Youth Without God

  PRAISE FOR ÖDÖN VON HORVÁTH

  “Horváth had turned his back on the mournful realism of the émigrés, with their passion for easy caricature and their desire for revenge. He had realized with extraordinary acuteness that to meet the horror of reality with a horror literature was no longer possible or useful; that the reality of Fascism was in fact so overwhelming and catastrophic that no realism, particularly the agonized naturalism of the twentieth century, could do it justice.”

  —ALFRED KAZIN

  “Ödön von Horváth was a brilliant German writer.… He makes the truth irresistible.”

  —EDMUND WILSON

  “The most gifted writer of his generation.”

  —STEFAN ZWEIG

  “Horváth is better than Brecht.”

  —PETER HANDKE

  “One of the best Austrian writers … In every line of his prose there is an unmistakable hatred for the kind of German philistinism that made the German murder, the Third Reich, possible.”

  —JOSEPH ROTH

  YOUTH WITHOUT GOD

  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 response. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Horváth relocated to Vienna, but on the day of the Anschluss—March 13, 1938—he fled to Budapest, and soon after, to Paris. On June 1, 1938, Horváth was caught in a storm after leaving a theater on the Champs-Élysées. He took shelter under a tree that was struck by lightning; a falling limb killed him instantly. He was 36 years old and had published 21 plays and three novels—Youth Without God, A Child of Our Time, and The Eternal Philistine.

  LIESL SCHILLINGER is a critic and translator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. She is the translator of Every Day, Every Hour by Nataša Dragnić and the forthcoming Camille, by Alexandre Dumas.

  R. WILLS THOMAS’S translations from French and German include Ödön von Horváth’s A Child of Our Time.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  YOUTH WITHOUT GOD

  Originally published in German as Jugend ohne Gott by Ödön von Horváth

  Originally published in the United States by The Dial Press under the title The Age of the Fish in 1939

  This edition © Melville House 2012

  Translated by R. Wills Thomas

  Introduction © Liesl Schillinger

  Design by Christopher King

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-120-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936545

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION by Liesl Schillinger

  YOUTH WITHOUT GOD

  1. Niggers

  2. Rain

  3. The Rich Plebeians

  4. Bread

  5. Pestilence

  6. The Age of the Fish

  7. The Goalkeeper

  8. War

  9. Venus on Trek

  10. Weeds

  11. The Lost Airman

  12. Go Home

  13. Human Ideals

  14. The Roman Captain

  15. Filth

  16. Z and N

  17. Adam and Eve

  18. Condemned

  19. The Man in the Moon

  20. The Last Day but One

  21. The Last Day

  22. The Pressmen

  23. The Trial

  24. A Veil

  25. His Dwelling

  26. The Compass

  27. The Box

  28. Expelled from Paradise

  29. The Fish

  30. The Fish Won’t Bite

  31. A Flag Day

  32. One of the Five

  33. The Club Steps In

  34. Two Letters

  35. Autumn

  36. A Visitor

  37. The Terminus

  38. The Bait

  39. The Net

  40. N

  41. The Ghost

  42. The Doe

  43. The Other Eye

  44. Over the Sea

  INTRODUCTION:

  NO GOD BUT MEN

  BY LIESL SCHILLINGER

  Ödön von Horváth’s Youth Without God, and the devilry of ungodly times

  What does it mean, and why does it matter, to find yourself in godless times—particularly if you yourself are not what you would call “religious,” at least, not in fair weather?

  In 1933 in Vienna, five years before Germany annexed Austria into the Third Reich, a Viennese author, critic, actor, and boulevardier named Egon Friedell (born Friedmann, in 1878, when Vienna was capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) denounced the Nazi regime as: “the Reich of the Antichrist,” and wrote vehemently, “Every trace of nobility, piety, education, reason is persecuted in the most hateful and base manner by a rabble of depraved bootblacks.” Three days into the Anschluss, on March 16, 1938, Friedell jumped to his death from the window of his townhouse on the Gentzgasse when the SA came knocking. Three days before, Friedell’s good friend Ödön von Horváth, the prolific playwright and novelist (born in 1901 in the Austro-Hungarian port city of Fiume, which today is called Rijeka, and lies in Croatia), had prudently packed his belongings and left Vienna, ending up in Paris after a brief sojourn in Budapest. For decades, Vienna had been an enlightened, secular haven for culture and café society. No longer.

  Von Horváth, unlike Friedell, was not Jewish; nor was he much of a churchgoer. He was a sophisticated Hungarian—a diplomat’s son—and had been schooled in Budapest, Vienna and Munich before moving to Berlin in his twenties to participate in the theater scene. His writing was irreverent, original and hostile to euphemism, and his two-dozen-odd plays and handful of novels mirrored his thoughts on the social, sexual and political hypocrisies of his era—a dangerous transparency in the anti-intellectual times that accompanied Hitler’s rise. His 1931 comic drama Italian Night, in which two different parties are accidentally booked in a Bavarian pub on the same date—one a crowd of vociferous Fascists marking “German Day,” the other a group of left-wingers celebrating “Italian Night”—infuriated German authorities. Light-hearted as the play’s jabs may have seemed to Berlin theatergoers who didn’t pick up on its subtext, von Horváth’s rubber bullets made him vulnerable to return fire of a more serious kin
d. In 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor, the playwright’s work was banned in Germany, and he fled for safety to Vienna. There in 1938, as a man of wit and conscience and something of a visionary as well, he could not help but perceive the existential threat that brown-shirted thugs posed to Viennese café society. A man does not need to be a fervent believer to sense the absence of God, or to detect the presence of darker agency.

  The year before he left Vienna, von Horváth wrote the novel Youth Without God, which you now hold in your hands. It was published in Amsterdam in 1937, and in 1939, came out in English. Rich in parable, urgent in tone, and unusually earnest for the sly and mischievous von Horváth, the book takes the form of the diary of an unnamed teacher at a boys’ school, who gets in trouble when he refuses to endorse the Aryan worldview. One of his students, “N” (the teacher identifies his pupils by initial letter only) turns in an essay in which he has written that: “All niggers are dirty, cunning, and contemptible.” [this page] Although this sort of racial propaganda was ubiquitous during the corrupting epoch in which the book is set (the teacher recalls having heard similar slurs broadcast from loudspeakers in public places) he refuses to let it pass unreproved. “You shouldn’t have said that it doesn’t matter whether the negroes live or die,” he scolds the boy, as he hands back the essay. “They’re human too, you know.” [this page]

  This (apparently) inflammatory comment is promptly reported by N. to his father, a local baker, who storms into the school and accuses the teacher of having made “an outrageous remark” [this page] by voicing the “odious sentiment” that “negroes” are human. “It’s sabotage—sabotage of the Fatherland!” the father roars. The teacher has “spread the poisonous slime of your humanitarianism” to the students, he charges. N’s father takes the case to the school’s headmaster; a confrontation that both he and the teacher deem their “Philippi”—referring to the historic battle (42 B.C.) in which the armies of Mark Antony and Octavian avenged Caesar’s death by defeating the armies of his assassins, Brutus and Cassius. In the same spirit, the baker means to avenge the teacher’s supposed slight against the Führer; while the teacher tacitly accepts the role of Brutus. The headmaster averts conflict by letting the teacher off with a warning to be sensible and keep in mind “the times we live in.” [this page] It’s startling to realize how accurately, in 1937, von Horváth anticipated the extent of the moral rot that National Socialist ideology would foment in the young. His narrator senses that the only defense against the pervasive psychic poison is flight. The individual must act to protect and serve his own conscience, at whatever cost. Unfortunately, an entire population cannot flee en masse; and most people won’t make the attempt, however toxic their environment. The narrator does not say so; but the author knows this to be true; and the weight of this knowledge gives this deceptively ingenuous fable its surprising gravitas.

  As he develops his story, von Horváth follows the teacher and his class on a junior ROTC-style camping expedition, during which adults and children lose their compasses, both morally and literally, as violent and dishonorable deeds take place, testing the proposition that anyone can lead by example during a lawless era—imagine Lord of the Flies, with no lord, and with the addition of grown-ups who are just as selfish and wilful as Golding’s marooned children. “Everything is permissible?” the teacher marvels incredulously, shocked by the unsoundness of the Nazi philosophy. “Murder, robbery, arson, perjury—these are not only allowed, there simply can be no wrong in them if they are in the interest of the cause.” [this page] As he rues the sclerosis of his pupils’ humanity, he wonders, “What sort of a generation will theirs be? Hard? Or only brutal?” By now, everyone knows the answer to that question. Two millennia before, the Roman orator Cicero had deplored the character of his own countrymen, crying: “O tempora! O mores!” … and it bears remembering that he was beheaded for disloyalty to Caesar the year before Philippi; when there was as yet no Paris to offer him sanctuary. The crimes that unfold during the school camping expedition bring on a trial; but the question von Horváth implicitly poses, is this one: in an age of misrule, who is competent to stand in judgment?

  In nearly all of his other writing, von Horváth exhilarates readers with cold-splash satire, lip-smacking seediness (bathroom scenes, STDs, spying, lying, petty thievery, slovenliness), un-airbrushed portrayals of ordinary Volk, and brashly confident political observation. His slim but potent dagger of a novel, The Eternal Philistine, (1930) mocked the amorality of the late 1920s by sending up the shady dealings of a pair of skirt-chasing, money-grubbing cheats (a businessman and a journalist) who head to Barcelona World’s Fair, in search of easy women and easy living. But Youth Without God shows little of the irony that characterizes von Horváth’s usual style. The barbs in this book aren’t zingers or razor etchings of sordid characters, they pop out like snags of despair, catching and tearing at the European social fabric. The teacher in Youth Without God grieves at the obduracy of the boys in his charge. “Thinking is a process they hate,” he reflects. “They turn up their noses at human beings. They want to be machines—screws, knobs, belts, wheels—or better still, munitions—bombs, shells, shrapnel.” [this page] His revulsion at his pupils,’ colleagues’ and fellow citizens’ prevailing mindset is palpable; so is his sadness, and his sense of powerlessness. The conclusion one draws, reading this allegorical, prophetic work, is that in 1937, as the Anschluss approached, von Horváth correctly understood the virulence of the degradation, militarization and cruelty that were overtaking the countries around him and infecting the minds of young people, and could not laugh at it.

  In France, in the spring of 1938, the author, by some reports, was meeting with a filmmaker to discuss adapting Youth Without God for the movies. But on June 1, only a few months after he had left Vienna, he was killed. He did not die of an act of aggression by the Reich’s enforcers, he died in a freak accident on the boulevards of Paris, across from the Théâtre Marigny. A thunderstorm broke a limb off a tree, which fell on von Horváth, killing him. Had he survived that spate of Parisian bad weather, and had the Third Reich come to a less protracted and horrific end, it’s tempting to ask if he might have altered the screenplay of his novel; if he might have made it less raw, less portentous, more satirical, more in the mood of his other work. In the event, though, he did not survive; and the corrosion of national character he foresaw in his novel, warning against the advent of days when “the souls of men, my friend, will become as rigid as the face of a fish” was worse than any seer could have predicted.

  One of the most moving passages in all of literature appears in the Aeneid, which Virgil wrote in the decades immediately after the Battle of Philippi—that contest that serves as such a crucial touchpoint in Youth Without God. Reading von Horváth’s book summons recollections of Virgil’s account of the horrific end of Priam, that venerable, once mighty king of Troy. Priam has seen his city invaded, his people ravaged, and his court overrun by a brutal army. In his last minutes of life, frail but still courageous, he buckles on a younger man’s suit of armor and rushes at the massed foe. But in front of his eyes, the pitiless soldier Pyrrhus stabs Priam’s young son Polites to death. In grief and outrage, the king cries out (in the Robert Fitzgerald translation):

  “ ‘For what you’ve done, for what you’ve dared,’ he said, ‘If there is care in heaven for atrocity, May the gods render fitting thanks, reward you / As you deserve. You forced me to look on / At the destruction of my son: defiled / A father’s eyes with death.’ ”

  After Priam throws his spear at the warrior and misses, Pyrrhus drags him by the hair to an altar to Zeus, where he plunges his sword into his body, up to the hilt. What will become of the dead king? Will Priam posthumously receive the honors due him? No. “On the distant shore / The vast trunk headless lies without a name.”

  The force of these lines comes from their two-part encapsulation of the worst-case-scenario of the before-and-after consequences of living in a godless age. No divine justice
will come: not before death, and not after it; not for the old, and not for the young. This was the worst-case-scenario that Europe faced in 1937, when Youth Without God was composed.

  Anyone who opens this book expecting to find von Horváth’s customary jaded breeziness will be struck rather by abundant Classical and religious allusions: to Philippi (of course); to the Roman Empire; to Julius Caesar; [this page] and to Jesus Christ [this page passim] himself. Brooding on the fall of the Roman Empire, thinking of his own present-day, von Horváth’s teacher envisions: “new hordes, new peoples. Arming, arming, waiting.” [this page] Despite the simplicity of his journal entries, the homiletic quality of his conversations and the chalky breath of the schoolroom; and notwithstanding the Boy’s Own set dressing of camp and tents and sleeping bags; the teacher’s diary quite intentionally, and presciently, exudes the aura of Classical tragedy.

  The same preoccupation that haunts the players in the Aeneid—the realization that the Greco-Roman gods, during the prolonged moment of Virgil’s tale, not only have no care for atrocity, but often fuel it (particularly spiteful Juno), haunts von Horváth’s teacher in the Christian era. If Virgil’s predecessor Homer can be believed, men of earlier times had confidence that the gods took an interest in their fortunes. Virgil’s gods showed less benevolence. Aeneas and his entourage, vanquished and adrift, could not benefit from the consolation that fortified Odysseus, because the gods were not on their side and were not just; they were capricious, even malicious. The misery of the refugees on their hard-won road to Rome—their excruciating losses, arduous travels, and heaped misfortunes—is compounded by their sense of abandonment. Erratic behavior on Olympus had queered their fates and confounded the rules by which they lived; making their survival precarious, and their suffering meaningless—salved only by the far-off promise of the new city they will eventually establish. This was precisely the plight in which Ödön von Horváth found himself and his continent in 1937; and the plight that motivates the book he wrote in his last year of life. Divinity had fled; and no Rome beckoned on the horizon as excuse or incentive.