We’ve had more terrible rain here in Somerset… luckily we haven’t been flooded, but I think constantly about the poor folk who have suffered so and are still suffering so at the hands of Hurricane Sandy.
Driving home from my Thursday class I went through a lot of standing water on the roads, and as I ploughed through causing waves in all directions, I was listening to Night Waves, a really excellent programme on BBC Radio Three.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp43
Night Waves is a discussion programme which covers all sorts of topics, for example tonight there were items on Frank Auerbach, and talks about surveillance as discussed by Zygmunt Bauman and the plays and translations of Christopher Hampton. Hampton seems a most interesting person, he was fascinating on the subject of writing plays translating works from German and much more. Hampton himself was in the studio and talked about Ödön von Horváth. Who, you ask? Surely you’ve heard of Ödön von Horváth? Really? You haven’t? Shame on you…. except obviously I hadn’t heard of him either!
Ödön von Horváth was born as Edmund Josef von Horváth in what is now Croatia in 1901. His family was Hungarian and they returned to Hungary where he was educated – it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then and the family lived in Budapest. He became a writer and eventually moved to Berlin, having learned German at high school. With the rise of the Nazis he moved to Paris and there, tragically, he was killed on the Champs d’Élysées…. by a falling tree. Tragic, he was thirty-seven…
The novel which was discussed on Night Waves was ‘Jugend ohne Gott’, published in 1938 , the English translation titled ‘The Age of the Fish’. He wrote to warn of the rise of Fascism, and the dangers of the Nazism and the particular dangers to young people. It sounded fascinating, and in many ways so contemporary… I must seek it out and read it! Available for about £5, apparently!
See what happens when you drive through a flood?
Lois Elsden 
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