We'll ship you any forthcoming title one month before anyone else has it. Get it 30 days early!
List price: $15.00
- paperback $12.00
- Pages224
- ISBN9781612191195
- PublishedJune 2012
- Categories
All
Fiction
Forthcoming
Youth Without God
A Novel
Ödön von Horváth
Translated by R. Wills Thomas
Part of The Neversink Library
Written in exile while in flight from the Nazis, this dark, bizarre evocation of everyday life under fascism is available for the first time in thirty years.
An unnamed narrator in an unnamed country is a schoolteacher with “a safe job with a pension at the end of it.” But, when he reprimands a student—”You shouldn’t have said that it doesn’t matter whether the negroes live or die. They’re human too, you know.”—he is accused of “sabotage of the Fatherland.” His students revolt: “We do not wish to be taught by you,” their petition reads. He tries to protect himself, first by retreating into silence, then by mouthing the platitudes of the regime. But when at last he fails to prevent a murder, he finds himself on trial . . . and one of the most reviled of society’s outcasts.
First published in 1939, the year after his tragic death at age 36, von Horváth’s Youth Without God was a harbinger of the brutalizing conformity of the totalitarian state. Its highly stylized characterizations and bizarre plot mirrored the unendurable reality engulfing Europe on the precipice of World War II.
ÖDÖN VON HORVÁTH (1901–1939) was born near Trieste, the son of a Hungarian diplomat who moved the family constantly. Horváth would subsequently say of himself, “I am a mélange of Old Austria; Hungarian, Croat, Czech, German; alas, nothing Semitic.” Although his first language was Hungarian, he went to high school in Vienna and college in Munich, and began writing plays in German. Leaving school, he settled in Berlin, where in 1931 his play Italian Night debuted to rave reviews—except from the Nazi press, which reviled him. His next play, Tales from the Vienna Woods, starring Peter Lorre, drew an even stronger, equally divided re-sponse. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he relocated to Vienna, but on the day of the Anschluss—March 13, 1938—he fled to Budapest. From there, he soon moved to Paris, but on June 1, 1938, he was killed in a freak accident when, caught in a rainstorm coming out of a theater on the Champs-Élysées, he took shelter under a tree that was hit by lightning; von Horváth was struck by a falling tree limb and killed instantly. He was 36 years old and had published 21 plays and three novels—The Age of the Fish, A Child of Our Time, and The Eternal Philistine.
