This special issue on "Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture" offers a differentiated picture of the interrelated ideas of lateness, belatedness, anachronism, untimeliness, old age, Ungleichzeitigkeit, post-memory and “late style” through a variety of readings from literature, music, art, film, and photography. Moving beyond the discussion of “late style” in the wake of Said and Adorno, the issue focuses on historical regimes of temporality in modernity and post-modernity. Lateness stands for the other side of a cutting edge present, and it joins notions of deceleration and slowness as another kind of de-synchronization of capitalist culture.