This Special Topic presents a collection of scholarly essays which emerged from a multi- and interdisciplinary panel series at the 49th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, and which represent the continuation of a collaborative thought process about transnational and cosmopolitical interventions that re-position the nation as text, performance, and pedagogy. From multiple critical perspectives, these articles examine anthropological, historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, and political reactions to German self-imagination and German imagination of the non-German/non-European “other,” thereby raising many questions pertinent to scholarly inquiry in the interdisciplinary field of German Studies.