In this paper, a decorum of dual referentiality is at play. Iser’s most immediate interest is “the crisis of a defunct society” after the Industrial Revolution. Yet, his remarks apply with at least equal resonance to the crisis of a defunct German culture, and perhaps even more generally to the crisis of defunct culture of the postmodern period, that is, in the vacuum of values (not merely in Germany) signaled by German fascism. Another question stemming from this paper is what factor, inherent in the experience of culture, might trigger the crisis of culture in the first place? In fact, since no one has yet located a culture that is not, at any given moment, in severe crisis of one kind or another, the question becomes: what factor, inherent in the experience of culture, triggers cultural crisis continually?