Currently, discussions about victims seem to be on the rise again. This is not a new development. It is the quintessential dramatic genre, the bourgeois tragedy, which between 1760 and 1850 transformed the tragic position of the victim from a gender-anthropological perspective: the cultural capital of empathetic identification is primarily mobilized for the female victim. Complementarily, male perpetration takes on the antagonistic position. Soon, this innovation also celebrates successes on the opera stage, whether similarly or contrastingly, as the deaths of victims like Norma, Lucia, Brünnhilde, or Carmen accuse the male protagonists. But what happens to the victim when stories are told about them? It is strikingly common for characters in 19th-century novels to go to the theater to subsequently celebrate their deaths in victim-cult contexts. Does the victim performative transform into a victim narrative when the leading genre of the novel observes the boundaries of genre narratively? Are we beginning to see the outlines of a literary critique of victimology here? Paradigmatically, Emma Bovary, Cécile, or Effi Briest lead the long list of prosaic distancings from the theatricality of the victim in the 19th century. Since then, the list of prosaic inquiries into a gender-coded victim dramaturgy has only grown longer, ranging from Bernhard Kellermann to Ingeborg Bachmann, Fritz Zorn, and up to Michel Houellebecq, Anke Stelling, or Olga Tokarczuk.