Youth Without God: Based on the Novel

(Paperback, Main)

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The old man started to talk about the trial. He blamed everyone involved, including the teacher, i.e. me. In his view the root cause of the problem was that everybody involved - teachers, parents, boys - behaved as if God no longer existed.

A schoolteacher is denounced and accused of 'sabotage of the Fatherland' when he reprimands a student for making a racist remark. The class petition against him. A murder follows. During the trial, the teacher decides to risk everything by telling the truth.

Published in 1937, Jugend Ohne Gott is the penultimate novel by dn von Horvth. It was judged by Thomas Mann to be the best novel of recent years. This powerful evocation of everyday life in the shadow of fascism also garnered praise from Hermann Hesse, Franz Werfel and Joseph Roth, who called Horvth 'the most clear-sighted chronicler of his age'.

Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Youth Without God was commissioned by and performed in Vienna at the Theater in der Josefstadt in 2009. On its tenth anniversary, the play receives its UK premiere at The Coronet Theatre, London.

Author Bio

Christopher Hampton was born in the Azores in 1946. He wrote his first play, When Did You Last See My Mother at the age of eighteen. Since then, his plays have included The Philanthropist, Savages, Tales from Hollywood, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, White Chameleon, The Talking Cure and Appomattox. He has translated plays by Ibsen, Molire, von Horvth, Chekhov, Florian Zeller (including The Father), Daniel Kehlman and Yasmina Reza (including Art and Life x 3). Musicals include Sunset Boulevard and Stephen Ward, both with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black. His television work includes adaptations of The History Man and Hotel du Lac. His screenplays include The Honorary Consul, The Good Father, Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, Total Eclipse, The Quiet American, Carrington, The Secret Agent and Imagining Argentina, the last three of which he also directed, and A Dangerous Method, based on his play The Talking Cure. Appomattox was first presented on the McGuire Proscenium Stage of the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, USA, in September 2012 as the centrepiece of a major retrospective of his plays and films. It was subsequently turned into an opera by Philip Glass and premiered at the Kennedy Center, Washington in November 2014.