How is the continuity of family enterprises and of aristocratic and bourgeois dynasties ensured? This is the question given close attention in German-language novels at the end of the 19th century in their creation of various genealogical narrative patterns – beginning with Gustav Freytag and continued by Theodor Fontane and later by Ricarda Huch and Franz Kafka. This study reconstructs these narrative patterns by invoking the socio-anthropological category of the “house”. Here, the house is an institution which is able to create and define its own rules in order to secure its continuity.