From felines to fairytales, Grimm to Goethe, and magic to marionettes, the literatures, cultures, and philosophies of the German Romantic movement maintain an enduring influence into the twenty-first century. While Romanticism and its legacies have been broadly addressed in scholarship, this dissertation specifically traces these Romantic trajectories, both structurally and thematically, in post-Wall contemporary German fiction. With a focus on how Romantic themes, values, and mechanisms are reimagined and transformed, I consider works by Kerstin Hensel, Juli Zeh, Julia Franck, Christa Wolf, and Sabrina Janesch. My study addresses four broader categories that thematize these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century influences: the forest as a Romantic motif, witches and other powerful women as transgressors, the "in-between" figures of the doll and automaton, and intersections of violence, gender, and power. Theories of material ecocriticism, feminist narratology, and intersections of violence and gender build the frame for this study in order to identify systems of power and oppression that play a political role in these works. Victims of patriarchal oppression are systematically relegated to the negative---and thus the Other---side of arbitrary binaries: male versus female, culture versus nature, normalized versus deviant. As such, my project articulates a model of binary violence that describes patterns of violence against marginalized populations and entities. Drawing on bell hooks, Rene Girard, and Christine Kunzel, I define binary violence as a system of brutality engendered by the power differential in relationships marked by perceived dichotomies, such as masculine versus feminine and humankind versus non-human nature. As I demonstrate, the new sociohistorical contexts in which these Romantic trajectories come to light play on reader expectations and reveal the political implications of telling a tale. Considering today's fraught political landscape, these patterns of violence and oppression play a foundational role in contemporary discourses, and their depictions link the nineteenth century with familiar concerns and uncertainties of today.