Youth Without God

By Ödön von Horváth and Liesl Schillinger

Written in exile while in flight from the Nazis, this dark, bizarre evocation of everyday life under fascism is available for the first time in thirty years.
 
This last book by Ödön von Horváth, one of the 20th-century’s great but forgotten writers, is a dark fable about guilt, fate, and the individual conscience.

An unnamed narrator in an unnamed country is a schoolteacher with “a safe job with a pension at the end of it.” But, when he reprimands a student for a racist comment, he is accused of “sabotage of the Fatherland,” and his students revolt. A murder follows, and the teacher must face his role in it, even if it costs him everything.
 
Horváth’s book both points to its immediate context—the brutalizing conformity of a totalitarian state, the emptiness of faith in the time of the National Socialists—and beyond, to the struggles of individuals everywhere against societies that offer material security in exchange for the abandonment of one’s convictions. Reminiscent of Camus’ The Stranger in its themes and its style, Youth Without God portrays a world of individual ruthlessness and collective numbness to the appeals of faith or morality.
 
And yet, a commitment to the truth lifts the teacher and a small band of like-minded students out of this deepening abyss. It’s a reminder that such commitment did exist in those troubled times—indeed, they’re what led the author to flee Germany, first for Austria, and then France, where he met his death in a tragic accident, just two years after the publication of Youth Without God. Long out of print, this new edition resurrects a bracing and still-disturbing vision. 

“Horváth was telling the truth. Furiously.” —Shalom Auslander

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612191201

Reviews for Youth Without God

[greeniezona · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had never heard of Horvath before this year, and now this is the second book I've read by him? I'm totally blaming Neversink Library.

So yes, this is another selection from Neversink LIbrary at Melville House Books. I tell you, their website is dangerous. Six of the books I've read this year were published by them, five of which I bought (one was from the library), and I have at least one more on my shelves and at least two on back-order. (I'm afraid if I check on the back-orders, I'll end up buying five more books, so it's best just to wait.)

Okay, so I loved this one. Much more accessible than The Eternal Philistine, this is a dark, dark story, even without the seedy satire. Youth WIthout God reads more like classic morality tales from Kafka and Camus. It is all the more impressive for its depiction of the heartlessness of the rising Nazi state when one is reminded that it was written before either Germany's annexation of Austria or its invasion of Poland. It's a place where the cruelty of schoolchildren isn't corrected, but encouraged as long as it is in the direction of the scapegoats of the state. Opinions contrary to official propaganda are suppressed and erased. Individual morality and conscience disappear. So where is there room for God?

It would be easy to read this story as simplistic and shallow, because it is so accessible. But there is a lot going on here just under the surface. Mediations on culpability, conviction and man's capacity for evil. A rewarding, but disturbing read.

[elmyra_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I may love my Austrian passports for this but I utterly failed to connect with this book. Bechdel: Pass (borderline).

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Falls squarely into the "should have cut the first 50 pages" basket. The first few chapters contain some fine polemic ("someone should invent a weapon that nullifies other weapons"), but the book really gets going once our narrator stops looking outward, and starts looking at himself. Despite the fascism, the anomy, the picture of disgusting youth (still relevant), the murder, and the turpitude of the narrator, this is ultimately a kind of farcical comedy: the narrator confesses to his wrongdoing, and that confession itself leads, after some time, to a kind of justice. As befits a man who fled the Nazis to Paris but was killed by a falling tree limb in 1939, the justice is bloody and discomforting, but justice nonetheless. The narrator himself enters a life of penitence, which will make very many contemporary readers very uncomfortable, and not in the silly "art must make us uncomfortable" way--instead, in the "life makes me rather too uncomfortable" way.