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This article aims to trace different hypostases of alterity as they occur in the novel Vaterlandstage (Days at Home) by contemporary Romanian-born German author Dieter Schlesak. The paper draws on the distinction suggested by Volker Barth between the concepts “das Fremde” (i.e. “the stranger” that remains unknowable and impossible to control) and “das Andere” (i.e. “the other” which is excluded as a result of othering). The analysis of the way in which these two forms of alterity are represented in the novel shows that they go beyond the ethnic and cultural meaning of the terms and are closely linked to Schlesak’s antimimetic poetics, his identity concept based on estrangement and not-belonging as well as to his rejection of a materialist view of the world.