Voll Hunger und voll Brot: Die Welt des Jura Soyfer 1912–1939 by Dorothy James, and: Full of Hunger and Full of Bread: The World of Jura Soyfer, 1912–1939 by Dorothy James

Abstract

Reviewed by: Voll Hunger und voll Brot: Die Welt des Jura Soyfer 1912–1939 by Dorothy James, and: Full of Hunger and Full of Bread: The World of Jura Soyfer, 1912–1939 by Dorothy James Vincent Kling Dorothy James, Voll Hunger und voll Brot: Die Welt des Jura Soyfer 1912–1939. Translated from English by Irmtrud Wojak. Bochum: Buxus Edition, 2021. 178 pp. Dorothy James, Full of Hunger and Full of Bread: The World of Jura Soyfer, 1912–1939. Bochum: Buxus Edition, 2021. 164 pp. When Friederike Caroline Neuber ("die Neuberin") ritually banished the figure of ribald Hanswurst and his dialect language from the German stage in 1737 in favor of classics performed in High German, she was supported by writers as eminent as Johann Christoph Gottsched and was later hailed in a memorial as the "Urheberin des guten Geschmacks auf der deutschen Bühne." She was responding to currents of Enlightenment sensibility with its rationalist ethics and its quest for normative social ethics, which declared war on what was judged as lewd vulgarity and low taste. By contrast, it is not possible to understand a brilliant theater phenomenon like Jura Soyfer without realizing that Austrian theater never underwent this "reform." Folk plays, dialect drama, farces and parodies, mixtures of music, dance, and speech, improvisation, and pure spectacle—emphatically lauded by Hofmannsthal—continued in a tradition that was centuries old by the time of Neuber's cleansing action. Plays like Raimund's Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind virtually disappeared in Germany, whereas Nestroy became the acclaimed embodiment and apotheosis of Hanswurst. Ödön von Horváth did not so much revive the folk play as continue its tradition, one that had been lost elsewhere and had to be artificially revived. Even today, theaters like Adi Hirschal's Lustspielhaus present the same kinds of tributes, parodies, and adaptations as did Nestroy. This unbroken tradition was a living entity readily available to Jura Soyfer, who was—in a brief career of inspired creativity—continuing what had come before. With no sharp division between the casualness of the Pawlatschenbühne and the loftiness of the Burgtheater, Soyfer drew on a rich, living heritage in which clowning, innuendo, and double entendre could be deployed as effectively as formal declamation. As Dorothy James reminds us throughout Full of Hunger and Full of Bread, Soyfer was motivated by politics in every phase of his writing; there was never a writer more engagé than he. And while he would not, then, have thought primarily in these historical terms, he was versed enough in theater to provide [End Page 123] helpful hints to a friend who was writing a seminar paper on Raimund (80), and he reflects his tradition at every turn. His "Song of the Comet" (5), which was also requisitioned by Peter Henisch, is a direct rebuttal to the fatalism of the "Kometenlied" in Nestroy's Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus. Again, these considerations are not primary in James's study, but they are essential secondary explanations of how a writer still in his teens could emerge as a fully mature, sophisticated talent by tapping into his tradition. They explain, moreover, how Soyfer could be political but not doctrinaire, human rather than ideological, disciplined without regimentation, his vision of the world and of humanity always filled with hope, so much so that he could even turn the infamous phrase "Arbeit macht frei" into a positive statement in his "Dachau Song." As James points out, the song is a final expression of "the freedom that Jura sang throughout his short life, the freedom to be alive in a better world, a better world that human beings must work to build together" (150). Well after the prospects of freedom dimmed in Austria, Soyfer continued to uphold freedom, daunted but not silenced by growing totalitarianism (37–45). Two features make James's book especially successful. She furnishes ample biography but creates cohesion by departing from chronology in favor of coherent analysis by genre and theme. After a brisk overview (13–15), James divides her study into five parts. Each of the first two concentrates on Soyfer's incomplete novel, So starb eine Partei, skillfully tracing background in sections...