Boundaries of the Stranger

In recent cosmopolitan work, scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, and Ulrich Beck have represented the stranger as a universal ideal for our global age and Georg Simmel’s stranger in the Exkurs über den Fremden has been emphasized as a model for this ideal. While these uses can be justified by generalized passages in Simmel’s essay, they still omit the problem of European Jewish historical exemplarity. Thus, in the decades before Simmel’s essay, this stranger type was already a well-developed figure related to the so-called Jewish question. Georg Brandes and Henrik Pontoppidan used the Jewish stranger to evaluate the societal changes of the fin-de-siècle period and questions of progress vs. decay. Yet, their work limited the stranger to a specific type of Jewishness not including other marginal existences. Hence, reading Simmel with Brandes and Pontoppidan outlines the boundaries of this stranger type as it raises questions regarding recent cosmopolitan uses of Simmel’s stranger.