The article aims to present the Nachtwachen von Bonawentura (1804) as a work of black romanticism. The first part describes the critique of optimistic−emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment (the idea of rational egoism) and of Romanticism (the idea of poetic transfiguration of the world); it shows social reality as a disciplinary rationality that negates the personal autonomy of the individual and from which there is no escape (the motif of the impossibility of death); it seems that the only escape is laughter, both paralyzing and emancipating, over the nothingness of world and over absurd reality, a model of which is the marionette theater. The second, final part of the article shows Nachtwachen of Bonawentura as a romantic work, as a romantic novel (combining many literary genres), that by means of radicalized irony tries to invert the fundamental categories of Romanticism (irony, arabesque, grotesque) and to give them a grotesque meaning.