In 1972 he completed his univer­sity degree but was banned from a position as a schoolteacher by the Berlin Senate on the ground of his supposed anti-constitutional activities, a decision which was reversed in 1976. He was by now, however, a recognised writer. In 1969 he had been awarded the Berlin ‘Young Generation’ prize, and since then he has received a number of prizes and grants to enable him to continue as a writer, essayist, scriptwriter, and literary critic. Between 1985 and 1990 he held visiting professorships at Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard Universities and at Dartmouth College.

Peter Schneider’s strong engagement with the student movement is indicative of the political interest at work in his writing, fictional and non­fictional. His political and literary political essays appeared in Kursbuch, the periodical edited by Hans Magnus Enzenzsberger between 1965 and 1975 which played a key role in intellectual life during this decisive decade in West German history.

If Schneider invoked in Kursbuch the idea of cultural revolution and ear­nestly considered the possibilities of proletarian class struggle, his greatest political effect was achieved with his first work of fiction, the novella Lenz (1973). It sold 120,000 copies by 1980 and is regularly cited as the most important work to emerge from the student movement, which while preaching an end to social alienation had little to offer in the way of solutions to personal problems.

Schneider’s story, as the title indicates, is modelled on Georg Buchner’s famous unfinished account of descent into madness of the eighteenth-century German dramatist Jakob Lenz. Schneider’s partly autobiographical hero would like to escape his middle-class origins and find himself in political activity. His growing alienation from the slogans and theories of left-wing activists leads him to flee Germany and seek salvation in the south. In Italy he finds a new identity and personal happiness among simple Italian workers, which gives him the strength to begin a new life in

Berlin – a new life which offered to the readers of Lenz an alternative to the melancholy of a post-1968 left. The story’s emphasis on the right to individual happiness, its rejection of politically correct abstractions in favour of the sensuous and the emotional, had a liberating effect. It touched the nerve of the time and signalled the turn from the political 1960s to the politics of the personal, the new subjectivity, as it was called, of the 1970s.

Schneider’s own turn in the 1970s was not a retreat into the private sphere. If he now parted company with his earlier radicalism, it was in the name of a political and moral realism, as critical of the German state and society as of the dogmatism of certain left-wing in­tellectual circles. His next story, ... schon bist du ein Verfassungsfeind (and already you are an enemy of the constitution, 1975), again draws on the conjunction between personal experience and public interest. Using the documentary material of a case of ‘Berufsverbot’, similar to his own exclusion from the state employment, he constructs the story of a schoolteacher in Frieburg who is declared an enemy of the constitution, and seeks, like Kafka’s Josef K, to defend himself against this judgement, only to realise that a successful defence is identical with self-surrender. The accused disappears, the court adjourns.

The direct political interest of  these two stories is also evident in the theme of Schneider’s next story, Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1982), which explored the division of Germany into two hostile systems defining themselves through mutual negation. Schnieder’s concern is to portray from outside as it were the everyday absurdity and monstrosity of divided Berlin – the ‘siamese city’ – as it is registered un the lives and attitudes of individuals on both sides of the wall. Schneider’s neutral stance, designed to reveal the ‘wall in the head’ preventing communication, contrasts with his essays of the period, which attack the West German peace movement for its indifference to the fate of Eastern Europe and readiness to appease Soviet power. Here he shows himself as an acute analyst of ‘German anxieties’ (this is the title of his 1988 essay collection), which characterised the public mood of the 1980s in West Germany.

His literary work after Der Mauerspringer includes a play, Totoloque (1985), about the destruction of the Aztec empire by Cortes, which found no favour with the critics, and his story Vati (1988), based on the account by Mengele’s son of his meeting in Brazil with his father, the doctor in charge of selection at Auschwitz. Here too the subject matter reflects a historical and moral issue of great significance in Germany. If the student movement had brought to a head the confrontation with the guilt of the fathers’ generation, the 1980s posed the question of the guilt of the sons. In portraying Mengele’s son as weak and indecisive, incapable of confronting the evil of his father’s actions, Schneider suggests the continuing difficulty Germans face in coming to terms with the Nazi past.

The question of German identity has been given a new impetus by the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the reunification in 1990. Schneider responded with a series of essays devoted to the German question in what he called ‘A Journey Through German National Feeling’ (1990). Since then he has published his most extended work of fiction, the novel Paarungen (Paris, 1992).