About the work
Die Hölle auf Erden (Hell on Earth) is a comedy by the Austrian writer Maria Lazar, written in the mid-1930s during her exile in Denmark. The manuscript remained in the family estate for decades, was handed over to the Austrian Exile Library at the Literaturhaus Wien in November 2022 and was published in 2024 in the volume Die vergessenen Theaterstücke by the Viennese publisher Das vergessene Buch. Anna Marboe directed the world premiere on 28 September 2024 in the Kammerspiele of the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck.
Plot
A new world war looms, and in Geneva the League of Nations struggles in vain for a solution at a peace conference. A professor of psychiatry, whose wife has turned devout, then places a newspaper advertisement asking God himself to chair the negotiations. God, who is enjoying his retirement, declines and sends Saint Peter with the angels Lux and Pax down to Earth – but nobody there believes in the heavenly envoys, Peter is taken for an asylum patient, and soon the Devil joins in as well.
Cultural significance
The play is one of the finds from her estate through which Maria Lazar is currently being rediscovered as a dramatist of the interwar years. Critics highlighted the biting mockery with which the satire exposes diplomacy, religious hypocrisy and the helplessness of politics in the face of approaching war. After the premiere, further theatres in Austria and Germany quickly took up the play.