It is a widespread bad habit to read old works especially to see if they are us just today have something to say. Just today. Theater programs live from these two words. What Schiller just today has to say … so seems Woyzeck just today of particular importance … can Shakespeare’s “Lear” just today again much to say. Absurd. As if you couldn’t be interested in a time that no longer exists. That is precisely why possibly. It’s exciting enough.
And yet this stupid search for what you already know is of course a lot of fun. “The eternal philistine”, Ödön von Horváth’s first (and only “edifying”) book, can, for example, seem very contemporary. The novel was published in 1930 and is about a not particularly likeable Munich resident, Alfons Kobler, who lives on Schellingstrasse, who is going on a trip to Europe. He dreams of an economically united Europe, a “pan-Europe”, modeled on the USA. Incidentally, he can do without England. (In Poland too.)
The weather in the novel set in 1929 is strange, unlike in the past – “Even the Gulf Stream is no longer in order, one heard in Munich.”
And then Horváth also uses the adjective “so-called”, which is overused by today’s columnists. Two gentlemen remain “unharmed as if by a so-called miracle” in an accident. That sounds like typed last night!
Otherwise the novel starts brilliantly, then does not hold the level continuously, but there are always glamorous highlights. When, for example, a bunch of differently uniformed Italians board the train at the Brenner Pass to check the passports in an authoritarian and completely irrational way. Or as 20,000 spectators in an arena in Barcelona witness how a small black Andalusian bull is impaled perfectly.
The so-called radio play version from 2015 is really good, by the way: It is freely accessible as a BR podcast on the Internet, director: Bernadette Sonnenbichler, Peter Simonischek speaks among others.
Further episodes of the column “Nothing new” do you think …? Find here.