Kellers kleiner Horrorladen

With the intention of getting Gottfried Keller out of the ‘humorous corner’ and into the grotesque, the monstrous elements of his work are worked out. The result: catastrophes are Keller’s ‘day-to-day business’ and the grotesque is a systematic subject in his novels. The discomfort is shown in an extraordinarily large repertoire of grotesque characters, a world before collapse, and the urge not to burst into laughter when portraying it. The book shows how Keller creates this interplay between laughter and horror, what possible motivation he could have had and how realistic the whole thing is constructed by the author of bourgeois realism.