Jura Soyfer was an Austrian dramatist, poet, storyteller, and essayist. He was a dramatist and poet who campaigned against fascism and National Socialism.
Background
Jura Soyfer was born on December 8, 1912, in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He was the son of Vladimir Soyfer, a wealthy industrialist, and Ljubov (Brodes) Soyfer.
The Soyfers enjoyed the privileges and comforts of an upper-middle-class Russian family, including the services of a French governess, until the Bolshevik Revolution forced them to immigrate to Vienna in 1921.
Education
Jura Soyfer began his history and German studies at the University of Vienna in 1931, the same year Josef Nadler began teaching. Nadler’s interpretations of German literature were often racist, and harmonized with the right-wing atmosphere of the time.
Soyfer began writing caustically satirical poetry for the Arbeiter-Zeitung (“Worker Newspaper”) in 1931. In the summer of 1932 Soyfer worked as a journalist in Germany, where he soon became disillusioned by the German Social Democratic party’s lack of resilience in the face of Hitler’s rise. He returned to Vienna in 1933 and joined Austria’s Social Democratic party, ready to fight fascism in armed resistance. But the ill-prepared party members and workers were defeated, and fascism ruled Austria. Soyfer joined the outlawed Communist Party. He continued to write but was unable to have his work published. One of his projects was a novel, So starb eine Partei (“Thus Died a Party,” 1936), in which he studied the faults that brought about the Social Democratic party’s defeat.
Soyfer began writing dramas for the actors and left-wing intellectuals who populated basement coffeehouse cabaret theaters, including ABC im Roegenbogen and Literatur am Naschmarkt. He often wrote under a pseudonym (Jura, Georg Anders, Fritz Feder, Norbert Noll, and Walter West), possibly because Soyfer is a homonym of Saeufer, the German word for “drunkard.” Much of his work has not survived, but five plays still exist. Three of these plays are examples of Mittelstueck (“middle pieces”), hour-long plays preceded and followed by cabaret numbers.
In 1937 Soyfer was arrested. Mistaken for another key Communist figure, Soyfer had enough experience with the Communist Party to interest the Fascists who held him for three months without a trial. Granted amnesty a month before Nazi troops entered Austria, he tried to escape to Switzerland but was arrested and sent to Dachau. There he wrote “Dachau-Lied,” a testament to the resilience of his spirit. He was given the task of carrying corpses in Buchenwald when he was transferred there in the autumn of 1939. Release papers arrived days after he had died of typhoid fever on February 16, 1939, at the age of twenty-six.
By the time he was in high school, Soyfer was a committed socialist and a member of the Association of Socialist High-School Students and the Social Democratic party’s Political Cabaret.
Views
Borrowing from old Viennese popular theater, surrealism and the day’s political writings, Soyfer’s plays were parables attacking capitalism and exploitation.
Soyfer’s work transcends the 1930s because their themes - unemployment, the threatened destruction of civilization, alienation, and colonialism - have retained their validity; his irony, wit and insights into the contradictions of his time have led to continued performances of his plays in German-speaking areas.
Membership
Jura Soyfer was a member of the Association of Socialist High-School Students.
Personality
Even after the war, Austria was not a country hospitable to Soyfer’s satiric writing. His plays were preserved in the underground by friends until the 1970s, when he was finally recognized as a significant interwar playwright.
Connections
Until his death, Soyfer was engaged to Helli (Helene) Ultmann, a first cousin of the famous stage mind reader and hypnotist Erik-Jan Hanussen.