To Georg Simmel, the stranger is "an element of the group itself whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it."# As a man with a Jewish background living in Nazi-Germany, he could certainly understand what it meant to be a stranger. While Simmel did in fact have great influence on the field of sociology, he also produced major works that may be classified as philosophy of history, ethics, general philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy of contemporary civilization and metaphysics.# Even within the field of sociology, he cannot really be placed into any particular school of thought; however, he was very interested in the relativism of all items in many of these fields of study. This relativism is the idea that "all things are to be considered as interdependent, or as functions of each other."# Donald N. Levine's essay, "The Structure of Simmel's Social Thought," suggests that while Simmel's work is not distinctive as any particular school of thought, his works revolve around recurring categories of the subjects of social processes, social types, and developmental patterns.#.
In 1894, Simmel was the first teacher of a course specifically on sociology. He had a great reputation as a speaker and thinker. Simmel's main goal in sociology was "to describe the forms of human communal existence and to find the rules according to which he or she is the member of a group." These "social forms" - the entities produced by individual interactions- were the basis of his subject matter. He openly integrated psychology into sociology, attempting to "develop an abstract science of individual interactions." His essay "The Stranger" examines the city as a place for these interactions, a place that "excites and alienates;" a place that leads to "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture."# .
The stranger described in Simmel's essay is one who is both attached and detached from the group structure in which he lives.