In Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), the deeply unsettling experiences of crisis in the period of revolution and war around 1800 cemented the conviction of a utopian potential inherent in the period of upheaval he was living through. In view of his deeply pessimistic analyses of current events, this conviction comes as a major surprise and calls for explication and clarification with reference to selected texts by Arnim and to contemporaneous semantics. The approach is necessarily a dual one: a diachronic analysis is required to do justice to Arnim's aesthetic adaptation of reality, and also as a supplement to the close analysis of the individual texts.