"Vienna Forest Tales" is a biting portrait of the petty-bourgeois mentality in a small-town environment: here everything is cozy and comfortable, forgetful and illusory. The play talks about the need to resist narrow, stagnant thinking. Resistance is born of otherness. A young woman looking for her life path, faced with the environment around her, tries to break free from it. We follow her fate throughout the play, until the tragic ending. The basis of Horváth's dramaturgy is the bitter satire of the depicted society. The very title of the play sounds satirical, for which the name of the particularly popular waltz "Vienna Forest Tales" by Johann Strauss was chosen.
It is especially ironic that the first Humanist Manifesto (an enlightened and positive view of human cooperation, ethical and religious progress) was published in the same year that Adolf Hitler took power and became Chancellor of Nazi Germany. Two years earlier, in 1931, Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Forest premiered in Berlin. The show was like an awkward artistic prophecy. This historical European paradox of exalting humanism while at the same time allowing fascism to take root is something we cannot forget.

*using herbal cigarettes without tobacco and nicotine.