Post-1918 Austrian literature is marked by radical changes caused by the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. For many Austrian authors the life thus broke into two halves, the period before the First World War and the time after. The authors such as Joseph Roth or Ödön von Horváth remain landless in a double sense, temporally but – as the authors who work in a culturally foreign territory of the Weimar Republic – also spatially. It is in this context that the dramatic oeuvre of the „old Austrian“ author Ödön von Horváth acquires a special role. His heterogeneous origin and polyphony derived from it turn him into an exceedingly exceptional observer of the world of crisis in Germany and Austria after 1918. Wolfgang Müller-Funk\u27s work does not pretend to offer a final interpretation of the author\u27s plays in the 1920s and the 1930s but is understood as a proposal for reading. The themes and motifs such as empathy, alienation in the world, ambivalence, inflation and the loss of footing, a new constellation of the sexes, cold objectivity and preference for the median, half-public spaces present high points that mark the atmosphere and the structure of Horváth\u27s works. In a manner of speaking, this oeuvre, based on psychoanalysis among others, can be understood as a critical model opposed to Brecht\u27s programmatic anti-psychological epic theater. Horváth\u27s „folk pieces“ aim at revealing the dark and subconscious aspects of the human
