The article examines the dominant concepts of the body in German Romanticism: the body-microcosm, the body-machine and the body-sign. On the material of the works of LA. von Arnim and ETA Hoffman analyzes the tendency towards the growth of mechanistic character in late romanticism, which leads to the disintegration of the body image into separate "parts", and the influence of physiognomy, which is intended to compensate for the lost harmony of the soul and body and to determine the correspondence between the inner and the outer.