The study sets out from an inquiry into why in the late 19th and early 20th century literature turned more and more to the subject of death although this phenomenon was increasingly repressed and negated in public awareness. The bias of this inquiry is slanted towards the aesthetic procedures enabling literature to embark on this new engagement with the experience of finiteness and mortality. Interpretations of selected texts in German demonstrate the extent to which narrative structures are suffused, affected and changed by new structures of awareness.