Die Masse und ihre Stimmen. Zur Genese des Austrofaschismus in Maria Lazars Roman "Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut"

The modern phenomenon of the mass becomes the subject of theoretical reflection and aesthetic representation, especially in interwar Austria. While the essayistic and literary works of authors such as Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti are well-known in this context, the Viennese writer Maria Lazar was virtually unknown until recently. With her novel Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut, written in 1935 in Danish exile, published posthumously in 1958 in the GDR under the pseudonym Esther Grenen and only published under her real name in 2015, she provides one of the earliest literary representations of contemporary mass events from a socio-psychological perspective. The essay is a first attempt to read Lazar's highly complexly constructed, polyphonic work in the context of Broch's Die Verzauberung and Canetti's Die Blendung, which were written in the same years, and to show its innovative character as a novel composed by the masses and at the same time a novel about the masses.