Ein Sklavenball. Pompeji

by Ödön von Horváth, Martin Vejvar (Editor)

The farce A Slaves Ball and Pompeii (1937), the comedy developed from it, are the two last dramas completed by Odon von Horvath. Based on the comedies of Plautus and well received by Horvath s contemporaries, they were later overshadowed by his major folk plays. For the first time, the edition fully presents the complex text genesis of these two plays and reveals the intertextual traces of Horvath s reading of Plautus."

1616 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 14, 2015

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."