developed a friendship with Arno Holz and around 1887 he agreed to an offer from Holz to share a vacant summer home of a friend from Niederschoenhausen and from there work on his writing. It was then he broke off his formal studies. Early work with Arno Holz Schlaf and Holz presented their first joint work, the anthology, "New Tracks" in 1892. In it the term "Sequential Naturalism" (Konsequenter Naturalismus) made its first appearance. The anthology consisted of three parts, each with its own preface. The middle part had been published in 1889 under the pseudonym Bjarne B. Holmsen. It contained the short story "Papa Hamlet." The third part of the anthology, the drama "The Family Selicke" had been published in 1890. In Sequential Naturalism, one encounters a moment-to-moment description of events without a governing overarching narrative or perceiver. The style is also called the "Sekundenstil" or second-by-second style. In Papa Hamlet, the story is told almost entirely in dialogue, much of it in dialect. There is almost no intervention by the narrator. Dialogue contains contradictions, grammatical inaccuracies, dialect, other elements of a "realist" atmosphere. The works in the story center on broken families, alcoholism, financial hardship, and sickness. The observance of unity of place and time in the narrative give the works an oppressive atmosphere. The Family Selicke found little success at first when it was first staged in April 1890. It did have its defenders, however. Holz and Schlaf felt increasing alienation through the 1890s, with early tensions over artistic notions exacerbated by public debate over the relative contributions and merit of both writers. The dispute reached its climate between 1905 and 1906. Today, Schlaf's esteem pales in comparison to Holz's – a situation convenient given Schlaf's support of the Nazis in the 1930s (Holz died in 1928 before the Nazi rise to power). At the turn of the century In 1893 Schlaf suffered from a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Charité, a Berlin hospital. He sustained several visits to the hospital by 1897 and later described his illness as a nervous disorder and depression. Holz used these experiences to discredit his former friend and wrote about his paranoia. In Schalf's novels published after 1900 one can find representations of schizophrenic and psychotic behavior. He also started to investigate the occult and cosmology. Schlaf published his first independent drama, "Meister Oelze" in 1892, which received its Berlin