Odon horvath biography of michaels
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Ödön von Horváth: Ein Kind unserer Zeit (A Child of Our Time)
You may remember I’ve reviewed plays by Ödön von Horváth before – I really love this author and his work, and can relate a bit to his famous quote:
If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg [Bratislava], 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.
This novel, the last he ever wrote, was published in Amsterdam in 1938, shortly before the author’s sudden death in exile in Paris, and it feels horrifyingly prescient not just of WW2 but also the results of the recent US elections. It certainly delivers a great insight into why people might be seduced by populist oversimplifications and illusions of quick fixes. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to fi
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It’s easy to laugh at the old cliché that literature teaches us about ourselves. Those who utter this type of banality tend not to be particularly well-read, or to have any original ideas about the role of literature nowadays. Theirs is the language of Cliffs Notes. Often overlooked is the more interesting truth that fiction, and certain kinds of dystopian literature in particular, have things to impart about who and what we are not.
When we read George Orwell’s 1984, we can measure our distance from a socialist authoritarian state where the government watches everyone all the time and puts dissidents in jail. We may see some disturbing parallels between the world Orwell depicts and the politically-correct present. In our day, the movement to expunge statues and place names associated with a less egalitarian past, to consign them to the memory hole, is Orwellian to the core. But America is not a repressive socialist state, and is light years from being a fascist one.
If
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Ödön von Horváth
When the shop purveying diacritical marks opened one morning in Vienna, in my mind the writer Ödön von Horváth turned up and said “Thanks. I’ll have the lot.”
It wasn’t even his real name, of course — which was Edmund Josef von Horváth. A child of the twentieth century, von Horváth was born in Fiume/Rijeka in 1901. His father was a Hungarian from Slavonia (in today’s Croatia) who entered the imperial diplomatic service of Austria-Hungary and was ennobled, earning his “von”.
“If you ask me what fryst vatten my native land,” von Horváth said, “I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Preßburg, Vienna, and Munich, and inom have a Hungarian passport.”
“But homeland? inom know it not. I’m a typical Austro-Hungarian mixture: at once Magyar, Croatian, German, and Czech; my name fryst vatten Hungarian, my mother tongue is German.”
From 1908 his primary education was in Budapest in the Hungarian language, until 1913 when he switc