“They preach the gospel the extermination of the neighbor. This is a very alluring gospel at a time when there are too many people and not enough work.” It is a bleak picture of Vienna and life in general in 1932 that the Jewish professor Frey, a character in Maria Lazar’s novel ” Life forbidden!”, for his politically astonishingly naïve guest, Ernst von Ufermann.
These warning words by Professor Frey, found in a novel that appeared in London in 1934 but was only published in German in 2020, can hardly be denied prophetic power today. Although, steered by happier coincidences, some things could have turned out differently. Only from historical distance does history prove so adamantly immutable and so deceptively clear. But face to face with events, uncomfortable truths often remain hidden behind lies for a long time – and for less interested people they may actually be invisible for the rest of their lives.
Published in German for the first time in 2020 by the Viennese publishing house “The forgotten book”: Lazar’s novel “Leben forbidden!”
– © DVB
In the scene mentioned, too, an essential point remains in the dark. Because Ernst von Ufermann, until recently a banker in Berlin, was introduced to Professor Frey under a false name when he met him a few days ago. And although he has now sought out Frey to reveal his true identity to him and ask him for advice, he does not succeed. Why? Because he fears the consequences of an embarrassing confession – being practically bankrupt and therefore on shady paths. And since he lacks the courage to face the uncomfortable truth and Frey the necessary curiosity about his immediate counterpart, both miss an opportunity to give their lives a saving turn in this fleeting encounter.
Maria Lazar, born in Vienna in 1895 into a middle-class family of Jewish origin, gave her life a saving twist in 1933 by emigrating to Denmark together with her daughter Judith – and together with Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel and their children. In 1939, because of the approaching Germans, she fled to Sweden and spent the last years of her life in Stockholm. She didn’t want to go back to Austria. Two of her sisters were deported from Vienna to the Maly Trostenets death camp in Belarus in 1942 and murdered.
Who was Maria Lazar, who worked in Vienna as an author, journalist and translator from the 1920s and became known internationally in the 1930s under the pseudonym Esther Grenen, at least for a short time? And why was her literary work forgotten even before her tragically early death on March 30, 1948?
Paradoxical as this may sound, it is perhaps still too early for answers to all these questions. Because since 2014 from the Wiener Verlag The Forgotten Book (DVB) The rediscovery of Maria Lazar, which was driven and accompanied by the applause of the large arts pages, has republished her novels “The Poisoning”, “The Natives of Maria Blood” (a stage version of which was already shown in the Academy Theater this year) and “Leben forbidden!” may just have started. The announced first publication of another novel (“Viermal ICH”) should take place on April 6th.
What is certain, if one follows the profound reports of the Germanist Johann Sonnleitner about Maria Lazar (who wrote afterwords for all her novels), is that her life has so far only been documented incompletely (although it would be interesting enough for a yet to come biography. Just that Maria Lazar temporarily housed parts of Walter Benjamin’s library in Danish exile suggests this conclusion).
Maria Lazar grew up in the first district of Vienna as the youngest of eight siblings, some of whom made a name for themselves. Lazargasse is named after her brother Erwin, a psychiatrist for children and adolescents; her sister Auguste becomes a children’s book author (and one of the founders of socialist children’s and youth literature in Germany). She herself attended Eugenie Schwarzwald’s famous school, where Adolf Loos and Oskar Kokoschka taught, among others, and where prominent writers such as Egon Friedell, Peter Altenberg and Elias Canetti frequented.
critical scale
It was in this milieu that Maria Lazar’s critical standards emerged, her “hatred of the mendacity of bourgeois society” and her lifelong untamable “urge for absolute personal freedom” (quotes from her sister Auguste). Nevertheless, she marries Frank Wedekind’s son, Friedrich Strindberg, and becomes a mother (the marriage does not last long, however).
However, she gave up her studies – philosophy and history – and devoted herself entirely to literature and journalism. From 1922 to 1933 she wrote articles for the left-liberal newspaper “Der Tag”, which also counted Alfred Polgar, Robert Musil and Joseph Roth among its authors, and worked as a translator into German, including works by EA Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald . And she writes for the stage: Lazar’s one-act play “The Executioner” was performed as early as 1921 – directed by the later film director GW Pabst.
Speaking of cinema: This comes up again and again in Maria Lazar’s time-critical novels. People flock to the cinema instead of to public libraries, by no means just the uneducated, to let their heads be turned thoroughly, mostly by kitschy romances – which Maria Lazar regularly gleefully boils down to their ridiculous content.
In addition, cinemas are places where people meet who would hardly cross paths elsewhere. Ernst von Ufermann (envied resident of a villa with domestic servants, owner of a car with a chauffeur and husband of a beautiful wife) accidentally meets a prostitute in the cinema on the day he misses his flight to Frankfurt and thus finds himself in a predicament . And no sooner has she reluctantly offered shelter to the gentleman in the fine thread, who is only interested in a place to stay for the night, than she is able, thanks to her underworld contacts, to offer him a very lucrative job: Ufermann is to come in by train under a false name Bring a parcel to Vienna. And what does Ufermann do? He’s cocky enough to ignore the seriousness of the situation – and accepts the job.
Does the plot now take off into the fantastic? It just seems so. In fact, Maria Lazar confidently keeps track of all risky narrative maneuvers, and her entire story, down to the last detail, is rooted in reality. (Quite similar to Alfred Hitchcock, whose masterpiece from the 1950s, “The Invisible Third”, incidentally has so many parallels with the plot of “Life forbidden!” that one can hardly believe it was a mere coincidence). Maria Lazar only takes artistic liberty when combining the individual elements.
Unbridled curiosity
In the end, Ernst von Ufermann, who went to Vienna as Edwin von Schmitz and, due to circumstances, has to exchange his suit for the leather jacket of an unemployed proletarian, returns to Berlin. And wants – although he suspects that his wife is not expecting him like Penelope – to take his place again. But this plan fails. And it not only fails miserably, but also in such an illuminating way that “Life forbidden!” not only about the time when humanity was pushed aside by political brutality, but also about the contradictory nature and the limited cognitive abilities of human beings.
Maria Lazar is not only concerned with the contemporary – that is, with the criticism of National Socialists, which is satirical and sharp in her case – but with the fundamentally difficult relationship between people and the truth. How accessible is this? And how reasonable? In her fascinatingly multi-layered and polyphonic novel “The Natives of Maria Blood”, Maria Lazar addresses these questions using the example of a small Austrian town and does not omit any topic relevant to a depiction of reality. If you are thirsty for knowledge, you can live with her like in heaven – and experience what a clergyman thinks when a young girl with slender legs and a short skirt happens to walk past him.
And already in her debut novel, “Poisoning”, her irrepressible curiosity, dressed with literary sophistication, bursts the boundaries of what seemed tolerable at the time. It was not until 1920, five years after Maria Lazar had written the novel, that a publisher was found for this family portrait, which is also a portrait of morals and traces the hypocrisy in corners that even Schnitzler did not dare to bring to the stage in “Reigen”.
One step ahead
It would be too simplistic if one were to place Maria Lazar, who, with her uncomfortable attentiveness, sensitively measures the whole breadth and depth of society, from the unemployed, the maids and cooks upwards, hierarchically up to the lawyers, doctors, writers and old “excellencies”, into the category “Resistance Literature”. “World literature” would probably be more appropriate as a guide.
In any case, the metamorphosis of Ernst von Ufermann seems as fatal to him as that of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, although it only affects his account and not his body. The adversary most to be feared by modern man, who loves liberty and justice, may not be sitting in chanceries (or enthroned in church pulpits), but lurking, at any moment Coup ready, in the next room – or even sleeping in the same double bed.
But is it really the others who bother you the most? Or is the worst enemy possibly in your own skin? If you dare to think so, you will notice some striking similarities between Oblomow and Ernst von Ufermann: Like the most famous slacker in literature, he too is not intentionally bad. He is just too weak to stand up to temptation. So his fate is not imposed on him. It catches him with his pants down only once too often.
Why Maria Lazar was forgotten by so many for so long will probably not be clarified anytime soon. Because her talent would have been lacking, probably not. Rather the opposite. Perhaps she was a decisive step ahead of her time in too many things that are difficult to bear.