The introduction provides the historical and conceptual backdrop to the argument that monolingualism is a more recent phenomenon than multilingualism and elaborates on the notion of the “postmonolingual condition.” It charts the emergence of the monolingual paradigm in late-eighteenth-century Europe, with emphasis on the conceptual impact of the thought of Herder and Schleiermacher. The chapter also provides a brief history of the term “mother tongue” and discusses feminist, media theoretical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on this concept before offering a new reading of it as a “linguistic family romance.” It situates the present study in relationship to literary and linguistic scholarship on multilingualism, as well as in relationship to German, German-Jewish, and Turkish-German Studies. Through an analysis of the conceptual artwork Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture by artist Karin Sander, the chapter argues for the importance of a critical approach to multilingualism that takes the monolingual paradigm into account, even in an age of globalization and transnational flows.