Ödön von Horváth

Ödön von Horváth (born in Sušak, near Rijeka, in 1901; died in Paris in 1938) was a playwright and novelist who wrote in German, though his family was of Hungarian origin and he is often counted among Hungarian-born writers. He went by the Hungarian form of his name, Ödön von Horváth, and he is regarded as one of the most admired writers of his generation before his early death. His work belongs to the interwar years and is known for its sharp criticism of fascism and of the petty bourgeoisie of Central Europe.

The eldest son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, he grew up between Budapest, Pressburg and Vienna, schooled first in Hungarian and later in German. His father was ennobled in 1909, which gave the family the 'von' in its name, and was posted to Munich; Ödön joined his parents in Bavaria in 1913. He studied at the University of Munich without taking a degree, and began writing as a student in 1920. He later lived in Berlin, Salzburg and Murnau am Staffelsee in Upper Bavaria.

His stage successes came with socially engaged and sentimental plays such as Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, which won him the Kleist Prize in 1931, shared with Erik Reger. His characters are ordinary people, clerks, soldiers and small-town shopkeepers, seen with an irony that reveals how history presses on their lives. When the Nazis took power in 1933 he moved to Vienna, and after the annexation of Austria in 1938 he settled in Paris.

He was killed in June 1938 during a thunderstorm on the Champs-Élysées, when a falling tree branch struck him. He was buried in the Saint-Ouen Cemetery, and in 1988 his remains were moved to Vienna. His legacy lives on mainly in German-language theatre and in novels such as Jugend ohne Gott, still read as a portrait of the years that led to the Nazi era.