Who am I? Every writing in response to this question revolves around itself, even the literary self-exploration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Philipp Moritz, and W.G. Sebald. Their (auto) biographical texts explore with radical narrative the contradictions of modern subjectivity. Martina Läubli directs our attention to the interconnection of thought and body experience, and of body and masculinity. She shows shows how the Enlightenment philosophers Rousseau and Moritz criticize the philosophical separation of body and mind in literary form, and how Sebald attempted to pick up the pieces of modern subjectivity at the end of the violent 20th Century.