Riviera, have lunch in Baden-Baden, fall asleep in California and wake up in Paris; how she would sit unhappily in opera boxes, dance at carnival, and scorn champagne in an exceedingly unhappy manner. And she kept getting more and more unhappy because she did not want to give herself to the elegant, young son of a millionaire who adored her in a discreetly sensuous way. So there was nothing left for her to do but to take to the water, which she then did in the Ligurian Sea. They recovered her unhappy body in Genoa. All of her maids, lackeys, and chauffeurs were very unhappy.
It was a very tragic film and had just one funny episode. That is, the millionairess had a lady’s maid. And one time this lady’s maid secretly put on her mistress’s “grand” evening gown and went out on the town with one of the chauffeurs in a “grand” fashion. Only the chauffeur did not exactly know howthe “grand” world held a knife and fork, and so both of them were exposed as attendants and then shown out of the posh restaurant. One of the guests even gave the chauffeur a good slap in the face, and the unhappy millionairess fired her lady’s maid on the spot. The lady’s maid bawled and the chauffeur’s face was not exactly clever either. It was very funny.
Horváth described his purpose in writing as “to be able to portray once again the gigantic struggle between the individual and society, this eternal battle with no peaceful outcome—during which the individual can at best enjoy a few moments of the illusion of ceasefire.” His truth, and the fury that followed, was provoked by a genuine care and concern for the individual. Observing a photograph of a happy family, Herr Reithofer thinks:
… that it might be nice sometimes to be able to call such a family his own. He, too, would sit in the middle and have a beard and children because without children people would die out, and there’s really something sad about dying out, even if you don’t have any legal claim to German unemployment benefits as an Austrian citizen.
“Is it funny?” your friends will ask.
“It’s not
funny
,” you’ll reply. “It’s social commentary.”
Then quote Alfred Kazin:
“Horváth … 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.”
I have not, by the way, forgotten about Beckett.
3. THE AUTHOR FLED FROM THE NAZIS.
There is no single greater guarantor of literary greatness than for an author to have, at some point, fled from the Third Reich. Sadly, though, there are no more Nazis from whom to flee, and you can see how few modern writers, consequently, are considered great. If David Sedaris had fled from Buchenwald instead of Raleigh, North Carolina, he would be seen as much more than just a successful humorist.
Through the twisted prism of a dark and gallows humor, Mr. Sedaris, a survivor of the death camps, turns his existential search for meaning into a something something something
. After all, Beckett (there he is) fled from the Nazis, and look how his career turned out. Beckett, incidentally, was hilariously funny; fortunately for him, though, he looked like a corpse, plus he frowned a lot, so everyone decided he was very serious (“My plays,” he was forced to remind a
Godot
producer, “should not be ponderous”).
Horváth, however, did more than just flee the Nazis; he openly provoked them. It’s all well and good for me to make jokes about Nazis, because it’s 2011 and I’m a pussy. But Horváth wrote in the early 1930s, in Berlin, and the Nazis were already a powerful and ominous presence. You did not fuck with them. The Brownshirts were not big fans of Horváth’s work, and it’s easy to see why. Here is Horváth at his Horváthian best, laying bare the