ABSTRACT
Strauss studied in Freiburg, Lausanne and Berlin; he associated with many of the naturalists, including Halbe and Gerhart Hauptmann. From 1890 to 1892 he farmed near Schaffhausen, rejecting the life of the city; from 1892 to 1894 he lived as a farmer and teacher in Brazil. The stories Menschenwege and Der Engelwirt appeared in 1899 and 1901; a tragedy, Don Pedro, was written in 1899 (and revised in 1914). Strauss’s most outstanding work was the short novel Freund Hein (1902), a sensitive account of a schoolboy with musical talents who, unable to grasp the rigours of mathematics, does badly at school and consequently is forbidden by his father to play the violin; he shoots himself. This theme is one that would be taken up by Friedrich Huch, Hesse and Musil. Kreuzungen (1904) deals, less successfully, with a man between two women. After his return to Europe, Strauss settled on Lake Constance; he spent the years 1911 to 1915 in Hellerau (Dresden). Der nackte Mann appeared in 1924; the sensitive Novelle Der Schleier in 1920; Das Riesenspielzeug, a political parable, in 1934. The patriotic play Vaterland (1923) was not successful.
