August Stramm was a German Expressionist poet and playwright; an important author of the Expressionist journal Der Sturm and its main contributor of ‘Wortkunst’, a form of literature characterised by the destruction of conventional language patterns.

Born in Münster on 29 July 1874, Stramm entered postal service, working on the ‘Seepostdienst’ (nautical mail service) between Hamburg/Bremen and New York from 1897 onwards and at the Berlin Postal Ministry from 1905. By then he started attending university lectures (e.g. philosophy, history, economy) and preparing for his doctorate, which he achieved in 1909 with a thesis on unified global postal rates. In 1902, Stramm married Else Krafft, a successful writer of light fiction; they had two children.