Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing firm. A man bumps into him, then disappears into the crowd. When von Ufermann reaches his gate, he finds his ticket, his passport, his wallet are gone.
At that point, most people would contact the police, try to arrange for replacements, contact the bank in Frankfurt. But von Ufermann surrenders to fate. “Oh, well! I don’t suppose old Hebenwerth would have given in anyway!” he shrugs, and hails a cab to take him back into the city. The theft has presented him with an opportunity to step away from the pressures of money, work, family, social status, the chaotic German economy. A hiatus, a moment of suspension:
Ufermann was almost ashamed of himself, but he could not help it. He was actually delighted at not having flown to Frankfurt. Slowly he paced a few steps. Now he had plenty of time at his disposal, the whole morning belonged to him and not to the business. No matter how many people rang him at the office, sorry he wasn’t there, he was away. No need to inquire about Irmgard’s health or dictate any letters, nor would he see the gloomy face of old Boss, who knew everything, who knew things that only a confidential clerk could know and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. No need to consider when and where to tell Gierke to pick him up. He was simply going for a walk, just like anybody else. The sun shone, it was actually bright and warm.
And then the plane von Ufermann was supposed to be on crashes.
In No Right to Live, the novelist offers her protagonist a chance to escape from his life. A bit like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Ernst von Ufermann gets a chance to see what the world looks like without him. For his widow and business partner, the cloud has a silver lining: a life insurance policy worth millions of marks, enough to bail out the firm and leave the grieving wife even wealthier than before.
With only the spare change in his pockets, however, von Ufermann soon finds himself grappling with the practical matter of survival. His mistress, a small-time actress, put him up for a night or two, then introduces him to a petty criminal who arranges for von Ufermann to travel to Vienna, complete with a borrowed passport and a new identity of Edgar von Schmitt, to deliver a mysterious packet to contacts there.
In Vienna, “Herr von Schmitt” finds he’s moved from relying on the goodwill of crooks to navigating the complex loyalties of a group of young National Socialist fanatics:
“Death to the Jews.” He was no Jew, he wasn’t even interested, he had never bothered about such things. Death! An ugly word. Death. Perhaps it really did mean something to him. In the street they were now singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. Did that concern him? Death, death.
He also realizes that every day he continues to allow the lie of Ernst von Ufermann’s death to play out he implicates himself ever more deeply in a case of insurance fraud. What he’d imagined at first as a momentary break from the demands of his life proves to be a descent into an ever more powerful vortex of chaos. And when he does eventually manages to make his way back to Berlin, he learns that, unlike George Bailey, everyone seems quite a bit happier without him.
His only respite are the moments when he can become completely anonymous:
Who was the man in the leather jacket leaning against the dirty corridor-window with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Did no one know him? No, no one knew him. He gazed out at the black fields, the black woods flying past in the white and wintry air. The roofs of humble cottages stood out black and the pine-trees, stark and bare, were black too. The sound of voices came from the compartment. They scarcely noticed when he left the hot, stifling atmosphere in which they sat. They showed no surprise at his not taking off his shoes at night or propping himself up against his neighbour and snoring with half open mouth as they did. They never thought of saying “sorry” or “excuse me.” It was more by luck than anything else that they did not drop their greasy sandwich-paper on his lap. No, no one knew him.
No Right to Live illustrates the problem with the fantasy of escaping from a life you find unbearable. First, there’s no guarantee that the new life you devise is any better than the first one. And second, if you do then try to step back into the life you left behind, it’s like trying to eat off a plate that’s been shattered and pieced back together. These stories never end well.
When it was published by Wishart in England in 1934, No Right to Live was almost guaranteed to be forgotten. Wishart’s ad claimed the book had been banned by the Nazis, but in reality, the German and Austrian publishers knew well enough not to bother even trying to get it passed the Party censors. Even Wishart was concerned not to aggravate the German authorities and their sympathizers in England by pressing the book’s anti-Nazi content too far and chose not only to delete certain passages from Gwenda David’s translations but to insert a few things of their own.
Even without comparing No Right to Live with its original German text, it’s not hard to see that something was lost, if not in translation, then at least in publication. There are several points at which the narrative jerks forward somewhat unexpectedly, almost as if pages are missing. It’s not surprising, then, that there were almost no reviews of No Right to Live in the English press.
By the time No Right to Live appeared, its author had herself escaped from her old life and taken on an assumed name. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1895, Maria Lazar grew up among the elite of Austrian culture alongside Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig. Oskar Kokoschka painted her posed with a parrot in his 1916 Dame mit Papagei. Thomas Mann dismissed her first novel Die Vergiftung (The Poisoning) for its Penetranter Weibsgeruch (“penetrating woman smell”).
In 1923, Lazar married a Swedish journalist, Friedrich Strindberg, which gave her Swedish citizenship and the means to later flee her native country safely. The couple separated and in 1933, living in Berlin and uncomfortable with the prospect of living under Hitler’s regime, she accepted an invitation from the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis to spend the summer at her home on the island of Thurø, where they were soon joined by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. Lazar never returned to Austria.
She adopted the pseudonym of Esther Grenen, which she thought sounded more Nordic, and Lazar and her daughter Judith later moved to Stockholm in 1939. She died there in 1948, having committed suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer.
The original German text of the novel did not appear until 2020. A young Austrian and fan of neglected books, Albert C. Eibl, had published Lazar’s first and last novels, Die Vergiftung and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut (The Natives of Maria Blood) through his one-man publishing house Das Vergessene Buch (The Forgotten Book). He was able to obtain Lazar’s typescript from the estate of Lazar’s daughter Judith and published the book, accompanied by a commentary by Prof. Johann Sonnleitner of the University of Vienna, in March 2020.
Leben Verboten! has been a commercial and critical success in Austria and Germany. Austrian TV channel Ö1 selected it as their book of the month for July 2020, writing that,
It is amazing with what clairvoyance and sharpness Maria Lazar describes the rise of National Socialism at the beginning of the thirties. The novel moves on rapidly, sometimes even has comical sides and is still oppressive in the description of the inhuman, ideologically cruel underpinned plans of National Socialism. One follows this — officially dead — Ernst von Ufermann through the days and weeks, as the political climate heats up threateningly. The book, which is a crime story, a psychological study and a political thriller at the same time, plays with the literary means of confusion, double life and more or less big rip-offs and impresses with quick scene changes and striking dialogues across all levels.
According to WorldCat.org, there are just nine copies of No Right to Live available in libraries worldwide. I obtained a PDF of the book courtesy of Meta Gemert, a Dutch writer, translator, and publisher, who will be releasing a Dutch edition, Leven Verboden! based on the original German manuscript from her Van Maaskant Haun Publishers in October 2021. Meta tells me that she’s trying to convince NYRB Classics to contract a new English translation of Leben Verboten!. If she does, it would follow the path of Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, which was a best-seller when it was reissued in Germany, in Dutch by Van Maaskant Haun as De Effingers in March 2020, and is rumored to be slated for publication by NYRB Classics in 2023. In the meantime, however, if you’re interested in reading No Right to Live in PDF, despite its shortcomings, drop me an email at [email protected].