A gloomy scene opens up, drawn with lively, nervous lines: a dark alley in the fictional town of "Perle", which the Austrian draftsman, illustrator and writer Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) sketched in his novel "Die andere Seite" (engl.: "The other side"). Published in 1909, the novel tells of the journey of an unnamed first-person narrator, a draftsman like Kubin, into the realm of dreams – an isolated region in Central Asia where time stands still. When an American entrepreneur invades the dream realm with his modern and aggressive way of life, it disintegrates and falls into ruin. In the end, the progress of Modernism also reaches the dream realm. "Die andere Seite" (engl.: "The other side") represents a synthesis of Kubin’s literary and artistic work and heralds a new phase in his artistic development. The protagonist of the novel also experiences this upheaval: "I was overcome by a work delirium, " he reports. "I gave up everything except the line and developed a strange system of lines during these months. A fragmentary style, more written than drawn, it expressed the slightest fluctuations in my mood like a sensitive meteorological instrument. – I called this process ‘psychographics’." The novel is in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom Kubin knew well as an illustrator; he had illustrated Hoffmann’s "Der Sandmann" (engl.: "The Sandman") and Poe’s "Grube und Pendel" (engl.:"Pit and Pendulum"). Kubin’s novel in turn influenced Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka as well as the German-speaking surrealists.