The first novel Agnes by the Swiss author Peter Stamm, published in 1998, attracted considerable attention. It relates, in an aesthetically subtle manner, a modern love-story which demonstrates the deep conflict between reality and fiction and, at the same time, the power of literature. The love affair between the first-person narrator, a Swiss non-fiction author who researches de luxe railway cars in Chicago, and Agnes, a twenty-five-year-old American doctoral student of physics, develops into an aesthetic question concerning the extent to which happiness can be described. – The present contribution examines in detail the literary divergence between imagination and reality which becomes evident in the love-story written down by the first-person narrator. It analyzes the reasons for the narrative experience of the failure of happiness. (HV; In German)