A child of our time

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A child of our time is a novel by Ödön von Horváth . It was published in 1938 , shortly after the author's death. The book tells the story of a soldier in a country with dictatorial leaders .

action

The first-person narrator, a soldier who remains anonymous, is the main character of the novel; he was born in 1917 . His first memory is the death of his mother. He is unemployed and moves out with his father because of ideological differences. Now he has to beg and is dependent on welfare. His hatred of his father's beautiful youth and the comfortable life of others increased, and he identified more and more with views of National Socialism , namely that the individual is no good, and only the national body counts. The war that he glorifies gives him hope, a disillusioned, selfish, outrageous, radical and no longer believer. He wants to join the military because he believes he is strong in uniform and is no longer alone in the troops. When he is recruited , a dream comes true for him. He does not think about the correctness of his deeds, he says "Thinking brings on stupid thoughts".

One day the soldier sees a young woman at the fair and falls in love with her. He has no opportunity to get to know her because he has to fight as a so-called "volunteer" in a lightning attack on a small country. His captain is fed up with his troops' many war crimes and runs to his death in battle. The soldier wants to save him and is injured in the arm. He comes to the hospital and begins to think. Unable to do military service , he returns to his father, whom he only uses. The woman from the fair is now in jail for having aborted her child in hopelessness , because the fair does not tolerate pregnant employees. When the soldier in search of her finds out about this, his hatred and doubts about the leaders and the people's body increase. Hateful he murders the accountant at the fair. Two days later he wanders through the night and sees the absurdity of the war and the Nazi thoughts , but denies his own guilt. In the snowstorm, the soldier freezes to death on a bench.

Language and storytelling

Horváth tells the story in the form of an intradiegetic first-person narrator . Time- lapse storytelling alternates with time- lengthening narration again and again . A few times there are jumps in time followed by flashbacks . Horváth clarifies exciting and hectic scenes with shorter sentences and lines. The language of history is the sophisticated colloquial language and the vocabulary of everyday Nazi life .

Historical background

With the novel , which was banned by the Nazis , Horváth made obvious, violent criticism of Germany under Adolf Hitler - even though the place of the action is not revealed at all. The background for writing A Child of Our Time was the occupation of the Rhineland and the support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War by Hitler's troops . Horváth wants to educate about the dangers and crimes of National Socialism ; warn not to blindly follow the hollow sayings and phrases and to act conscientiously. In addition, he very successfully lets you feel the negative mood of the time and shows its consequences. The repeated motif of getting colder stands for the social conditions.

The original manuscript of the novel has been preserved and is in the literary archive of the Austrian National Library .

Film adaptations

In 2003 , Ödön von Horváth's novel by Fabrice Cazeneuve was filmed for French television under the title Un fils de notre temps (German title: A child of our time ) . The Belgian actor Jérémie Renier played the leading role as a young soldier .

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