Rediscovered tales by the Jewish exile author Maria Lazar | EUROtoday

Maria Lazar is without doubt one of the nice rediscoveries of German-Jewish literature. As with Friedl Benedikt, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Veza Canetti and Paul Zahler, we owe this primarily to coincidences and the luck of the finder. In this case, it’s the Viennese writer Albert C. Eibl who’s persistently taking care of the property, which was found by Lazar’s granddaughter in Nottingham and has now been bequeathed to the Austrian Exile Library within the Literaturhaus Vienna. Since 2014, her works have been revealed by Eibl’s publishing home “The Forgotten Book”. Most not too long ago, the performs got here out in 2024, through which Simon Strauss praises the “sarcasm” and “sharp language” within the afterword; the politics, set in dense scenes, are extraordinarily topical.

Robert Musil acknowledged comparable qualities in Lazar’s debut novel “The Poisoning” (1920) and praised the great eye in addition to the “power of the figural”. Slightly later he and Lazar wrote characteristic articles for the Vienna newspaper “Der Tag”. But they each grew to become acquainted within the Eugenie Schwarzwald salon, the place Lazar additionally met Peter Altenberg, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Egon Friedell and Jakob Wassermann. She beforehand attended Eugenie Schwarzwald’s reform faculty in Vienna, the place Oskar Kokoschka was certainly one of her academics. In 1916 he portrayed her with a parrot in her hand.

Before her Danish exile from 1933 – with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel with Karin Michaelis on the island of Thurø and from there to Stockholm (she had acquired Swedish citizenship via a brief marriage to Wedekind’s son Friedrich Strindberg) – Lazar organized readings for Canetti: first from the “Blendung” within the Black Forest School, then in her condo from his drama “Wedding”. This piece a few weird home group that desires to rob an previous girl dwelling within the attic of her property additionally exhibits similarities with a few of Lazar’s tales which have now been introduced. Above all, the settings, grotesque personnel, sociological perspective and love of the absurd are comparable. This additionally applies to the residents in Veza Canetti’s brief tales “The Yellow Street”, which had been written a little bit earlier and likewise seem in newspapers beneath pseudonyms.

Between 1937 and 1942, Lazar revealed beneath the identify Esther Grenen within the Basel “National-Zeitung” and its “Sonntags-Beilage”, and in exile additionally within the Danish newspapers “Social-Democrats”, “Arbejderens Almanak” and “Berlingske Tidende”. Eibl has compiled 31 tales for his choice quantity, which has now been revealed, a few of that are first publications. The texts printed in Danish magazines comply with the German originals from the property.

Back to the home tales, that are paying homage to the baronesses, tobacconists, waitresses, housekeepers, cash messengers, household tyrants, students and reality-addicted poets of the 2 Canettis. Lazar opens up a equally broad spectrum of social sorts, outsiders, impostors and the mentally deformed. There is, for instance, a lonely previous baroness who rents rooms to “foreigners” in neighborhood at surprisingly low costs. But she seems to be the “feudal ghost of a dead past”. In her princely home, all residents are monitored and controlled till a younger Russian desires to kill them – “on principle”. So he offers himself and the story the nickname “Raskolnikov”. In one other condo, two older widows come collectively due to a private advert, acknowledge one another as lovers from their youth after which, because the title says, discover their “modest happiness”.

On one other flooring, a considerably pale piano instructor lives subsequent door to a sick boy, who develops the phantom of a musical “fever girl”. However, he’s repelled by a red-painted “mannequin” that was lastly despatched over and as an alternative falls in love with an older, chubby nurse in the remainder residence. Elsewhere, in a resort, a shy worker who really strikes “on the sidelines of life” equally involuntarily turns into an acoustic witness to a blackmailing homicide within the subsequent room. When he additionally hides a lady he sees within the hallway, he turns into an “accomplice” who forces the unknown lady into a wedding. This is as surreal because the story “A Serious Reader,” who desires to carry against the law author accountable as a result of the peach pit killing methodology described in his e book failed.

The “admiration for strange natures” and the “sharp, jumping manner” of their portrayal, which Canetti attested to his spouse Veza, additionally applies to Lazar. But there are additionally texts that transcend this. “A Harmless Person,” for instance, is a (beforehand unpublished) sharp satire on fellow residents from the very starting: Immediately after the “takeover of power,” the small city librarian Karl Lehmann will get a swastika flag, hangs an image of the “Führer” over his marriage mattress, merely accepts the dismissal of a colleague due to a joke and his upright democratic boss, and attends performances by the Hitler Youth. Although he notices his personal transformation right into a “beast” within the mirror, that does not cease him from pushing his Jewish neighbor down the steps when he affords him a uncommon merchandise for his stamp assortment.

While these fascist aberrations are oppressively reasonable, the absurd title story discusses the chances of killing via “mental bacilli” or “through intense thought rays”. Given the date the story was written, which was solely revealed in Danish in 1937, the plot is much less implausible than anticipated. Because the director, who’s threatened with thought rays, really dies out of worry of the vicious stigmatization that arose in every single place in the course of the Nazi period.

Maria Lazar: “Thought Rays”. Short tales and brief tales. Edited and with an afterword by Albert C. Eibl. Publisher The Forgotten Book, Vienna 2025. 416 pages, hardcover, €26.