Horvath's Renewal of the Folk Play and the Decline of the Weimar Republic

Abstract

The folk plays of Odon von Horvaith (1901-1938) have attracted little attention in England and America. Whereas his novels A Child of Our Time and Youth Without God were translated into English and published in 1938/ 1939, just a few years after their completion, his seventeen plays have been virtually neglected. Only Sladek and Tales from the Vienna Woods have been translated and produced in English. This gap in reception is due primarily to the nature of the plays themselves: they resist translation into other languages.' As critically revived folk plays, they tend to destory the structural features of this traditional Austrian-German genre and rely heavily on the difference between the de-mystified reality which they expose and the expectations of sanguine and spirited entertainment aroused by the term folk play. Moreover, translation is made difficult by the unique treatment of language in Horvath's plays which do not present consciously delineated conflicts of interests between the various personae; rather, they stand or fall with the dialogue (IV, p. 663).2 It is precisely through the loss of their own unique language that the petty bourgeois characters express their helplessness and fall in social class or ddclassement. They chatter in a standard high German that is tinged by dialect and then betrayed by an occasional relapse into the dialect as an estranged and dispossessed language. Despite all these linguistic problems the widely acclaimed performance of Tales from the Vienna Woods (1976) in London offers some hope