Ödön von Horváth

Edmund Josef von Horváth (December 9, 1901 Sušak, Rijeka, then in Austria–Hungary, now in Croatia - June 1, 1938 Paris) 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.

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Early life and education

Horváth was the oldest son of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat of Hungarian origin from Slavonia. Dr. Edmund (Ödön) Josef Horvát and Maria Lulu Hermine (Prehnal) 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 Hungarian. In 1909, his father was ennobled (indicated in German by the preposition "von", and in Hungarian by an additional "h" at the end of the last name) and assigned to Munich, but Ödön and his mother did not accompany him. The young Horváth went to high school in Bratislava and Vienna, where he was taught German - this not being his native tongue - beginning in 1913, and where he also earned his Matura (high school diploma), before finally re-joining his parents at Munich (more precisely at Murnau am Staffelsee, near Munich), where, from 1919, he studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University.

Later life

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. Having always lived in fear of being struck by lightning, in Paris Horváth was hit by a falling branch and killed during a thunderstorm on the Champs-Élysées, opposite the Théâtre Marigny. 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.

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 most enduringly popular works, Jugend ohne Gott describes the youth in Nazi Germany from a disgruntled teacher's point of view, who, himself at first an opportunist, is helpless against the racist and militaristic Nazi propaganda that his pupils are subjected to and that de-humanizes them and, at last, loses his job but gains his identity.

The title of his novel Ein Kind unserer Zeit (A Child of Our Time) was used in English by Michael Tippett for his oratorio (1939–1941), composed during World War II.

Works

Plays

Novels

Other prose

Quotes

In popular culture

References

Bibliography

Balme, Christopher B., The Reformation of Comedy Genre Critique in the Comedies of Odon von Horvath University of Otago, Dunedin 1985 ISBN 0959765026