Abstract
The grotesque is one of the style essentials of the early German expressionistic poetry. Proceeding from the contemporary debates on the notion of the grotesque, in particular from Wolfgang Kayser's "immanent criticism" and Peter Fuss' cultural-scientific approach, this essay interprets selected poems by Jakob van Hoddis, Alfred Lichtenstein, Georg Heym and August Stramm, shows diverse forms and targets of the grotesque and shapes four types of achieving grotesque effects: significant (de)formation concerns primarily the elementary language structure, compositional arrangement of motifs, tension between the literal and the figurative, or the structure of the fictional world and fictional action constructed by the text.