The fictional place of pilgrimage Maria Blut shows Austria in the early 1930s in a nutshell. There is an unfortunate mixture of economic crisis and provincialism, belief in miracles and anti-Semitism; the Socialists and the National Socialists have a common enemy in the Christian Socialists, who set up the proto-Fascist corporate state; the old Herr Baron, a relic of the fallen empire, is so impoverished that his valet has to burn the furniture; the Catholic Church is still a power in “Austrian Lourdes”.
