Youth Without God (2 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” [
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] 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.” [
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] 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.” [
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] 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.” [
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] 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; [
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] and to Jesus Christ [
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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.” [
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] 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.

Two thousand years after the demise of Virgil and the Greco-Roman pantheon, and more than a century after Nietzsche declared in
The Gay Science
that “God is dead,” and that, moreover, “we have killed him;” the mystery of the role that God plays—or does not play—in human affairs continues to compel authors, theologians, readers, and indeed, most thinking people. It’s safe to say that the rumor of God’s death that Nietzsche started 130 years ago
has been exaggerated. And yet, in the 21
^st
century, the questions that the philosopher raised on the heels of his inflammatory proclamation remain unanswered: “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” and “What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”

These questions of solace, guilt and atonement stung even more sharply in the last century during Hitler’s murderous dictatorship, which acquired its full strength after von Horváth was dead, and expired, ignominiously, less than a decade afterwards. If God exists, the atheist taunts, and the boulevardier asks with regretful politesse: how could he permit infernal states like the Third Reich to arise? In
Youth Without God
, von Horváth puts one possible answer in the words of a disgraced priest, [
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] who explains to the demoralized narrator that the state “is a necessity of nature, and it is willed by God.” But what if the state is a bad state; what if its structure collapses? the teacher presses. “Very often such a collapse is the will of God,” the priest responds. He adds, “God is the most terrible thing in the world.” [
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]

In
Youth Without God
, with unique sincerity and unique power, von Horváth suggests that men who play God are more terrible still.

YOUTH WITHOUT GOD

THERE WERE FLOWERS ON MY TABLE. BEAUTIFUL. A present from my landlady, kindly old soul: a birthday present.

But I needed to use the table, and I pushed the flowers aside, together with the letter from my people. “For your thirty-fourth birthday,” my mother wrote, “I send you the very best wishes, my dear child. May Almighty God bring you health, luck, and happiness.” And my father: “For your thirty-fourth birthday, my dear boy, I wish you the very best. Almighty God give you luck, health, and happiness.”

Well, luck will always come in useful, I thought—and thank your stars you’ve got your health into the bargain. Touch wood. But happiness? No, happiness I’ve missed. No one, really, is happy.

I sat down at my table and uncorked my bottle of red ink: it got onto my fingers and I was annoyed. Somebody ought to invent an ink which would put an end to stained fingers …

No, I can’t call myself a happy man.

Don’t be so silly, I said to myself. You’ve got a safe job
with a pension at the end of it. Isn’t that something in these days, when nobody knows what to-morrow holds? How many fellows would almost give an arm to be in your shoes? For what a tiny percentage of candidates for the teaching profession succeed in getting good posts in the end! Be thankful that your post is in a county high school, where you can grow old and senile without a moment of real worry. Why, you might live to be a hundred—the oldest inhabitant of the Fatherland! Then, on your birthday, you’d have your photo in the illustrated newspapers. “He is still in possession of all his faculties,” you would read beneath it. That’s where the pension would come in! Think it over, and count your blessings.

I did: and I began working.

Twenty-six blue copy-books lay before me—I’ve twenty-six boys in my charge, fourteen-year-olds; for yesterday’s geography lesson they wrote me an essay. Geography and history are my subjects.