Oskar Matzerath sits at his laptop and writes an entry on Wikipedia about Günter Grass. He does this voluntarily, without payment, and for a free, publicly accessible encyclopedia on the internet. Is he engaged in volunteer work at this moment? Or is he perhaps demonstrating civic engagement? The fictional image and the posed questions point to an essential problem. How narrow or broad can or should definitions be in order to characterize objects in reality and make them recognizable and identifiable? The idea for this volume arose from the public response to an interview given by the author about volunteer work, which was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on May 8, 2009, and is reprinted in this book. The electronic version of the interview has been replicated multiple times on the internet and has appeared on platforms including Twitter.