With the figures of the official, the secretary, the employee, and in the structure of representation, literature analyzes its own cultural position between providential sovereignty and passive subalternity, between intervention and monumentality, between metaphor and metonymy. In the literary adaptations of the Old Testament story of Joseph in Baroque novels and in the works of Thomas Mann, in Franz Kafka's bureaucratic fictions, in the employee literature of the Weimar Republic, in the planner and leader programs of GDR literature, and in the office and employee novels of literature in the Federal Republic, one can recognize transcripts of various representations that self-referentially bring the status of literature into play. In representation, the decoupling of individuals and positions, the replaceability of the individual, and so on, is explored.