In this blog post, we’ll briefly explore Boto Strauss’s life and his works by period to see how he reinterpreted mythology and expanded upon it to address key concepts such as the Other, language, and emergence.

About the Author

The leading currents in German-language literature today are generally divided into two generations: those born in the 1920s and those born in the 1940s. The former includes figures such as Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Christa Wolf, while the latter includes Peter Handke, Boto Strauss, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Compared to figures like Grass and Jelinek, who are Nobel Prize laureates, or Walzer and Handke, who have been at the center of public debate, Strauss is relatively less well-known to Korean readers. His complex ideas and writing style are among the reasons for this, and as a result, only a fraction of his works have been introduced in Korea.
Botto Strauss was born on December 2, 1944, in Naumburg, Germany, and studied German literature, sociology, and theater history in Munich. However, he dropped out after five semesters and began working as an assistant director in Recklinghausen; from 1967, he worked as a freelance contributor and editor-in-chief for a theater magazine for about three years. Subsequently, in the 1970s, he worked as a theater critic for the Schaubühne theater company in Berlin, establishing close ties with the theater world; this career path is also the reason he is commonly recognized as a playwright.
His first major essay, “An Attempt to Think the Aesthetic Event and the Political Event Together” (1970), clearly demonstrates his distancing from a realist representation of reality. In this essay, Strauss criticizes the political role of art and attempts to represent reality, arguing that events on stage should not merely reflect history or reality but must reveal their own theatricality. In other words, he proposed a multilayered (dialectical) approach: when theater functions in a way that demonstrates its own theatrical nature, it actually prompts the audience to reflect on political reality.
Although this Adornian influence continued to shape Strauss’s thinking thereafter, a shift in direction also occurred after the 1980s. His intellectual interests expanded broadly beyond literature and philosophy to include media, mythology, and the natural sciences; this breadth of interest and the complexity of his work made it difficult for the general public to engage with his ideas.

Works by Period and Key Ideas

Late 1960s–Late 1970s: Theories of the Unconscious, Language, and Text

Strauss’s first phase as a writer spanned from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and was strongly influenced by Adorno, Freud, and the post-structuralists. During this period, he did not view the self as an autonomous subject, but rather as an illusion governed and manipulated by the unconscious. This perspective was directly reflected in his poetics.
Drawing on the theories of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, he did not view the author as a singular subject who creates a text. Instead, he emphasized the concepts of intertextuality and the generation of text by the unconscious, arguing for the autonomy of language—that is, the idea that language cannot faithfully represent reality.
These ideas are clearly evident in his essays “The Theory of Blackmail” (1975) and “Homage” (1977), and are also explored as central themes in his plays “The Big World and the Small World” (1978) and “The Trilogy of Reunions” (1976). In these works, the breakdown of communication in modern society is repeatedly depicted: in dialogue scenes, the speaker appears to be monologuing due to the other person’s indifference, while in monologue scenes, the speaker sometimes speaks as if conversing with someone. The love they pursue is portrayed as something that cannot be realized through language, and ultimately, true love is depicted as attainable only through the language of silence, which transcends verbal communication.

The 1980s: The Rediscovery of Myth and the Other

The second phase spans the 1980s, up until German reunification, and marks the period when Strauss began to explore myth in earnest. He was often attacked as a conservative because he distanced himself from the Enlightenment’s progressive view of history and emphasized the preservation of tradition. However, the past he focused on was not the past of historical facts, but myth as the primordial past.
For Strauss, myth—combined with a stance critical of reason—takes on a fragmented and deconstructive character, yet simultaneously serves an integrative function as yet another interpretation of the world. Mythological elements are implicitly revealed in relation to Orpheus in ‘Unrest’ (1980), a work from the early 1980s, and are subsequently explored in greater depth in ‘The Park’ (1983), ‘The Young Man’ (1984), and ‘The Female Tour Guide’ (1986).
In ‘Park’, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the myth of Ovid—which served as the basis for the original text—is also revealed. However, unlike the original, Strauss depicts the collapse of the mythical world within reality through a scene in which Oberon, the king of the fairies, transforms into a human and is unable to return to his original form. At the same time, he emphasizes that myth has not completely vanished but remains in a fragmented form, capable of being experienced fleetingly even in the present.
‘The Female Tour Guide’ is a representative work that embodies this mythical dimension hidden within reality. The protagonist, tour guide Christine, falls in love with a teacher named Martin while traveling through Greece and eventually retreats to a small house in the mountains, experiencing a kind of downfall. The core of this work lies in the fact that, paradoxically, even amidst a regression into reality, the possibility of experiencing mythical and profound emotions remains open.
Furthermore, as depicted in “Time and Room” (1988), moments of mythical experience often appear as festive motifs. This suggests that such experiences are events possible only temporarily—moments of escape from everyday, goal-oriented life. In Strauss’s novel ‘The Young Man’, mythical experiences are also depicted as a simultaneity of time that encompasses the past, present, and future.
Alongside myth, another central theme in his works from this period is the question of “the Other.” Under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas, Strauss frequently addresses the Other not only in his novels and plays but also in his essays. In particular, in ‘Couples, Passersby’ (1981) and ‘None Other Than He’ (1987), the Other is portrayed as closely linked to love or mythical experiences.
The Other is presented as a being that cannot be arbitrarily objectified from the subject’s perspective, nor can it be fully grasped. It appears in moments of love that are difficult to express in words, or in scenes of mythical experiences that transcend everyday life. By the 1990s, this Other gradually began to appear in the form of God.

After 1989: Reunification and the “Poetics of the Sacred”

The third phase unfolds following the events of 1989, particularly the changes in Eastern Europe and German reunification. Reunification brought about significant changes not only in German society as a whole but also in Strauss’s personal choice of themes and aesthetic conception. These changes are evident not only in his subject matter but also in his poetic shift.
Strauss’s afterword, published in George Steiner’s book in 1989, contains his newly proposed aesthetic program. He adopts the biological concept of “emergence” (Emergenz) into an aesthetic context, discussing the possibility that new phenomena—which cannot be predicted or derived from prior experience—suddenly appear and transform the entire system. Just as the opening of the Hungarian border led to the unexpected outcome of German reunification, such experiences of emergence can be interpreted as divine manifestations on an aesthetic level as well.
Following Steiner’s perspective, Strauss views language itself as the dwelling place of the divine at the moment when the distinction between signifier and signified disappears—much like the bread and wine in the Eucharist. Therefore, the experience of writing and reading is not merely the act of writing or reading about a certain object, but an act of experiencing the manifestation of the divine in and of itself. He terms this “sacred poetics (sakrale Poetik)” and presents a new aesthetic direction.
In this way, Strauss’s thought originates, on the one hand, from the Adornian critical tradition and the theories of language and the unconscious in post-structuralism, while expanding, on the other hand, to encompass myth, the Other, and religious experience. His works continue to explore the complex tensions between language and reality, the individual and the Other, and the secular and the sacred, posing repetitive yet multilayered questions to the reader.

Strauss’s Later Works and Emergence

“The Last Chorus,” which premiered in 1991, deals with the monumental historical moment of German reunification; however, within the work, symbols of German identity—such as the eagle, the forest, and the word “Germany”—appear merely as signs rather than representations of concrete entities. Consequently, reunification is depicted not as a representable state, but as a moment experienced as fleeting and emergent.
The essay collection ‘The Absence of a Beginning’, published in 1992, clearly demonstrates an attempt to transcend the boundaries between natural science and the humanities. This book interweaves reflections on natural science concepts—such as chaos theory, radical constructivism, and the theory of the normal universe—with narratives of myth, religion, and everyday life, focusing on emergent processes such as perception and cognition arising from neural connections, and chaotic situations that occur within order.
A key point to note in this discussion is that Strauss believed humans cannot live in a state of complete chaos and require an illusion of some degree of order. Only by considering both aspects—chaos and cosmos, fragmentary and sequential narratives—can one fully understand his worldview and aesthetics.
His 1993 essay “The Song of the Scapegoat Spreading,” published in ‘Der Spiegel’, sparked controversies that rocked the German literary world at the time, including those surrounding Christa Wolf’s East German past, Handke’s defense of Serbia, the debate over Walser’s instrumentalization of Auschwitz, and Grass’s past as a member of the SS. Although he was sometimes attacked as a conservative for criticizing the left and modern media while emphasizing tradition and the “true right,” he himself distinguished between far-right extremism and his own concept of the “right.”
He argues that Western society, having lost its internal enemies as ideological divisions have faded, now finds itself in conflict with a traditional and primordial world that is completely alien to it. While this diagnosis sparked controversy, it also clearly reveals the sense of cultural disconnection and loss that he addresses.
The play ‘Ithaca’, staged in 1996, is an adaptation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. In the preface to this work, Strauss states that original thought often emerges from “mistakes” made in the process of copying or quoting. This perspective is reiterated in ‘The Mistake of the Mimic’ (1997), a literary treatment of his autobiographical experiences, supporting the argument that within the web of intertextuality, a writer can realize the aesthetics of emergence only at the moment of breaking free from that web through a mistake.

Introduction to the Work: ‘Couples, Passersby’ and the Expansion of Themes

Introduction

Published in 1981, the essay collection ‘Couples, Passersby’ can be regarded as a representative work that encapsulates Strauss’s overall philosophy. Although this work takes the form of essays rather than a typical novel, it is an aesthetic prose piece in which narrative and reflection are intricately intertwined, transcending the mere conveyance of ideas.
The collection consists of chapters titled “Couples,” “The River of Vehicles,” “Writing,” “Twilight/Dawn,” “Solitary Figures,” and “The Fool Living in the Present.” Although each chapter is composed of short pieces that appear superficially independent and unrelated, they reveal thematic connections and a certain order amidst that chaos. The coexistence of these fragmentary parts demonstrates synchronic writing, yet a diachronic flow is also discernible when the narrator “I” recalls past events. This so-called “fluctuating simultaneity” in writing is the key method through which Strauss reveals his conception of time.
In the following section, we will examine—through the four themes of love, homeland, literature, and reminiscence—how Strauss, using literature as a medium, attempts to break away from the goal-oriented and reified daily life of modern society and presents a path toward a mythical and primordial Other. Through this, we will confirm that love signifies an encounter with the Other, and that the artist, as an individual, serves as the mediator of such an encounter.

Love

One of the central themes addressed in “Couples, Passersby” is love. In particular, the first chapter, “Couples,” illustrates how love is objectified and distorted into a goal-oriented pursuit in modern society. The various relationships between men and women depicted therein—such as the affair between a German woman and a Persian man, or the relationship between a young woman who has suddenly come into wealth following a miscarriage and her married coworker—all share a common lack of subjective passion.
For these couples, sexual desire and material desire are intertwined, and love and calculation are not clearly distinguished. Love becomes the subject of a transaction, and eroticism is reduced to an act of exchange within a kind of “relationship market.” The very term “relationship” functions as an attempt to introduce predictability into the complex and subtle realm of love; as a result, the relationships formed are not permanent but constantly cycle through union and dissolution under the sway of unfettered desire.
Physical relationships, too, are far removed from a purely natural experience. People who engage in physical contact without any love remain faithful only to the sensory stimuli at hand; while such relationships offer independence and freedom on the one hand, on the other, they cause those suffering from loneliness to become even more dependent on the relationship itself. Non-binding relationships between men and women are governed by capriciousness, like flowing waves, and end up binding those who believe themselves to be “free” even more tightly.
In this regard, the chapter titled “The Fool Who Lives in the Present” addresses not only the capricious emotions of individuals but also the rapid shifts in public sentiment. For example, Holger Meins, a member of the Red Army Faction, was briefly hailed as a hero by television viewers after his death, but public opinion took a sharp turn when a regional court president was murdered. In the past, such abrupt shifts in identity might have led to psychological fractures, but modern people, experiencing simultaneous contradictions through the media, are not as easily unsettled as they once were.
Strauss also refers to Pina Bausch’s dance theater, pointing out that even eroticism is not entirely natural but is filled with social forms and programs. Eroticism completely detached from all values, rules, and cultural forms is impossible; no matter how freely humans try to act, they ultimately cannot help but remain social beings.
Nevertheless, he believes that love can possess the power to temporarily transport us away from the world of daily life and labor. The passionate love displayed by Sada and Kichijo in Oshima’s film ‘Empire of the Senses’ symbolizes a moment that transcends social norms and the framework of everyday life. According to Strauss, the intense rapture that everyone experiences in the first moments of love is precisely how humans escape from the everyday.
However, in reality, such passionate rapture is difficult to sustain permanently. In most cases, people eventually conform to social life. The exceptional nature of ‘Empire of the Senses’ lies in the fact that love does not diminish over time but rather grows stronger; this can be interpreted as demonstrating “love’s victory over time.” However, Strauss also notes that the complete victory of such “pure” physical love can only be presented as an ideal within the constraints of reality.

Love and Utopia

Unlike in ‘The Empire of the Senses’, love in reality is short-lived and marked by conflict and discord. The scene of a couple who, after a quarrel during their trip, refuse to speak to each other for two days vividly illustrates this reality. Although they are superficially presented as a couple, they are not, in fact, beings belonging to one another, but merely passersby walking their own separate paths. Nevertheless, one scene stands out: the woman humming loudly along to an old hit song playing from the bar’s speakers. The song she sings is a secularized version of a song from a distant past we have long forgotten, and in that moment, a certain time from the past—a time that no longer exists in the present but remains frozen in the heart—comes back to life.
One could say that all love creates a utopia in the past—that is, an idealized time takes root there. The “past” referred to here is not merely the historical past, but an archetypal past that traces back to a mythical and primordial time. Even if contemporary relationships between men and women appear frozen solid and corrupted, the perspective that this primordial and ideal time of love still remains within the heart is repeatedly presented. While Strauss depicts relationships devoid of passion in his work, he seems—rather than attempting to dialectically overcome love in a negative form—to present the ideal of positive love as an alternative in defiance of binary codes.
The instrumental reason that dominates modern society makes human behavior goal-oriented, and in this process, others are objectified. In what is commonly referred to as a “romantic” situation, the subject reduces the other to an object that satisfies their own narcissism and ends up objectifying love itself. However, Strauss’s perspective holds that love must become a moment of great experience capable of breaking free from such objectified relationships and transcending everyday time. When one steps outside of everyday life, one encounters the Other—who cannot be captured by language or reason—and that Other manifests as a mythical and primordial world. Love becomes the very passageway leading to that primordial world.

Hometown

Rapid modernization has brought profound changes to individual lives. Urbanization, the fast pace of life, and frequent moves have caused many people to lose their points of reference and experience a sense of identity crisis. While the ills of large cities and a sense of crisis have long been addressed in literature, the acceleration of pace and the collapse of value systems since the mid-20th century have further amplified the feeling of rootlessness. Contemporary German authors such as Handke, Walser, and Strauss keenly captured these issues and began to address the theme of “home” in earnest within their works. However, the meaning of “home” differs from author to author: while for Walser it refers to a literal hometown, for Strauss, “home” points more broadly to human origins and roots.
In modern society, anything that seems certain and stable appears to be wavering. This instability is symbolically revealed in the section titled “A River of Vehicles.” The rapidly passing cars and the endless stream of traffic metaphorically illustrate the alienation found in human relationships. The narrator in the story, while driving by, glances at his former lover N and feels that he has become a stranger, cursing the “damned world of pedestrians.” The world of pedestrians, racing toward their destinations like vehicles, symbolizes a goal-oriented and objectified human world.
In a similar scene, the encounter between the narrator and his friend H reveals another facet of alienation. After parting ways following a deep conversation about philosophy and art, the narrator playfully pulls his car up beside his friend to say goodbye, but H fails to recognize him and merely waves his fist, wearing the expression of an angry pedestrian. The narrator feels that he appeared to his friend as if he were an object and compares himself to a helpless vehicle that was about to hit him. Rather than dismissing this as a mere momentary illusion, he accepts it as an expression of alienation deeply rooted among humans.
In civilized life, represented by the worlds of vehicles and pedestrians, people yearn for the world of the Other, where stillness and silence reign. The scene of an elderly couple illustrates this vividly. At a busy intersection, leaning against a traffic barrier outside the crosswalk, they gaze at the road and asphalt as if watching a river flow. Imagining a river that retains an aspect of stillness even amid its rapid current, they yearn for that world, but passing vehicles shatter their fantasy into pieces. This traffic barrier can be interpreted as a symbol of a boundary point—a departure from the linear time of everyday life toward “fluctuating simultaneity.”
A similar boundary point appears at the glass door leading into the hotel restaurant. For some reason, this glass door is closed, and many people, failing to notice the detour sign in time, bump into it and get hurt. One man, despite being seriously injured after colliding with the glass door, remains calm, absorbed in some “heavy” matter, rather than becoming agitated or horrified. Behind that glass door, a young blonde woman dressed in black with a white lace apron sits next to a cigarette stand, reading a magazine. She shows no interest whatsoever and appears to be an object of desire that unconsciously draws people to pass through that door.
The black clothing symbolizes death, while the white apron symbolizes life; just as that glass door represents an insurmountable boundary, there is a similar barrier between the world of the sacred woman—who governs the universe’s destruction and creation—and everyday human society. Even if colliding with the glass door does not actually allow one to enter the woman’s world, it foreshadows her existence and stirs desire. This temptation and the impulse to act are recurring motifs throughout the work.
Later, in the “Twilight/Dawn” section, the narrator, guided by mentally disabled children, steps into the world of “elephants dancing with a heavy yet elegant grace.” The narrator objectifies and observes the elephant, ultimately injuring it through clumsy actions. This scene demonstrates that humans cannot comprehend the world of the Other through a rational, objectified perspective. The “empire of heaviness and beauty,” entered under the escort of children devoid of desire, signifies a world beyond rational thought—that is, a world corresponding to the other shore of everyday life.
The woman who seduces people from behind a glass door appears as a symbolic figure—like the Lorelei—where the river and the woman together stir desire. The story of the children who were in a boating accident on the river illustrates this point well. The sight of a girl’s chest, taut and swollen after emerging from the water, makes the narrator feel as though she has been transformed into a mature woman following her brush with drowning. However, for a woman to stimulate desire in this way, an accident must occur first. The river contains treacherous spots like traps that cause accidents, and those accidents give rise to erotic desire.
Like love, an accident possesses a timeless quality that halts the flow of everyday life. Such an event causes people to harbor a desire for something that exists beyond the time of daily life, and the symbol of that otherworldly realm is ultimately reduced to “hometown” and “home.” In other words, a longing for the primordial world—which emerges only through a departure from everyday life—permeates the entire work by re-symbolizing the concept of “hometown.”

Transformations of Home and Hometown

In the chapter “Couples,” Wolf’s lover is usually portrayed as an indifferent character whose mind is elsewhere, but on the night her home is completely destroyed by fire, she becomes strangely lively and excited. That night, even though she knew no one was listening to her, she did not give up her urge to speak. Behind this sudden change lies the burning of the house—that is, the destruction of the house as the everyday world. With the house’s destruction, the path to the source was half-opened, and as a result, behavior different from the norm became possible.
The significance of the house extends beyond merely a personal living space, as revealed in the narrator’s “I” expressing concern over the appearance of protesters. The imagination that protesters might swarm in, occupy the house, and drag him out of bed presupposes that the house is a symbol of tradition and the world of origins. If we understand the protesters as a movement seeking social reform, their occupation of the house can be interpreted as an attempt to subvert and destroy the traditional world of origins.
The ’68-generation activist forces that appear here break with tradition and dream of a new utopia, but ultimately face a fate of either conforming to social norms or being criticized and isolated by their own children’s generation. The narrator “I” supports neither the father of the ’68 movement generation—who rejects his own father’s generation—nor the daughter who rejects that father; instead, “I” maintains a distance from both generations. In this way, the distance from home and tradition goes beyond mere political stance or class position to reveal a complex distancing from identity and roots.

Fluctuating Contemporaneity and the Experience of Time

Strauss concludes the chapter “The River of Vehicles” with a reminiscence of his hometown, clearly revealing the connection between the river and his hometown.
The narrator’s hometown is not entirely free from the influence of modernization. A large hospital building has been erected, and tourists visit the area via a computer-controlled mountain railway. In contrast, the house site on the mountainside has fallen into disrepair; the iron gate to the garden is broken and half-burned, and even the small stone house has collapsed, losing its original form.
Nevertheless, even in this transformed hometown, the narrator evokes scenes from the past through reminiscence. As a source of origin, the hometown remains as fragments of everyday reality and never completely disappears. In a sense, the hometown is the “other of the everyday” discovered when one steps away from daily life, and it takes on a timeless quality when summoned into the present through recollection. In other words, the hometown functions not merely as a place but as a realm of primordial memory and mythical time.
The narrator describes a genuine experience of time through the river viewed from the window of his parents’ home. The river flows ceaselessly like a procession of vehicles, yet simultaneously exhibits an aspect of permanence and stillness. The stillness inherent in this movement is what Strauss refers to as “fluctuating simultaneity,” creating a pause—a moment detached from the linear time of past, present, and future—and an atemporal instant.
While this simultaneity does not entirely exclude diachronic flow, the diachrony it points to is not the linear flow of everyday life but rather an originary time—a “distant past”—in which mythical archetypes recur. In other words, a certain dimension of time, represented by religious and mythical traditions, exists as a “pure past,” and within the fluctuating simultaneity arising from this, we arrive at the everyday “other”—such as our hometown or home.
Strauss views various situations as arising through the “metamorphosis” of the primordial scene (mythic archetype). In this case, since each situation is a transformed form of the primordial scene, they exist essentially simultaneously, and on the surface, temporal differences are lost. However, a relationship of “after” and “before” remains between the repetition and the primordial scene, leaving room for the diachronic dimension to be reintroduced. Strauss argues that the very task of literature is to open the path to the origin through these diverse situations.

The Place of Writing and Literature

In “Writing,” the third chapter of ‘Couples, Passersby’, Strauss reflects on the significance of writing as a medium and explores the place of literature in modern society, which is dominated by media such as television and computers. Just as he mentioned the proliferation of television advertising slogans and the vending-machine-like mimicry of salespeople in the previous chapter, he criticizes the phenomena of language becoming clichéd and reified. The narrator also reflects on the limitations of language through emotional expressions such as interjections, raising the possibility that all language may at times be nothing more than muttering that fails to capture meaning precisely.
He expresses skepticism toward the view that the signifier and the signified must necessarily coincide, making language a perfect means of conveying meaning. He argues that it is wrong to evaluate all art solely based on its social-critical value or subjective relevance, and maintains that the essence of art lies in providing pleasure derived from human desire. In this context, Strauss revises his childhood view of literature through the statement, “One does not write ‘about’ something; one writes it.” In the past, the narrator sought to write an infinite book “about” everything, but now such an attitude must be reconsidered.
The attempt to elevate Mallarmé’s book to a universal repository of culture seems anachronistic in an era where television and computers store and reproduce information far more actively. In this context, literature faces a crisis, and even the activities of “anti-writers”—who declare themselves outsiders and engage in satirical writing—risk losing their meaning. This is because, as the written word itself is pushed out of the cultural center, there is a concern that text-based literature will be swept away along with it.
Does Strauss, then, declare the end of literature? Upon closer inspection, this is not the case.
The expression quoted earlier refers to the Other beyond language, and he interprets writing as a site of lack. Because writing desires this lack, it becomes a site of primordial eroticism, and it is precisely at this point that literature encounters love. This is because both are plagued by lack and seek to recover what has been lost through recollection.
While writing, being inherently symbolic, cannot directly capture the primordial Other, the act of writing reveals a desire for that Other. By pointing to the Other as an absence within writing, it demonstrates the possibility that “by being within language, we gain both a homeland and a place of exile in the depths.” Literature must be able to point to the Other—who is absent from reality—through creative imagination and productive recollection.
With sentences such as, “I do not exist; you—the character—exist only on the fringes of the waves that cause my disappearance,” Strauss presents a space where literature can take root. The sight of a drunken person’s head, rumbling and sinking back into the water just before crying out for help, rolling this way and that amid the waves, illustrates the concept of “fading” in a work of art. The moment of being caught in the midst of this flight is precisely the core of realism.
The self is nothing more than an imaginary being born within the symbolic order created by the written word. Before the self is completely dismantled and falls into a state of delirium, literature brings the self—on the verge of drowning—into contact with the Other, who cannot be captured by the written word but “exists” as an absent presence within it. Therefore, the true realism Strauss speaks of does not lie in reproducing reality as it is, but in creating the event of a momentary encounter with the Other.
Ultimately, Strauss views the moment when the poet’s existential position reaches its lowest point as, paradoxically, the poet’s time. The poet must sever ties with his own time and, by destroying the present time that dominates modern society, encounter the time of origin. Literature must point to the lost primordial scene while demonstrating that it can continually transform into and repeat as other scenes. In this way, the poet will be able to realize a literature of “fluctuating simultaneity” that embodies both the temporal dimension of loss and the simultaneity of scenes.

Reminiscence and the Collapse of Self-Identity

For Strauss, reminiscence is a key means of entering the primordial world. To understand this, we must first examine how he interprets social development since the modern era. Strauss believes that the ideas of a break with the past and a utopian ideal society championed by the ’68 generation are no longer valid. He criticizes ideologies—such as coming to terms with the Nazi past—that have failed to be fully realized in reality; in the face of the ongoing emergence of new forms of far-right extremism, he argues that ideologies premised on a break with the past or linear historical progress are hollow.
In the era of history, individuals formed their self-identity through recollection, but today such self-identity is revealed to be a fiction. The identities people seek for themselves lack substance, and apart from external cues such as official identification markers, there is nothing to guarantee the existence of the individual. Even the body does not speak with a consistent, unified voice; rather, the self is fragmented and deconstructed, as if different organs were telling different stories every day. In this sense, Strauss views the era in which we live as a post-historical state, distinct from the historical era.

The Total Present, Forgetfulness, and the Form of Remembrance

What Strauss describes as the post-historical era shares certain parallels with the “era of simulation” discussed by Baudrillard. The belief that the ideologies of revolution and social transformation can control and manipulate society has already reached a point of overload, and the boundary between the real and the virtual has become blurred.
In this era, where trust in progress and faith in reality itself have vanished, society is dominated by media such as television and computers, and time has shifted from the linear framework of history to a “total present” capable of summoning everything in an instant.Computers store and retrieve disparate elements on an equal footing, leading to a cultural leveling in which even phenomena that bear no relation to one another are treated as having equal value. This leveling devastates consciousness and causes mental confusion. Unlike in the past, when successive generations lived through historical events with either optimism or pessimism, history today seems to vanish, leaving behind a fog of indifference; it appears as though, whenever the flow of history passes through an event, it exits with its historical connections hollowed out.The defining characteristic of this era is forgetfulness. Humans have created inventions to improve themselves, but these inventions often prevent humans from looking back and, instead, objectify them. Just as industrial machinery has weakened the functions of the hand, the development of memory machines—such as computers—weakens the human capacity for recollection. Computers can store vast amounts of information, but they prevent humans from actively participating in the process of recollection. As a result, people passively consume information and experience nothing but information overload, failing to perceive the sense of deprivation caused by forgetting or loss. Furthermore, this weakens even the emotion of yearning for the world of another being—that is, the world of the Other.Therefore, to recall what is fundamental, it is essential to restore human subjective participation in memory. The difference in recollection between men and women in Strauss’s work clearly illustrates this point. The mother, deprived of her own childhood due to raising her child, recalls the past only in fragmented, passionless ways. In contrast, the father, in an effort to resist a desolate old age, passionately recounts his past to his son, seeking to safeguard it. While the former represents a form of recollection lacking subjectivity, the latter is a passionate, subjective act of recollection that defiantly evokes “what once was” in the face of a deficient reality.However, the recollection Strauss speaks of does not stop at the mere recovery of personal memory. Passionate and subjective recollection must transcend the self and connect to the other of the self—that is, to a recollection of a more fundamental existence. “That which once existed,” fragmented and hidden behind the surface of daily life, possesses both presentness—in that it does not disappear but coexists simultaneously—and historicity—in that it always precedes phenomena. Such an encounter with this existence does not occur through the repetition of superficial representations; rather, it becomes possible through a moment of intense passion that shatters everyday life—a great explosion of emotion that destroys the order of representation.Like the rationalist Enlightenment, Strauss does not view longing and recollection, hope and nostalgia, as mutually exclusive. The scene in the “Twilight/Dawn” chapter, where the protagonist chases an unknown woman with short black hair and catches a glimpse of her face in front of his house, symbolically illustrates this. The unknown woman represents the world of the Other, and his seeing her face in front of his house signifies an encounter with his homeland as the source.In the process of chasing the woman, he overtakes the Other who had been following him from the past and finally sees her ahead of him. At this moment, recollections of the past, longing for the Other, and expectations and nostalgia for the future are no longer temporally separated but converge at a single point in the present. In other words, this is not an attitude of merely reflecting on the past or simply anticipating something new in the future, but rather a way of recognizing anew the meaning of what has already existed and anticipating the encounter with that existence itself. This is what makes Strauss’s concept of recollection unique.

Couples and the Other: The Mediator of the Crisis of the Present and Love

In modern society, “couples” are portrayed as beings who go their separate ways without being deeply connected to each other’s inner worlds—appearing superficially bound together yet emotionally closed off. Conversely, “passersby” appear as an anonymous crowd of people who have lost their individuality, homogenized to the point of being indistinguishable from one another.
Thus, both the couple and the passerby find themselves in a state of crisis, each harboring negative aspects within themselves.However, within this crisis, Strauss seeks to reveal the alternative possibilities lying dormant beneath the surface of the everyday couple and the passerby—namely, the “true couple as the Other” and the “true passerby as the Other.” Although the couples in the work are generally depicted as negative figures dominated by cold emotions, they simultaneously harbor the contradiction that they also serve as mediators who experience love and encounter the Other.Here, the expression “loving love itself rather than loving someone” refers not to possessive attachment toward a specific object, but to an encounter with the “Other”—the unknown woman who remains anonymous—as mentioned several times earlier. Such an encounter is possible only through a departure from the goal-oriented and rational world of everyday life. Therefore, what matters is not narcissistic or selfish affection, but rather a passionate emotion that transcends the everyday—that is, love accompanied by actual contact with the Other.

The Pedestrian, the Solitary Figure, and the Artist’s Breakthrough

The position of the pedestrian can also be interpreted in two ways. While the pedestrian, as part of a crowd hurriedly walking toward a destination, is portrayed negatively, the pedestrian as a “solitary figure” can simultaneously serve as a representation of the artistic existence. In other words, the solitary stride that resists the false solidarity or emotional emptiness of the masses actually opens up a genuine emotional breakthrough.In one scene of the work, the narrator is the only one walking in the opposite direction of the protesters, refusing to go along with the false sense of solidarity put forward by the masses. This act is read not as mere opposition, but as an attempt, as an artist, to reach genuine emotions and the Other. Therefore, the pedestrian is linked to the couple, serving as both a prerequisite for an encounter with the Other and a mediator.

Voice, Gait, Face—Entrances to the Other in Everyday Life

The work includes the passage: “Let us once again make use of the ordinary entrances that lead us to humanity through voice, gait, and face.” This trinity is concretely revealed at the work’s conclusion. In Venice at the end of the year, walking alone in St. Mark’s Square at midnight, the narrator notices passersby with strange, uncharacteristic gaits.Although the square is a public space, it has somehow transformed into a solemn inner space, an auditorium of dreams, and the passersby walk in ways beyond their own control. Their gait—sometimes quick, sometimes unnaturally slow—sends shivers through the present and opens a passage into the city’s hidden, secret, and past-oriented realms.Later, the narrator hears a young woman singing. The vibrations resonating in this time and place both disrupt the rhythm of the footsteps and evoke the song; the sound that was buried in the noise during the restaurant scene at the beginning of the work is heard again at the conclusion. This song may sound like the song of the Lorelei, coming from a realm of beauty beyond representation.
Even amidst language as a symbolic system and the noise of modernity, the Other still speaks to us. Caught between the two extremes of communication breakdown and the banality of everyday conversation, we are constantly urged to listen to the “words” of the Other. The moment we lend an ear to these sounds, we arrive at the world of the Other.Seated at the table next to the café where the young woman was singing was the apparition of an elderly philosopher whom the narrator greatly admired. The narrator had never met him in person and learns that, in reality, he had died in a Swiss hospital. Nevertheless, the narrator turns his gaze beyond the city’s visible landscape to behold the invisible and the unknown.This “misseeing” and “miswalking” reveal apparitions that cannot be captured by a rational gaze. These apparitions, formed from faces, must be deciphered symbolically, like dreams, rather than through rational analysis. They become a passageway leading us beyond everyday life into a mythical and otherworldly realm.