The article discusses the ways in which the early modern era has been related to the modern era in German-speaking historical scholarship in the 20th and early 21st century. Its main focus is on narrative and its methodological implications. The article argues that the modernising narratives that had been prevalent from the beginnings of the discipline in the 1960s until roughly the late 1990s have been replaced, in the past twenty years, by the notion of an alterity of the premodern era vis-à-vis modernity and the present. Originally introduced as a heuristic tool in the wake of the advent of cultural historical methods, this notion of alterity has replaced modernising narratives as a new master narrative of the early modern era. The article accordingly goes on to discuss the potential consequences and problems of this notion. It does so by drawing on methodological discussions about alterity as a narrative and a method in German medieval literature studies and medieval history. Ultimately, given the problems of alterity with a view to relating early modernity to modernity, the article argues that the discipline would do well to critically discuss such notions in a more explicit manner than has typically been the case.