How they would love to perish on some battlefield! The name on a war memorial is the dream of their adolescence. She is brutal, emotionally cold, and immoral, that 'youth without God' which Ödön von Horváth (1901-1938) describes through his first-person narrator, a nameless teacher. Embedded in the story of a murder, Horváth skillfully paints a disturbingly vivid picture of a thoughtless, ideologically blinded youth at the beginning of the Nazi regime. The scenically composed novel was first published in 1937 in Amsterdam and was quickly translated into eight other languages shortly thereafter. Despite the ban imposed by the National Socialists in 1938, it rapidly made its author internationally known.