This article examines Otfried Preußler’s novel Krabat from a spatial-theoretical perspective, analysing in particular the linking of space and time following Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopos. The article looks specifically at how the cyclical, that is temporal, course of the narrated time of a year is connected with the narrated space, and what function this construction fulfils. In its specific spatial and temporal structure, the novel tells of an adolescence characterised by rituals and violence. The threatening dimension of the mill, as an animated and personified space, is central. The tension between markers that anchor the novel in reality and fantastic elements that create breaks in the realism is striking.