French surrealism exercised a deep influence on the visual arts and literature throughout Europe. To what extent, however, did this movement exist within German literature as well? Besides fundamental considerations of surrealism from the perspectives of literary, art and theatre studies, this volume is concerned with the search for evidence of the surreal in German literature from Romanticism to the present age ? and with answering the question of why a Germanophone surrealism has previously not surfaced in the history of literature.