After finishing his secondary education, Strauss studied German, History of the Theatre and Sociology in Cologne and Munich. He never finished his dissertation on Thomas Mann und das Theater. During his studies, he worked as an extra at the Munich Kammerspiele.
Career
Botho Strauß photographed by Oliver Mark in his forest in the Uckermark, 2007
After his first attempt as a writer, a Gorky film adaptation, he decided to work as a writer. Strauss had his first breakthrough as a dramatist with the 1977 Trilogie des Wiedersehens, five years after the publication of his first work. In 1984, he published Der Junge Mann (The Young Man), translated by Roslyn Theobald in 1995.
With a 1993 Der 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 of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno, but his outlook was also radically anti-bourgeois.
In 2014, Carl Hanser Verlag brought out a compendium of Strauß’s aphorisms called Allein mit allen, spanning close to four decades from 1977 to 2013, and edited by German scholar Sebastian Kleinschmidt.
Strauss lives in Berlin as well as in the nearby Uckermark region. In 2017, he switched from his long-time publisher Carl Hanser Verlag to Rowohlt Verlag.[3]
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