Maria Lazar

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Maria Lazar , pseudonym Esther Grenen (born November 22, 1895 in Vienna , † March 30, 1948 in Stockholm ) was an Austrian-Jewish writer .

Life

Lazar was the youngest of eight children of a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. Her older sister Auguste Lazar was also a writer. She attended the well-known Black Forest School in Vienna , a community school with a reform pedagogical approach, at which her interest in literary work was encouraged. Here she met numerous prominent personalities from the Viennese cultural scene at the time, including Adolf Loos , Elias Canetti , Hermann Broch and Egon Friedell . Oskar Kokoschka portrayed the young artist here in 1916 in his picture Lady with a Parrot . After finishing school, she worked as a teacher at a state educational home on Semmering, which was part of the Black Forest schools .

In 1920 she published her first novel, Die Vergiftung , and a year later her one-act play Der Henker was premiered on the Neue Wiener Bühne . Both works were unsuccessful and were not accepted by the public or critics. Thomas Mann criticized the "penetrating womanly smell" of her debut novel. Robert Musil, on the other hand, praised him for "rich ideas" and "agile power in the figurative". The Lazar family read the text as a key novel . The intolerable family situation, which is portrayed in the novel based on the unsuccessful escape attempts by the protagonist Ruth, saw the family as a direct attack on themselves. Her older sister Auguste Lazar also retrospectively provided a biographical reading of the text, which was consistently in the first-person perspective is written near:

“Maria's departure from home - or rather from my mother's house, because she was only 13 when my father died - began at a time when she was still living at home. [...] In poisoning , bourgeois family life is depicted in the blackest of colors. My mother and my siblings and sister-in-law were shocked by this. They felt hit. My husband and I tried to mediate. We looked at the book more objectively. In any case, it was a strong test of talent. "

- Auguste Lazar : arabesques. Recordings from turbulent times

In 1923 she married the journalist Friedrich Strindberg , the couple separated again in 1927. Both had a daughter born in 1924. Lazar worked mainly as a translator in the 1920s and translated works from Danish , English and French . It was not until 1930 that she published her own works again, this time under the Nordic pseudonym Esther Grenen . The novels Der Fall Rist from 1930 and Veritas Bewitched the City from 1931 were successful. In 1933, her political drama Nebel von Dybern, which deals with the gas war , was premiered in Stettin , but was soon removed from the program by the National Socialists .

Together with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel , she accepted an invitation from the writer Karin Michaëlis in the summer of 1933 and went into exile on the Danish island of Thurø . There she continued to work literarily, but had relatively little success with her works. A first exile novel with the title Leben forbidden appeared in London in 1934 under the English title No right to live .

In 1937 the novel The natives of Maria Blut appeared in the well-known exile magazine Das Wort , published in Moscow and edited by Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Willi Bredel . The novel, which can be considered her main work, depicts the maturing of Nazism in Austria. She offered it to Austrian and Swiss publishers in vain. A Swiss publisher wrote her an enthusiastic letter about it, but he could not risk publishing it, if only for the reason "because the 'market' would have become too narrow for it", said her sister Auguste Lazar, who wrote the novel in 1958, ten years after the death of Maria Lazar, published in the GDR.

During the years of her exile, Lazar wrote numerous articles for Scandinavian and Swiss newspapers and lived, among other things, from translating literary works from Danish and Swedish into German. In 1939 she moved to Sweden with her daughter Judith Lazar, having become a Swedish citizen through her marriage to Strindberg . After she was diagnosed with an incurable bone disease, she ended her life by suicide in Stockholm on March 30, 1948 .

Rediscovery of her work in the 21st century

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In view of the new edition of the novel The Poisoning in December 2014, Michael Rohrwasser wrote in the Wiener Zeitung :

“And then that: A novel from 1920 is being reprinted [...] by an author whose name is as unknown as possible. Such idiosyncratic and strong language has not been heard in a long time, and the way it is told here reveals sovereignty, creative ability and literary self-confidence - thirteen chapters that are actually small stories that gradually become a whole in the course of reading merge. With this haunting sequence of images, one quickly forgets all attempts to classify it in terms of literary history ( Expressionism or Impressionism ), but if you want to name the neighborhoods of this extraordinary little novel, then they are big names like Ernst Weiß , Hermann Ungar or Veza Canetti  - in short: it is a little sensation. "

- Michael Rohrwasser : Wiener Zeitung

Franz Haas called The Poisoning in his review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung "the amazing book". For him, the case of Maria Lazar shows “what lasting gaps National Socialism made in the reception of literature by women”. Although Sandra Kerschbaumer, in her review of the poisoning in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, does not attest to the “strangeness” of the protagonist Ruth, herself and her environment, “despite all the modernity of the novel”, enough suggestive power “to banish today's readers”, she asks why and how the work escaped general attention for a century.

Harald Eggebrecht commented on the new edition of the novel The Natives of Maria Blut in 2015 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as follows:

“It is a bitter and very true mélange that the Viennese writer and journalist Maria Lazar (1895–1948) touches in the fictional Austrian small town Maria Blut in the novel written in 1935 while in exile in Denmark: clerical fascism and anti-Semitism, xenophobia and religious beliefs, bigotry and lying sexual morality. It is that right-wing radical mixture in whose climate the Nazis met with sheer compliance. "

- Harald Eggebrecht : Süddeutsche Zeitung

The world's first public presentation of Lazar's works took place on November 17, 2015 under the auspices of the Austrian Library in Exile in the Literaturhaus Wien . The editor Johann Sonnleitner, the publisher Albert C. Eibl, the writer and publicist Martin Haidinger and the Viennese cabaret artist Markus Oezelt were involved.

The rediscovery of the playwright Maria Lazar has also recently been promoted. On December 4, 2019, the premiere of her one-act play The Executioner from 1921 took place at the Akademietheater (Vienna) .

Other novels by Lazar that have been forgotten since the early 1930s, including the detective novel and business thriller Life forbidden, first published in 1934 in an abridged English exile edition . , are published successively by DVB Verlag in Vienna. Thomas Miessgang called the work, first published in the German original version from 1932 in May 2020 in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, a “haunting anti-Nazi novel that is still current today. He can satisfy on all levels ”. On July 9, 2020, the literary critic Denis Scheck presented "Leben Forbidden!" as part of the SWR quartet as a "deadly sad, incredibly funny and extremely entertaining" literary discovery.

Works (selection)

  • 1920: The poisoning. Novel. New ed. and with an afterword by Johann Sonnleitner. DVB (The Forgotten Book) Verlag, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-200-03768-7 .
  • 1921: The executioner. One act. One act.
  • 1930: The Rist case. Novel.
  • 1931: Veritas bewitches the city. Novel. (1931/1932 published as a serial in the weekly magazine Der Kuckuck .)
  • 1933: The Dybern Fog. Drama.
  • 1934: life forbidden! Novel. New ed. and with an afterword by Johann Sonnleitner. DVB (The Forgotten Book) Verlag, Vienna 2020, ISBN 978-3-903244-03-0 .
  • 1937: The natives of Maria Blut. Novel. New ed. and with an afterword by Johann Sonnleitner. DVB (The Forgotten Book) Verlag, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-200-03950-6 .
  • 1938: The stowaway. Drama.
  • 1946: Det kom af sig selv. Novel.

literature

  • Birgit S. Nielsen: Maria Lazar (1895–1948). Writer, journalist. In: Willy Dähnhardt ; Birgit S. Nielsen (Ed.): Exile in Denmark: German-speaking scientists, artists and writers in Danish exile after 1933. Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens, Heide 1993, ISBN 3-8042-0569-0 , pp. 559-578.

Web links

Wikisource: Maria Lazar  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maria Lazar: The poisoning. The forgotten book - DVB Verlag, Vienna 2014, blurb.
  2. ^ Complete works by Robert Musil. (Complete edition); Theater events in Vienna, March 30, 1921.
  3. ↑ Auguste Lazar: Arabesques. Recordings from turbulent times. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1962, p. 56.
  4. ^ Johann Sonnleitner: Maria Lazar (1895–1948). A portrait. In: Maria Lazar: The poisoning. The forgotten book - DVB-Verlag, Vienna 2014, pp. 143–167, here p. 154.
  5. ↑ Auguste Lazar: Arabesken , p. 164.
  6. ^ Wiener Zeitung, 21./22. February 2015. online
  7. ^ Franz Haas: Rediscovered - Maria Lazar's novel "The Poisoning" - Angry sparkling expressionism. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 6, 2015, accessed on December 7, 2015.
  8. ↑ Sandra Kerschbaumer: Poetry from defiant forces. In: FAZ, May 22, 2015, No. 117, p. 12.
  9. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 10, 2015.
  10. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.literaturhaus.at
  11. ↑ The executioner | Burgtheater. Retrieved March 12, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Life is forbidden! - Maria Lazar - DVB Verlag GmbH. Retrieved on March 12, 2020 (German).
  13. ↑ Die Zeit, June 4, 2020, No. 24/2020, Austria part, p. 16.
  14. ↑ Worth reading Quartet with Denis Scheck. Retrieved July 11, 2020 .
  15. ^ Franz Haas: Maria Lazar's novel "The natives of Maria Blut" - Nazi twilight in Austria's province. Review in the NZZ , December 8, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Lazar, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grenen, Esther (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Jewish writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1948
Place of death Stockholm