Possible Answers in the Year Marking the 125th Anniversary of Ödön von Horváth's Birth
Am I Really That Different?
Possible Answers in the Year Marking the 125th Anniversary of Ödön von Horváth’s Birth
Lecture by Dr. Dieter Kirsch
“Actually, I’m completely different—I just rarely get the chance to be that way.” This line comes from Ödön von Horváth, and it applies to many of his characters—ordinary people who speak like they’re in a movie and live like they do in everyday life. In 2026, the playwright would have turned 125. An evening at the Bäderbibliothek takes the title question at face value.
On October 24, 1931, Horváth received the Kleist Prize, the most important literary award of the Weimar Republic. A few days later, the feared critic Alfred Kerr saw *Tales from the Vienna Woods* at the Deutsches Theater and wrote in the *Berliner Tageblatt* of a “power of the highest order.” Seven years later, Horváth was dead: On June 1, 1938, a storm in Paris uprooted a chestnut tree on the Champs-Élysées, which struck and killed him. He was 37—an author with a Hungarian passport who wrote in German and saw himself as a cosmopolitan.
Dr. Dieter Kirsch—a Germanist, longtime director of a Goethe-Institut, and co-author of the graphic novel biography of Horváth (Allitera Verlag)—tells the story of this short life through 95 black-and-white illustrated stories. “Be sincere, know yourselves,” Horváth once urged. The question in the title is one the evening poses back to its audience.
Saturday, September 5, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Bäderbibliothek Graal-Müritz, Fritz-Reuter-Straße 17
Admission: €6. Only 25 seats available. Tickets available at Haus des Gastes, Rostocker Straße 3, Tel. 038206 7030.
Organizer: Tourismus- und Kur GmbH Graal-Müritz
