The contribution of women to the literature of the interwar period and thus to the fragile First Republic has often been overlooked in the canon of cultural historiography. Thanks to editorial achievements such as that of the publishers of Albert C. Eibl’s Forgotten Books and Johann Sonnleitner’s German studies research in Vienna, names such as those of the author Maria Lazar have been saved from oblivion.
The Austrian Jew Lazar, who accepted the invitation to the Danish island of Thuroe as early as 1933 and would henceforth live in Scandinavian exile, can be seen as a very direct chronicler of the decline in Austrian society and the Weimar Republic. Her novel The Natives of Maria Blut, which began when Adolf Hitler and Engelbert Dollfuss took office and was completed in exile in Denmark, is a clairvoyant key work on the course of developments in Austria up to 1938. Lazar takes a very close look at the specifically Austrian mix , which behind the hypocrisy just favored the rise of the National Socialists in the shadow of Catholic figures of saints.
A Lourdes grotto for the rise of the Nazis
In her fictional place, Maria Blut, with its more than 700-year tradition of devotion, she lets the controversies of recent history get stranded in a tangle of voices and characters. In this Maria blood there is a long village culture of fixed catholic and social rites. Outsiders are a nuisance in this rural regional stronghold.
But Lazar places the outsiders in the middle: the recently widowed Viennese doctor Lohmann (Philipp Hauß), but also the Jew Meyer-Löw (Dorothee Hartinger). In the place of pilgrimage, which also describes itself as “the Austrian Lourdes”, the outsiders are important scapegoats – and they are needed in a world in which gossip is everything and the fact only ever appears in negative form.
Academy Theater: play by Maria Lazar
The Academy Theater is showing a stage version of the novel “The Natives by Maria Blut”. In it, the Jewish author Maria Lazar describes the maturing of National Socialism.
There is little hope, and there are many of the voiceless, above all the “Pimperl”, Vinzenz (Jonas Hackmann), who will only get his voice when a new racial era opens up on the horizon. The fact that the investor Schellenbach would soon turn the ailing cannery of the town into the dazzling company called “Space Power” quickly turns out to be an illusion. To be on the safe side, Schellenbach will also be assumed to be “a Jew” in order to conceal their own ignorance.
A world of constant threat
Threats teem in Maria’s blood – and the greatest seems to be that of a Marxist subversion. Lazar caricatures this fear perhaps with the greatest pleasure – and in so doing touches on a topos that is still being used to this day. The country is governed “by the left”, which is already evident from Lazar: the left are more animated by phlegm than by the ability to act.
“Someone will come who will lead to something,” says the text. It is Lazar’s lurking phrases that seem to have driven the director and author of the stage version of this book, Lucia Bihler. With her work, Bihler is flexible in the present and knows that she can fall back on a top-class ensemble that will send her into an evening of set pieces for almost two hours.
In this stage version, typification and specification are balanced. Sometimes there are concrete figures, sometimes people with oversized puppet heads, who are doubled by speakers at the edge of the stage. In addition, a narrator is introduced in the background, so that one could close one’s eyes and listen to a radio play, so it becomes clear what’s going on that evening even without looking at the stage.
But when the narrator speaks, it is also deceptive, as the oversized statue of Mary lights up in the center of the stage at these moments. Should it even be she who is speaking here? It would suit the pathology of this Lourdes place. In any case, one does not look at a stage with localizations here, rather one looks into all the abysses that one has taken with oneself at Catholic places of remembrance in the course of an Austrian life.
See through and fear anyway!
On the stage by Jessica Rockstroh, with the costumes by Victoria Behr and the music and the sound design by Jacob Suske, director Bihler intends to create nothing less than a tension between a constant atmosphere and basic alienation. Basically, the same thing has to happen here over and over again. And basically the cheap tricks from the storage room of modern theater craft are used very mercilessly as such – and sometimes in a frightening way.
See through it and fear anyway! This slogan also runs through the work of David Lynch and Lars von Trier student Nicolas Winding Refn, who with “Copenhagen Cowboy” properly jumbles up the narrative attitudes of series platforms and at the same time casts a spell over the most diverse layers. It’s no longer about provocation, but about the miserably long rolling out of atmosphere in order to recalibrate our viewing habits. Morals and taboos are no longer allowed to play a role in this narrative attitude – not out of a spirit of provocation, but to open up new perspectives.
This theater acts in a similar way, thereby challenging theater on its own ground. This is always precarious and demands patience. Still, it becomes successful in the last ten minutes. By then you have ridden through and down all the clichés. And the last ten minutes of the piece sum up the template, prove the sense of picking up exactly this book, relying exactly on the drasticness of the intimidating figure of a saint. This is no longer classic dramaturgy – although we constantly encounter set pieces of dramaturgical and theatrical craftsmanship. Just as series are not cinema episodes in a row – but normally addictive substances, but ideally a fundamental questioning of how it is told and when it is told it should no longer be evaluated.
This work is a stroke of luck, even if you don’t want to go to the theater to see the theatre. And in any case, a position of the theater to the world that surrounds this established art form.
