Biography
Maria Lazar was born in Vienna in 1895, the youngest of eight children in a Jewish family, and attended the progressive Schwarzwald school. Her first novel, Die Vergiftung, appeared in 1920, and her one-act play Der Henker was staged at the Neue Wiener Bühne in 1921; during the 1920s she worked mainly as a feuilleton journalist and translator, among other things of the first German edition of The Great Gatsby. From 1930 she published under the pseudonym Esther Grenen, and her drama Der Nebel von Dybern, about gas warfare, premiered in Stettin in 1933 before the Nazis soon removed it from the repertoire. In the summer of 1933 she went into exile in Denmark together with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, moved to Sweden in 1939 and died in Stockholm in 1948; her novel Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut, about the rise of Nazism in Austria, appeared in 1937 only in an exile magazine and was not published as a book until 1958. Since 2014 the Viennese publisher Das vergessene Buch has been reissuing her work, and plays from her estate such as Die Hölle auf Erden and Der blinde Passagier received their premieres in 2024 and 2025.
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