85th anniversary of death Jura Soyfers in Concentration Camp Buchenwald

VIENNA, VIENNA, AUSTRIA, February 16, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Installations are a new format of the Jura Soyfer Society (located in Vienna with members in over 50 states including United Kingdom, USA) to create public. In the recent month there were Soyfer installations in the context of the Book fairs in Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna and for media. The last Soyfer installation was about the February fights 1934 in Austria – an important signal against fascism which played not only in the 1930ies an important role in history. Reportages (Ilja Ehrenburg), Poems (Fritz Brügel), plays (Friedrich Wolf, Bertolt Brecht), novels (Anna Seghers, Rudolf Brunngraber, Christopher Isherwood) were written about these fights.

One of the authors was Jura Soyfer (1912-1939) who died with 26 years in the Concentration Camp in Buchenwald in Nazi Germany. The title of his novel about the fights in February 1934 against Austro Fascism is “The Death of a Party”. This is a novel about freedom fight in Austria from the 19th century to the 1930ies.

Today Soyfer is translated in over 50 languages. The background is the importance of his poems/songs, his plays (also performed as radio plays and films), his prose published originally in Austria under the condition of censorship auf Austrian Fascism.

He understood in the 1930ies the importance of new media like radio, film, but also the role of telegraph. New were world communication, but also aesthetics.

In the 1930ies Soyfers poems were published in the newspaper “Deutsche Freiheit” until the Saarland was occupied by Hitler Germany. The poems played a role in the fight of the Saarland for freedom against Hitler Germany.

In Budapest (Hungary) his play “Pinguins” was performed. Only one poem out of this play could be found until today.

Import was the publication of Soyfer texts in London by John Lehmann in his literary journal “New Writing”. John Lehmann was sometime in Vienna to learn Russian from Jura Soyfer. A part of the novel “The Death of a Party” is only available as a retranslation from English into German. Later, the Austrians in Exil in England played an important role in the distribution of Jura Soyfer texts. Latest Tony Britten remembered in his play “Astoria”, performed in London 2023 about Jura Soyfer and John Lehmann, the important English writer and publisher.

Important were also the distribution of Soyfer texts in Argentina, Australia, and USA (New York, Los Angeles, University of California at Riverside). In Buenos Aires it was Alfredo Bauer who brought Jura Soyfer in the 1940ies on the stage, translated later all the known plays (some are not found until now), organized their performances in Spanish. In USA Leon Askin played an important role, who was also member of the Oscar Prize Committee.

The installation (central part: documentation of the 32nd Soyfer Symposion) uses Video Podcasts (conversations about the translation of Jura Soyfer in Arabic (Rania Elwardy, Cairo), in English (Anette Horn, Johannesburg), Italian (Ramona Pellegrino, Genova, Italy), Kyrgyz (Chinarbubu Tuleeva, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), Russian/ Ukrainian (Olha Kryvosheieva, Berlin/ fugitive from Kharkiv where Soyfer was born 1912), Turkish (Dilek Altinkaya Nergis, Izmir, Türkiye).

These are talks also about new formats (File Books, Hyper Books), of usage of machine translation for literary texts and the boundary of the numeric which cannot be crossed by “training” of machines.

Part of the installation are also articles from important scientists and artists: Knut Ove Arntzen (Bergen, Norway – a specialist for theatres worldwide/ analyzes Soyfers plays since the 1990ies), Hartmut Krones (most important his contributions about Soyfer and music including a symposion at the Mozart house in Vienna 2013), Rudolf Muhr (specialist on Austrian German/ a least a study with help of the Austrian Press Agency archive with billions of words as study object), Alessandra Schininà (started her studies about Soyfer in the 1980ies, today Vice President of the Jura Soyfer Society).

Presented were also a lot of artistic projects. Most important the recording of a theatre performance of Divadlo Feste (Brno | Brünn) about Jura Soyfer and about by a Neo-Nazi murdered citizen of the Czech Republic of today which is available via installation as film at the Channel Jura Soyfer. Georg Mittendrein (former Director of the Jura Soyfer Theater, performer of Soyfer plays as art), Georg Herrnstadt (member of the legendary “Schmetterlinge” who played an important role by the discovery of Soyfer in the 1970ies and important until today), Natalia Lapina (stage director from Saint Petersburgh, today Berlin), Maren Rahmann (a well-known interpreter of Soyfer songs), Michael Koball (composer), Klaus Bergmeier/ Angelika Sacher (program and CD of Soyfer songs).

And there are school performances of the Soyfer play “The End of the World” today in Vienna (Goethe Gymnasium, Komensky Gymnasium) and Villach (HTL). In the recent years there were some hundred school performances not only in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, but also for example in Georgia.

The coordinator of the installation and President of the Jura Soyfer Society is Herbert Arlt who start 1978 with a proseminar paper about Jura Soyfer at the University in Salzburg with his studies on this author. 1988 he finished his studies in Salzburg with a 600 pages dissertation about Jura Soyfer. It took one year for the approbation because he used the term Austria Fascism. 2019 he got the highest decoration of the Republic of Austria for Science and The Arts from the President of Austria – especially for his books, File Books, exhibitions, journals (printed: 1989-2007, digital: 2000 until now), until now 32 symposia about Jura Soyfer (among them at the University of California at Riverside), organization of performances.

The liveliness of Jura Soyfer today is once more a defeat of the activists for racism, nationalism, fascism, war. The installation is a part of the movement bring hundreds of thousands on the street in Europe against the perspective of violence, war.

Herbert Arlt
Jura Soyfer Society
+ +43 6765364912
[email protected]
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I Love Hate. Theater Performance of Divadlo Feste (Brno | Brünn)