The adaptations of the Old Testament story of Joseph in baroque novels and Thomas Mann, Kafka's fictions of bureaucracy, clerk and employee literature in the Weimar Republic, the planning and management texts in the literature of the GDR, and office novels in West German literature are discussed here as media in which literature reflects on its own cultural standing. The representation structure and the protocol procedure characterize the way in which literature fluctuates between sovereignty and the subaltern, intervention and monumentality, metaphor and metonymy.