After finishing his secondary education, Strauss studied German, History of the Theatre and Sociology in Cologne and Munich.

Between 1970 and 1975, he worked as a dramaturgical assistant to Peter Stein at the West Berlin Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer.

Strauss had his first breakthrough as a dramatist with the 1977 Trilogie des Wiedersehens, five years after the publication of his first work.

In his theoretical work, Strauß showed the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno, but his outlook was also radically anti-bourgeois.

In 2014, Carl Hanser Verlag brought out a compendium of Strauß’s aphorisms called Allein mit allen, spanning close to four decades from 1977 to 2013, and edited by German scholar Sebastian Kleinschmidt.