How is the continuity of family enterprises and of aristocratic and bourgeois dynasties ensured? This is the question given close attention in German-language novels at the end of the 19th century in their creation of various genealogical narrative patterns beginning with Gustav Freytag and continued by Theodor Fontane and later by Ricarda Huch and Franz Kafka. This study reconstructs these narrative patterns by invoking the socio-anthropological category of the house . Here, the house is an institution which is able to create and define its own rules in order to secure its...