Edmund Josef von Horváth was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist. He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.
Early life and education
Horváth was the oldest son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat of Hungarian origin from Slavonia, Edmund Josef Horvát, and Maria Lulu Hermine Horvát, who was from an Austro-Hungarian military family. From 1908, he attended elementary school in Budapest and later the Rákóczianum, where he was educated in the Hungarian language. In 1909, his father was ennobled and assigned to Munich, but Ödön and his mother did not accompany him. The young Horváth went to high school in Pressburg and Vienna, where he was taught German – this not being his native tongue – beginning in 1913, and where he also earned his Matura, before finally re-joining his parents at Murnau am Staffelsee, and, from 1919, studying at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
He started writing as a student, from 1920. Quitting university without a degree in early 1922, he moved to Berlin. Later, he lived in Salzburg and Murnau am Staffelsee in Upper Bavaria. In 1931, he was awarded, along with Erik Reger, the Kleist Prize. In 1933, at the beginning of the Nazi regime in Germany, he relocated to Vienna. Following Austria's Anschluss with Germany in 1938, Horváth emigrated to Paris. Ödön von Horváth was hit by a falling branch from a tree and killed during a thunderstorm on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, opposite the Théâtre Marigny, in June 1938. Ironically, only a few days earlier, von Horváth had said to a friend: "I am not so afraid of the Nazis...There are worse things one can be afraid of, namely things one is afraid of without knowing why. For instance, I am afraid of streets. Roads can be hostile to one, can destroy one. Streets scare me." And a few years earlier, von Horváth had written poetry about lightning: "Yes, thunder, that it can do. And bolt and storm. Terror and destruction." Ödön von Horváth was buried in Saint-Ouen cemetery in northern Paris. In 1988, on the 50th anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred to Vienna and reinterred at the Heiligenstädter Friedhof.
Literary themes
Important topics in Horváth's works were popular culture, politics and history. He especially tried to warn of the dawn of fascism and its dangers. Among Horváth's more enduringly popular works, describes the youth in Nazi Germany from a disgruntled teacher's point of view, who initially is an opportunist, but is helpless against the racist and militaristic Nazi propaganda that de-humanizes his pupils. The title of his novel Ein Kind unserer Zeit was used in English by Michael Tippett for his oratorio, composed during World War II.
Works
Plays
Das Buch der Tänze, 1920
Mord in der Mohrengasse, 1923
Zur schönen Aussicht, 1926
Die Bergbahn, 1926, originally Revolte auf Côte 3018
Sladek der schwarze Reichswehrmann, 1929, originally Sladek oder Die schwarze Armee
Figaro läßt sich scheiden, 1936. Giselher Klebe wrote the libretto and composed his 1963 opera of the same name based on this work; Elena Langer's 2016 opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, to a libretto by David Pountney, is also largely based on the play.
Pompeji. Komödie eines Erdbebens, 1937
Ein Dorf ohne Männer, 1937
Himmelwärts, 1937
Der jüngste Tag, 1937
Novels
Sechsunddreißig Stunden, 1929
Der ewige Spießer, 1930
Jugend ohne Gott, 1938
Ein Kind unserer Zeit, 1938
Other prose
Sportmärchen, 1924–1926
Interview, 1932
Gebrauchsanweisung, 1932
Quotes
"Nothing conveys the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity does."
"Eigentlich bin ich ganz anders, nur komme ich so selten dazu." "Actually I'm quite different. But I so rarely have time to show it."
Ödön von Horváth was once walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered the skeleton of a long dead man with his knapsack still intact. Von Horváth opened the knapsack and found a postcard reading "Having a wonderful time". Asked by friends what he did with it, von Horváth replied "I posted it".
"If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg , Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport, but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical mix of old Austria–Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary; my mother tongue is German."
In popular culture
Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood portrays a fictional Horváth. He survives the falling branch and moves to the United States, where expatriate German authors such as Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Mann write for the motion picture industry.
Danilo Kiš's short story "The Man Without a Country", published in the 1994 collection The Lute and The Scars, fictionalizes the death of von Horváth.
Lydia Davis' short story "Ödön von Horváth Out Walking," published in the 2014 collection Can't and Won't, concerns Horváth's encounter with the skeleton in the Alps.
