This book is as much about literature as it is about Germany. As a ‘cultural history’ of German literature, it is a study of literature in German as a variety of social and artistic practices. It is neither literary criticism nor literary history but something in between. I ask what kind of resource many different kinds of writing in German from many different parts of Europe have been in the period one could roughly describe as ‘modernity’. I understand this to mean the part of European history that goes from the high tide of the Enlightenment in the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the Cold War in 1989, when it fi nally ceased to be possible to believe that capitalism meant freedom simply because it was not state controlled.