At the highest levels of German, command of the literary subjunctive forms allows speakers and writers to express hypothetical, conditional, and unreal meanings with elegance and precision. While modern German often paraphrases these with "würde + infinitive," the traditional Konjunktiv II forms remain preferred in formal and literary writing. The verbs sterben, verderben, helfen, werfen, and backen all have archaic but still-recognized subjunctive forms: stürbe, verdürbe, hülfe, würfe, and büke. The verb empfehlen uniquely accepts two forms, empföhle and empfähle, with the latter being slightly more common in contemporary usage.
The Plusquamperfekt Konjunktiv expresses unreal conditions situated in the past by combining hätte or wäre with the Partizip II, as in "Hätte ich das gewusst, hätte ich anders gehandelt." This construction is essential for counterfactual narration and formal argumentation. Closely related is the literary Präteritum, which functions as the standard storytelling tense in written German. Where spoken German overwhelmingly prefers the Perfekt ("er hat den Raum betreten"), literary prose uses the Präteritum ("er betrat den Raum") to create narrative distance and temporal flow.
A particularly sophisticated literary device is the erlebte Rede, or free indirect speech, which blends a character's internal perspective with third-person narration. This technique uses the Präteritum without quotation marks or the conjunction "dass," allowing the reader to inhabit a character's thoughts while maintaining the narrative frame. Such constructions are hallmarks of literary prose and signal the highest register of written German.