Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, which premiered in 1927, is not only a late classic of the silent film era but has also advanced to become an iconic audiovisual text of modernity through an interplay of aesthetic, intermedia and edition-historical factors. Metropolis (1926) is also a novel that was written by Thea von Harbou together with the screenplay for the film. The aim of this article is to analyse the literary text together with the audiovisual, both of which have a sprawling reference structure with regard to the narrative of work. The focus will be on four areas: (1) the physical and mechanical labour both of workers and machines, (2) care work (saint/whore), (3) scientific/alchemical and revolutionary work (mad scientist and machine woman) as well as the topos of (4) work as a vocation. The background to this analysis is the hypothesis that the novel and film tell of a socio-political transformation that draws on the ideology of the national community and aims for redemption from modernity.