Johano Strasser

Johano Strasser was born in 1939 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands. In 1958, after taking his school certificate in Rotenburg a.d. Wümme, he began studying at the Foreign Languages and Interpretation Institute of Mainz University, from which he graduated as a translator. From 1961 to 1962 he worked as a technical translator at the Ford works in Cologne. Following that, he studied philosophy in Mainz, where he gained his doctorate in 1967. He was then commissioned by the DFG to research "English Philosophy of the 18th Century", with stays at universities in England and Scotland. Over the same period, he also taught languages and philosophy at the Adult Education Centre in Mainz and then politics at the Technical College in Darmstadt. He also taught at the Teacher Teaching College and the Technical College in Berlin. In 1974, he received a two-year research grant from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In 1977 he qualified as a university lecturer in the Faculty of Politics at the Free University of Berlin, where he subsequently taught. From 1980 to 1988, Johano Strasser edited the political and literary magazine, L'80, together with Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Carola Stern, and others. He has been a freelance writer since 1983. In addition to his academic and literary activities, he is a member of the SPD and the trade union IG-Medien (now ver.di). Between 1970 and 1975, he was Deputy Federal Chairman of the Young Socialists and since 1973, he has sat on the Basic Values Commission of the Federal Council of the Verband Deutscher Schriftsteller (German Writers' Association). In 1995, he was elected General Secretary of the German branch of P.E.N., becoming its President in 2002.