This article examines two literary texts from the time around 1900: Theodor Storm’s novella Der Schimmelreiter and Hans Richter’s novel Der Kanal. Both texts have an engineer as their protagonist who dies in his own technical work. Similarities and differences are analysed in relation to the engineer’s respective understanding of himself and others as well as the significance of self-sacrifice for the position of technology and the engineer in the social context. The thesis of this article is that engineers are prepared to do anything to make their work a reality. Thereby the literary figure of the engineer – successful as an engineer – proves to be a figure of transition within the horizon of the emerging modern age: guilt (Schuld) in the sense of a mythical, old cosmogony is successively replaced by the concept of responsibility (Verantwortung) in the sense of a new, institutionalised society. However, the mythical world view cannot simply be exchanged, but returns to the texts in the form of hauntings (Der Schimmelreiter) or a demonised nature (Der Kanal).