Ödön von Horváth was in his folk play, which premiered in 1931 Stories from the Vienna Forest quite explicit about ideas of violence against women. “Take off the braincase” or “stab it,” it says. The term femicide didn’t exist yet, but with everything that happens to young Marianne in the environment of her groom, her child’s father or her father in the “quiet street in the eighth district”, the Austro-Hungarian writer describes exactly that: the firmly anchored, habitual misogyny, reinforced by the threatening fascism.
