Jura Soyfer

He also wrote two articles for the Politische Bühne (Political Stage, a socialist newspaper connected to the Red Players group of actors).

Soyfer also satirised the key authoritarian figures of the Austrofascist (1933/4 to 1938) period like Engelbert Dollfuß, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg and Kurt Schuschnigg.

Here, Soyfer met the composer Herbert Zipper, and together they wrote the famous Dachaulied, the Dachau song, which cynically took up the Nazi motto Arbeit macht frei ("work liberates"), written above the entrance to such camps.

[1] In the autumn of that year, Soyfer was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp where he died of typhoid fever the day after his release was granted, on 16 February 1939 at age 26.

and are buried at the Hebrew Free Burial Association's Mount Richmond Cemetery, Staten Island, N.Y., per his family's request.

This point is made clearly at the end of the play by a song of praise the actors sing about the country when they are actually being sent to prison.

In this piece he leaves behind traditional Austrian theatre and portrays absurd actions and speech which lead irretrievably to downfall and destruction.

Soyfer has been accused by the publisher of the "Columbus"-play, Felix Blochs Erben as well as by both widows, Mary Tucholsky and Edith Hasenclever, of having plagiarized the play from its original authors.

The first verse of the Dachaulied [de], the Dachau song:[4] Stacheldraht, mit Tod geladen,ist um unsre Welt gespannt.

This took his works out of their original context and gave them a larger application: they were presented, for example, as timeless criticisms of the society of the communist GDR.

[better source needed] Soyfer was survived by his parents, Wladimir and Lubow, his older sister, Tamara, and his girlfriend, Helene.

Jura Soyfer und Marika (Maria) Szécsi
Plaque at his last residence, Heinestraße 4, 2nd district of Vienna
Jura Soyfer's gravesite at Hebrew Free Burial Association 's Mount Richmond Cemetery