Literary studies and stage practitioners alike frequently display a certain bafflement in the face of contemporary stage-plays. The relation between text and theatre has undergone as sweeping a change as have the ideas on what makes a play 'theatrical'. The traditional concept of drama has grown too restrictive and is in obvious need of revision. As contemporary plays in German show, theatre texts make very different uses of the drama form and in some cases depart from it altogether. With this mind, the study sets out to analyze the dramaturgic concept behind such plays, relinquishing the automatic recourse to a 'dramatic' function model and replacing it with an inquiry into the specific theatricality of these works, which may equally be determined by the form of the text or by the use made of intertextuality.