Chapter 5 focuses on the notion of “common possession” (Gemeingut) in the formulas of world literature by Marx and Goethe. I suggest that their sense of collective possessiveness drew on the history of communal land ownership and its ramifications in German historical jurisprudence and Romantic philology. The chapter also claims that Goethe’s (conservative) scepticism about the liberal absolutization of private intellectual property formed an unlikely alliance with early socialist thought (Proudhon). On the other hand, the label “common good” attached to world literature in the Communist Manifesto not only resonated with Marx’s belief in the approaching dissolution of bourgeois property but also pointed at the ambivalent legal status of world-literary works before the internationalization of copyright. I argue that Karl von Savigny’s distinction between property and possession cuts across the legal history of world literature before and after the Berne Convention and signals a perpetual crisis of ownership in literary works.