Tales from the Vienna Woods (German: Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, 1931) is a play by Austro-Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth.
Before the première, the German writer and playwright, Carl Zuckmayer nominated the play for the Kleist Prize, which it won, the most significant literary award of the Weimar Republic.
It is a bitter satire about the mendacity and brutality of the petite-bourgeoisie, named ironically after the Vienna Woods near the Austrian capital that are so idealised in the waltz.
In the play, Viennese Gemütlichkeit or "coziness" becomes a hollow phrase; the tragic, brutal story of the sweet girl Marianne and the deeply conventional butcher Oskar reflects the hardships and anxieties of the late 1920s during the global economic crisis.
[8] Christopher Hampton, who had provided the English translation of the play for Maximilian Schell's London production of January 1977,[9] used von Horváth as a character in his 1983 play Tales from Hollywood to draw parallels between Austrian society of the 1930s, as depicted in von Horváth's original work, and Hollywood's treatment of film-makers escaping from European fascism to find work in the American entertainment industry.