Ödön von Horváth | |
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Von Horváth in 1919
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Born |
Edmund Josef von Horváth December 9, 1901 Sušak, Rijeka, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia) |
Died | June 1, 1938 Paris, France |
(aged 36)
Occupation | playwright and novelist |
Edmund Josef von Horváth (9 December 1901 Sušak, Rijeka, then in Austria–Hungary, now in Croatia – 1 June 1938 Paris) was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist. He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.
Horváth was the oldest son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat of Hungarian origin from Slavonia, Edmund (Ödön) Josef Horvát, and Maria Lulu Hermine (Prehnal) Horvát, who was from an Austro-Hungarian military family.
From 1908 he attended elementary school in Budapest and later the Rákóczianum, where he was educated in Hungarian. In 1909, his father was ennobled (indicated in German by the preposition "von", and in Hungarian by an additional "h" at the end of the last name) and assigned to Munich, but Ödön and his mother did not accompany him. The young Horváth went to high school in Bratislava and Vienna, where he was taught German – this not being his native tongue – beginning in 1913, and where he also earned his Matura (high school diploma), before finally re-joining his parents at Murnau, and, from 1919, studying at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
He started writing as a student, from 1920. Quitting university without a degree in early 1922, he moved to Berlin. Later, he lived in Salzburg and Murnau am Staffelsee in Upper Bavaria. In 1931, he was awarded, along with Erik Reger, the Kleist Prize. In 1933, at the beginning of the Nazi regime in Germany, he relocated to Vienna.