Botho Strauss

Black and white photographs and a poem in free verse show the natural aspects of a park in four seasons.

"Populated by characters who are searching for meaning in life and in one another - a hiker waiting for a train in a deserted station, a television journalist who meets an old lover he doesn't really recognize, mismatched lovers, couples married and casual, lost and lonely people - Botho Strauss's Living Glimmering Lying is a melancholy collection of sketches and vignettes, a series of tableaux of post-reunification Berlin."--BOOK JACKET.

127 pages ; 19 cm

Provides examples of opposites in brief stories, verses, and labeled illustrations.

Appearing after the reunification of the two Germanys, DramaContemporary: Germany offers a politically charged view of German drama in the years immediately preceding and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The volume includes plays by the internationally renowned authors Heiner Muller, Botho Strauss, and George Tabori, as well as works by other German-language authors who deserve a wider audience, among them Georg Seidel of the former East Germany and Elfriede Jelinek of Austria. The spectrum of subjects and styles represents the great number of new plays that have premiered in German theaters between 1985 and 1995. In the best German dramatic tradition, these plays range from poetic, highly imagistic work to realism and melodrama, and to virtuosic wordplay. They are often outspoken in criticism of contemporary reality and the German past. Heiner Muller's "Mommsen's Block" was one of the first plays written after the historic changes in Germany to take as its theme the political and economic consequences of unification "The Beautiful Stranger," by Klaus Pohl, offers an uncompromising view of the aggressive violence and brutality directed at foreigners in Germany. George Tabori, in "Mein Kampf," situates the young Hitler in a Vienna flophouse. Elfriede Jelinek's "Totenauberg" is a satirical treatment of Martin Heidegger's crypto-fascist theories and the relationship between Hannah Arendt and the philosopher which is now the subject of an international controversy.

In Couples, Passersby, the controversial German writer Botho Strauss deftly combines the fantastic and the mundane to depict a society in which people pair off only to find greater isolation and alienation. In Strauss's world love turns not to hate but to indifference, and lovers fade into strangers, indistinguishable passersby in the crowded loneliness of the city streets. The six linked sections of Couples, Passersby present vignettes of frustrated connections and emotional numbness as characters search for meaning in art, in language, and in each other. Throughout Couples, Passersby, Strauss filters the particulars of everyday existence through his singular sensibility to create an arresting portrait of contemporary urban society and the solitary artist's place within it.

A boy and his psychic dog are able to steal plays from the opposing football team.