This study offers interpretations of works by contemporary German and Austrian authors that focus on the topic of the house. Houses are powerful objects and can provoke great passion. Like love or travel, with which they share the key element of desire, houses belong to the basic inventory of literary traditions, and the interaction between dwelling and traveling, stasis and movement — or between being housebound and travel-bound — has yielded ample fictional material. Providing for our most basic needs, offering both shelter and identity, and representing specific historical formations, houses touch upon virtually all aspects of individual needs and collective organization. As an intensely emotional experience, major financial investment, and a material reality embedded in architectural, aesthetic, and social traditions, houses can be regarded as the building blocks of culture. Houses can also produce and echo subjectivity, thus occupying a unique place in life stories. They reflect and shape the psychological, socio-economic, and political conditions of those who live in them, thus making them a potent and complex expression of characters and their circumstances. In houses, subjectivity, changing regimes of taste, style, and power, and the numerous associated discourses (such as architecture, economy, and aesthetics) form a dense, multi-layered, and over-determined arrangement of materials and signs. People need a place to live and to store their memories and belongings, a place where they can feel at home and to which they can return.