Don Juan Comes Back from the War / Figaro Gets Divorced

by Ödön von Horváth

Don Juan Comes Back from the War, Figaro Gets Divorced

Two modern classics by Austrian dramatist, Ödön von Horváth. Hampton's Don Juan Comes Back from the War was first performed at the Royal National Theatre. Figaro Gets Divorced, in which an aristocratic couple and their two servants are on the run from a revolution, premiered at London's Gate Theatre.

Genres: Plays

164 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1991

About the author

Ödön von Horváth was a German-writing, Austro-Hungarian-born, playwright and novelist. Important topics in Horváth's works were popular culture, politics and history. He especially tried to warn of the dawn of fascism and its dangers. Among Horváth's most enduringly popular works, Jugend ohne Gott describes the youth in Nazi Germany from a disgruntled teacher's point of view, who, himself at first an opportunist, is helpless against the racist and militaristic Nazi propaganda that his pupils are subjected to and that dehumanizes them and, at last, loses his job but gains his identity.

Having always lived in fear of being struck by lightning, in Paris Horváth was hit by a falling branch and killed during a thunderstorm on the Champs-Élysées, opposite the Théâtre Marigny.

His famous quote:

"If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg [Bratislava], Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport, but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical mix of old Austria-Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary; my mother tongue is German."