Alfred Schütz, “Der Fremde” (1944)

This social-psychological essay uses a general theory of interpretation to analyze the newcomer who seeks durable acceptance in a group. The immigrant is Schütz’s exemplary case, but the type includes entrants into clubs, families, universities, armies, villages, and labor markets. Its scope is the “approach” that precedes assimilation: the moment when a social world must be learned as a practical environment.

Diese Abhandlung möchte mit den Mitteln einer allgemeinen Auslegungstheorie die typische Situation untersuchen, in der sich ein Fremder befindet, der versucht, sein Verhältnis zur Zivilisation und Kultur einer sozialen Gruppe zu bestimmen und sich in ihr neu zurechtzufinden.

English translation: By means of a general theory of interpretation, this essay seeks to examine the typical situation in which a stranger finds himself as he attempts to determine his relationship to the civilization and culture of a social group and to orient himself anew within it.

Schütz’s first move is to oppose scientific observation to the actor’s common sense. The participant does not begin with a theory of society but with projects, means, risks, and expected responses. Everyday knowledge is therefore arranged by relevance; it is uneven, partly unclear, and not free of contradiction. In the in-group, however, this imperfect knowledge becomes workable as “thinking-as-usual,” a stock of cultural recipes.

Es ist ein Wissen von vertrauenswerten Rezepten, um damit die soziale Welt auszulegen und um mit Dingen und Menschen umzugehen, damit die besten Resultate in jeder Situation mit einem Minimum von Anstrengung und bei Vermeidung unerwünschter Konsequenzen erlangt werden können.

English translation: It is a knowledge of trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world and for handling things and people in order to obtain the best results in every situation with a minimum of effort while avoiding undesirable consequences.

Such recipes rest on tacit assumptions: life will continue as before, inherited knowledge can be trusted, general types suffice for control, and others share the same schemes. The stranger’s crisis begins because these assumptions cannot simply be transferred. He lacks the host group’s biography and status; its past is accessible as history, but not as his lived inheritance.

Er ist wesentlich der Mensch, der fast alles, das den Mitgliedern der Gruppe, der er sich nähert, unfraglich erscheint, in Frage stellt.

English translation: He is essentially the man who calls into question nearly everything that appears unquestionable to the members of the group he is approaching.

The stranger first interprets the new world through the home group’s frame, including its ready-made image of the foreign group. But that image was designed for spectatorship, not interaction. Once the newcomer tries to act, cultural patterns change position in his relevance system: they cease to be objects of thought and become conditions of conduct. Schütz’s map metaphor is decisive here. An orientation scheme works only for someone who can locate himself within it; the stranger, without recognized membership, cannot use the host culture as the native does, nor can he devise a general formula translating one civilization pattern into another.

Language provides the most vivid example. Vocabulary and grammar may be learned, yet expressive mastery also involves connotation, emotional “fringes,” idioms, private codes, shared memories, and literary tradition. A language as lived social form is not possessed by dictionary equivalence.

Um eine Sprache frei als Ausdrucksschema zu beherrschen, muß man in ihr Liebesbriefe geschrieben haben; man muß in ihr beten und fluchen und die Dinge mit jeder nur möglichen Schattierung ausdrücken können, so wie es der Adressat und die Situation verlangen.

English translation: To command a language freely as a scheme of expression, one must have written love letters in it; one must be able to pray and curse in it and to express things with every possible shade of meaning, as the addressee and the situation demand.

The same structure governs manners, laws, fashions, and institutional roles. Members of the in-group can rely on anonymous types: passenger and railway official, citizen and officeholder, guest and host. The stranger must instead test each recipe as a merely subjective probability. He over-individualizes some persons and over-typifies some accidents, producing pseudo-intimacy, pseudo-anonymity, and unstable expectations.

Mit anderen Worten, die Kultur- und Zivilisationsmuster der Gruppe, welcher sich der Fremde nähert, sind für ihn kein Schutz, sondern ein Feld des Abenteuers, keine Selbstverständlichkeit, sondern ein fragwürdiges Untersuchungsthema, kein Mittel um problematische Situationen zu analysieren, sondern eine problematische Situation selbst und eine, die hart zu meistern ist.

English translation: In other words, the patterns of culture and civilization of the group which the stranger approaches are for him not a shelter but a field of adventure, not a matter of course but a questionable topic of investigation, not a means for analyzing problematic situations but a problematic situation itself—and one hard to master.

This explains the two traits Schütz finally discusses: objectivity and doubtful loyalty. The stranger’s objectivity is not neutral superiority but forced explicitness, born from the collapse of “thinking-as-usual.” Doubtful loyalty often reflects the in-group’s surprise that its own patterns are not self-evidently sheltering. Adaptation is then a general phenomenological process: the unfamiliar is investigated, fitted into the stock of experience, and made habitual. The essay remains important because it treats belonging as an epistemic achievement, not merely a legal or emotional status: to belong is to inhabit relevances, recipes, typifications, and histories as self-evident.

Aber dann ist der Fremde kein Fremder mehr, und seine besonderen Probleme wurden gelöst.

English translation: But then the stranger is no longer a stranger, and his particular problems have been solved.