Depictions of disaster in literature and art highlight a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, natural disasters appear to challenge the symbolic order; at the same time, they have always been interpreted culturally. Poetry itself has contributed to the emergence of such interpretative patterns. However, it is not only capable of reflecting on its own interpretative action, but also of problematising and blocking that same process. Against this backdrop, Laura Isengard examines forces of nature as described in selected texts from German-language realism as a crisis-ridden “perceptual disorder”. The tension between realism and idealism is visualised using the example of narrated natural catastrophe. Innovative reassessment of German-language realism using the example of narrated natural catastrophes Linking literary, cultural and perception theories