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Botho Strauss | |
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.jpg) Botho Strauß photographed byOliver Mark, Uckermark 2007 | |
| Born | 2 December 1944 (1944-12-02) (age 80) Naumburg, Germany |
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Botho Strauss (German:[ˈboːtoːˈʃtʁaʊs]ⓘ; written as Botho Strauß) (born 2 December 1944) is a Germanplaywright,novelist, andessayist.[1]
His father was a chemist.
After finishing his secondary education, Strauss studied German, History of the Theatre and Sociology in Cologne and Munich. He never finished his dissertation onThomas Mann und das Theater. During his studies, he worked as an extra at theMunich Kammerspiele.
From 1967 to 1970, he was a critic and editorial journalist for the journalTheater heute (Theater Today). Between 1970 and 1975, he worked as adramaturgical assistant toPeter Stein at the West BerlinSchaubühne am Halleschen Ufer.
After his first attempt as a writer, aGorky film adaptation, he decided to work as a writer. Strauss had his first breakthrough as a dramatist with the 1977Trilogie des Wiedersehens, five years after the publication of his first work. In 1984, he publishedDer Junge Mann (The Young Man), translated by Roslyn Theobald in 1995.
With a 1993Der Spiegel essay,Anschwellender Bocksgesang ("Swelling He-Goat Song")[N 1][2] a critical examination of modern civilisation, he triggered a major political controversy as his conservative politics was anathema to many.
In his theoretical work, Strauß showed the influence ofNietzsche,Heidegger, andAdorno, but his outlook was also radically anti-bourgeois.
In 2014,Carl Hanser Verlag brought out a compendium of Strauß’saphorisms calledAllein mit allen, spanning close to four decades from 1977 to 2013, and edited by German scholar Sebastian Kleinschmidt.
Strauss lives inBerlin as well as in the nearbyUckermark region. In 2017, he switched from his long-time publisher Carl Hanser Verlag toRowohlt Verlag.[3]
