On June 1, 1938, Ödön von Horváth would go to Paris with the feeling both exalted and reassuring of having been safe. He had seen with his own eyes how the Europe he knew and loved surrendered to Nazism: first Germany, where his books and his plays were banned since 1933; then Austria, where Horvath had witnessed the roars of criminal fervor with which the crowds received Hitler in the civilized streets of Vienna. Horvath was as much a son of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire as his friend Joseph Roth, who had also already begun his long flight. Roth came from the world apart from the Jewish communities of Ukraine and Poland; Von Horváth, from an administrative and military aristocracy, between German and Hungarian, with Balkan connections. That two contemporary authors, who wrote in the same German language, came from such diverse geographical and social origins is a symptom of the admirable fluidity of that world, soon shattered by the double poison of nationalism and totalitarianism.
Roth and Von Horváth began to be known in the Berlin newspapers in the early twenties. Roth had a narrative talent that manifested itself equally in fiction as in chronicles. Von Horváth soon passed from short stories and chronicles to the theater, in a collective atmosphere of creative fever in which Bertolt Brecht was one more among other exceptional luminaries. In a few historical times there has been a greater concentration of talent and catastrophe. These people wrote, invented, composed, painted, in the midst of the diaspora, of persecution, of uncertainty without relief. At the end of 1937, Von Horváth's first maturity novel, Youth without God , was published in Amsterdam, in a small German-language publishing house. He had written it that same summer, with an urgency of desolation and denunciation that is transparent in the speed of writing, in a syncopated rhythm that encompasses equally the thoughts and actions spoken by the characters. In Youth without God there are no exact dates or allusions to contemporary events, nor does the name Hitler or any Nazi leader appear. The action is not even said to happen in Germany. But through the story of a high school teacher who sees how propaganda is bewildering his students one by one, and how it is increasingly difficult not to be pointed out without remedy because of any minimal form of dissent, the novel makes visible the mechanism of submission and collective blackmail thanks to which Nazism was imposed with a terrifying speed: it is an immense collective wave, but within it happens the debasement, surrender, of each individual conscience, one by one.
In Paris, that first day of June, 1938, Von Horváth had reason to feel hopeful, despite the disaster he had seen advancing first through Germany and then through Austria, the black tide that at that time already flooded Spain and soon was going to bait with Czechoslovakia. Von Horváth planned to emigrate to the United States. And thanks to the success of Youth without God, he was presented with an opportunity that many of his colleagues would envy: he had just met with a former Berlin acquaintance, Robert Siodmak, already installed in Hollywood, who was interested in taking the novel to the cinema. (Robert Siodmak is another of the luminaries of that diaspora: in 1930, in Berlin, he had collaborated with Billy Wilder in an admirable experimental film, People on Sunday ; in the forties and early fifties he filmed some of the most perfect films in the cinema black).
It was an afternoon announcing storm. After the interview with Siodmak, Von Horváth went with his hands in his pockets under the groves of the Champs Elysees. In America, another life was waiting for him, the reunion with friends who had emigrated before him. The Nazis had burned his previous books and those he wrote were now banned in Germany and Austria. But he had finished another novel, without taking a break after the previous one. He had written it more quickly, more concentrated, more stripped, with phrases that seemed rather imprecations addressed to the audience of a theater, with a narration as choppy as that of an expressionist film, made of violent contrasts of lightness and shadow. That novel, A son of our time , now comes to us translated with great literary and oral encouragement by Isabel Hernández. I began to read it one night, without knowing yet almost nothing of its author, because I had not read the back cover: the reading caught me like a snare, guided me without respite until the end, 150 pages and several hours later, already in the kingdom of insomnia. In Youth without God , the protagonist is that teacher who assists from outside the transformation of others; in A son of our time , who counts is one of the already converted, of the already upset. He is a young man who, when he enters the army, feels redeemed from the humiliation of poverty and unemployment. Again there are no names and places remain undefined. With very accurate notes, Isabel Hernández helps to understand the context without altering the fable quality of the story. In the novel is the imprint of radical theater and cinema. The scenes happen in the imagination as on a screen that shows a hypnotic German horror film of the early thirties. As the novel progresses, the sentences become shorter, the tone sharper, the language both drier and more poetic, with poetry more of cinema than of literature. A paragraph is a single sentence and a hallucinated vision: "In the mirror a city burns."
The novel is like a sharp and precise artifact, thrown into our present from the other present in which it was written. He explains his time and lights ours with some of his harmful radiance. Von Horváth did not see it published. Nor did he arrive in the United States or see the full fulfillment of the horror whose origin he had attended. It is as if we were watching a movie then. The rain rages and Von Horváth breaks his hat, walks faster under the trees. Lightning strikes the glass of a huge chestnut tree, cutting down a large branch just as Von Horváth passed under and kills him instantly. Thus one of his characters could also have died, struck without reason or remedy for the destructive reason of the world.
Get 'Youth without God'
Author: Ödön von Horváth
Editorial: Nordic, 2019.
Format: 208 pages. 18 euros
Find it in your nearest bookstore
Get 'A child of our time'
Author: Ödön von Horváth
Editorial: Nordic, 2020.
Format: 196 pages. 18 euros
Find it in your nearest bookstore