For a long period of time, literature has been one of the main materialisations of human imagination with respect to the contingency of the past, the changeability of the present and the hopes and anxieties for the future. It is a medium that may indeed require a considerable quantity of labour time, but it tolerates that this labour time is not paid and there are hardly any other material preconditions or environmental factors. The changes on the labour market in the past two centuries and in consumer behaviour as well as the development of new media definitely have had a substantial effect on the literary imagination. Much more than it used to be, it is driven by the urge to constantly innovate and experiment, both with form and content, and it is expected to respond much more alertly to ideological, social, philosophical, spiritual and other evolutions in society. One of the key topics in this context is the imagination of the ineffable and the unimaginable. My research will go into questions of what is called “subnarration” or “nonnarration” and will use the methodologies of narrative and rhetorical analysis to better understand the evolution of the tension between the imagination and the ineffable in the context of the histories and the societies of German-speaking countries.