Schwarze Fahnen : Roman

Johan August Strindberg (1849 – 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.

Black Banners, written in 1904, is August Strindberg’s last major novel of social criticism. It embodies an attack on the decadence and immorality he perceived in the literary circles and cultural life of Stockholm at the turn of twentieth century and led to the so-called «Strindberg Feud». It is considered by many to be the most notorious roman à clef in Swedish literature and it occasioned the greatest scandal of a career marked by controversy.