In his introduction to the German translation of Norwid's Vade-mecum Hans Robert Jauss calls the work of the Polish poet a lasting challenge to German poetry. This essay attempts to show the ways in which Norwid’s further reception could help re-evaluate German assessments of their own Romantic tradition. For instance, the ironic undermining of the value of work, both creative and physical, in Norwid’s ‘Irony’ can be used as a tell-tale clue for the pursuit of similar intima-tions in the writings of early German Romantics, especially the barely noticed ironic undertones of their representations of labour economics. Furthermore, the adoption of the newly-developed concept of a political and economic Romanticism for the critical study of Norwid leads to the discovery of an unexpected theoretical coherence of his oeuvre, which in effect (let it be made absolutely clear) loses nothing of its heterogeneity and dialogic nature. The irony generated by the habitus of Norwid’s crypto-parabases (a technique which is a distinctive feature of his dramas) reveals the productive role of time in this mode of poetic representation, the time of work and the time of great projects, and conjure up the jeering specter of eternity.