Following on from the seminal work of Heinz Hillmann and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, this essay traces the career of the Romantic structural formula of the ‘other world’ in modern literature. As a recurring motive and structural element, it denotes a genuinely Romantic line of tradition that has been effective in the form of a specific drift since the beginning of the 19th century. The evocation of another world arises from the dissatisfaction with the empirically existing world and leads both to a dichotomy of the two worlds and to a complex interplay of the elements involved. The example of the ‘other world’ thus makes the dual function of art in modernity – mimesis on the one hand, surplus on the other – recognizable and demonstrable.