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 Se- mitic.” 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.
