Botho Strauß is one of the leading literary representatives emerging from the student revolution of the 1960s. His sensitive portrayals of the fathers, mothers, and children of the failed upheavals in 1967-1968 and of a Germany saturated with economic success and populated with people in search of some purpose for their efforts have put him in the forefront of today's dramatists and fiction writers. While critics have often labeled Strauß a member of the Neue Sensibilität (New Sensitivity) or Neue Innerlichkeit (New Inwardness), he criticized the introspective nature of these movements from the beginning. Informed by French structuralist and poststructuralist theories, Strauß casts off the notion of a classical subjectivity in favor of a subject defined by his or her position within ideological, literary, economic, and social structures. Radically alone and unable to communicate with his or her surroundings, the subject is the...