The World of Ödön von Horváth

THE WORLD OF ODON VON HORVATH Violet Ketels "Horvath is better than Brecht" -Peter Handke THE FORMATIVE YEARS Od6n von Horvath (1901-38) wrote 17 plays, 3 novels, and numerous shorter pieces before a bizarre street accident claimed his life in Paris, where he had stopped briefly on a leg of the long journey into exile forced on him by the Nazis. Had it not been for Hitler, who closed the theatres of Europe against him, he would rank as one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century. He recorded history in his art while it was happening, exposing the corruption of the would-be defenders of the purity of the fatherland, naming the irrational forces in a disintegrating social system that ensured their success. More important, like all great artists , he verified in his plays the connection between history and the ongoing human predicament. He was an innovator in artistic form as well, especially in his creative use of the non-verbal resources of 29 the theatre. His first play, Das Buch der Tinze, was inspired by a chance invitation from the composer Siegfried Kallenberg. A fusion of poetry, pantomime, and music, the play was produced in Munich in 1922, as was Brecht's first play. Soon, like Brecht and other playwrights nurtured during the years of rebellion, inflation, and depression in post-World War I Germany, Horvath began to document the rending apart of the social and political fabric. Actually, the Catholic Horv'th, a pure Aryan according to Nazi concepts, was one of the first German writers to grasp fully the cataclysmic possibilities inherent in the rising National Socialist movement. He challenged the anti-semitism of the Nazis openly in his life as well as in his writing. In constant danger and writing under threat, his promising theatre career was extinguished overnight when the National Socialists seized power in 1933. He was one of that whole generation of artists and intellectuals, part of the Bohemian ferment in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna during the twenties , who were either hounded into exile or murdered by the Nazis. Against that background of worsening political oppression as well as social and economic disruption, Horvath became a playwright for whom the interpenetration of social and political forces into individual lives became a major dramatic theme. He claimed that his own life really began, when he was already thirteen, with the outbreak of the first world war. For him that cataclysm signified the collapse of Western culture, the beginning of "a new item," the dawning of an age when the souls of men would become as "rigid as the faces of fish."' He explained: We who were adolescents during the war were somehow brutalized. We felt neither pity nor reverence. We had no respect for culture nor for morality. When adults broke down under the strain of suffering and loss, we remained intact.2 That inhuman imperviousness to the suffering of others, that failed empathy, is illustrated in all of his plays and novels (very explicitly in Youth Without God and A Child of Our Time.) In 1927, in the Berlin Office of the German League for Human Rights, HorvAth examined the documents on the gangstyle murders committed by the Black Reichswehr, a secret corps of thugs mindlessly doing the regular army's dirty work-a new breed in the new time Horvath identified. Their callousness and the virulence of their social pathology, especially their anti-semitism, became the subject of Sladek der schwUrze Reichswehrmann, which premiered in Berlin in 1929. Sladek raises the basic issue of communal life: the conflict be30 SLADEK, DER SCHWXRZE REICHSWEHRMANN Dir: Erich Fusch; Berlin premiere, 1929 tween freedom and responsibility. Social justice is unthinkable when people do not limit their egotism, yet without reverence for individual human rights, society easily becomes an efficient and ruthless killing machine. The play's central character, like the boys Horvith recalled from his youth, was an adolescent during the war and had never known peace. Traditionless, rootless, and lacking in firm principles, he is the prototype of the "fellow traveler." Deprived of a chance to develop rational personal and moral substance, his character is deformed by his associations. The consequence...