Obviously, Jura Soyfer is suitable as a symbolic figure for a polylogue experiment in a changing world.
One goal of the National Socialists was to destroy the works of their opponents (book burnings) or to appropriate their belongings (November Pogrom 1938), to turn people into numbers, to break them up in exploitation, especially in the concentration camps, to destroy them industrially in the sense of profit optimization, to erase the memory of them.
Today, Soyfer has been translated into over 50 languages. His Dachau song was sung in the concentration camps, his work was also played in exile. His plays – played by young actors such as Otto Tausig – stood at the beginning of a new peace architecture in Europe and at the beginning of a new peace order after 1989.
His understanding of the relationship between humans and machines (Lechner Edi), a new form of world communication (The End of the World), the visualization of the structures of the states (Astoria) is still trend-setting today. His play Vineta is recognized as a piece to the present. And also his play Broadway Melody 1492 (lines of verse from it: The fist – the phrase – and money:/ The three of us are conquering the world).
In the face of the war in Ukraine, it is again about a new peace architecture. It seems as if figures from Karl Kraus‘ monumental drama The Last Days of Mankind, from Soyfer’s plays, are cavorting on the world stage. But even in his Dachau Song – in the face of terror (Before the muzzles of rifles / We live by day and night) – Soyfer assumes that there is a future (Bright will laugh at us freedom – is another line of verse). For this it is necessary to change the present.
This polylogue sees itself as a contribution to the peace process, as a contribution to a new relationship between Europe and Africa.
This includes respect for African culture, understanding what Is European culture of African culture, understanding a new way of dealing with nature and technologies.
Grillparzer showed in his play The Jewess of Toledo that it is not war that brings wealth, but production, trade. Speculation, financial transactions make only a few (temporarily) rich (Astoria). The world is not destroyed by the iron age (Ovid), but an environment that enables people to live and survive.
Europe is in a state of upheaval, Africa is on the move. It’s about the people on these continents. The extent to which these are taken into account will be shown by cultural policy, by the willingness to polylogue, by the facilitation of development.
Sc.Dir.Dr. Herbert Arlt
15.3.2022