By analyzing Theodor Fontane’s crime novella Unterm Birnbaum (1885), this article explores how the advent of mass communication in popular periodicals as well as the increased prominence of visual media in nineteenth-century Germany challenged realist writers to reflect on modes of medial reality construction in their texts. Unterm Birnbaum was published in Die Gartenlaube, the most prominent family journal of its time that aspired to connect hundreds of thousands of German-speaking readers around the globe in a virtual space conceptualized as a village-like community. Fontane’s novella adapts this village metaphor by constructing a village-story that stages the communicative mechanisms that construe reality in the public sphere of mass media. While the literary village Tschechin seems to be organized by forms of panoptic observation and visual control, it also allows manipulative “actors” to utilize the villagers’ desire for visual spectacle and entertaining stories to create distorted versions of reality emerging from gossip and rumors. In the experimental space of the village, Unterm Birnbaum thus shows how modern media produces its own notions of “truth” and thereby scrutinizes realism’s programmatic quest to recognize and depict reality in a changing media-cultural environment.