"We say our name, we shake hands," reads Alexander Osang in the theses of the Federal Minister of the Interior on German cultural identity - and he wonders. Does our life really operate according to such principles, or is it much more complex in this globalized era? Observations both abroad and at home lead Osang to reflect on German peculiarities, whether in encounters with neo-Nazis at the meat counter of a Brandenburg department store, during a visit to a furniture store in New York, while playing tennis in Odessa, or while searching for an apartment in Tel Aviv. Behind all these little stories, there are always the bigger questions, often in passing: Who am I? How do I want to live in this world?.