RICHARD WAGNER GREW UP IN A German-speaking community in western Romania, in a region called Banat. Upon completion of his studies in German literature at the university in Temeswar, Romania, Wagner taught German as a foreign language to Romanian school children. After three years of teaching he began work as a correspondent for a German language newspaper in Transylvania. Wagner lost his position after five years with the newspaper, because, as he puts it, he would not write what the communist editor-in-chief wanted to print. In 1985, he formally petitioned to leave Romania and, in 1987, was finally permitted to emigrate to West Berlin.

Wagner began to write at approximately the age of fifteen and in 1973, when he was 21, his first book of poems was published. By this time Wagner was already active in the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a literary group that he and six other students of German literature at the university in Temeswar founded in 1972. Their primary aim was to write serious modern literature in the same vein as that of their freer Western contemporaries, while working within the context of a communist society. The members of the group understood themselves as critical, reform-minded socialists, drawing their inspiration from the Prague Spring. The Aktionsgruppe Banat was tolerated for three years under the watchful eye of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, until 1975, when the group was disbanded and its members arrested. Wagner was released after preliminary investigations, whereupon he left Temeswar and began to work as a German teacher.

Wagner considers his involvement with the Aktionsgruppe Banat to be the literary and political basis of his later work. The former members of the group, save three whose mysterious deaths have yet to be satisfactorily explained, currently live in Germany, and some, like Wagner, are still writing.

In his highly autobiographical Ausreiseantrag, Wagner chronicles the struggles and observations of a disillusioned and often cynical German-Romanian writer, Stirner, living in the bleak environment of communist Romania. Stirner sees a society that is only deceptively functional, repressed by its dictatorial regime and the petty corruption of its citizens. He writes for a German language newspaper in a country where most people do not even bother to read between the headlines on the front page, but instead flip to the back for the less propagandistic sports section.