Magdalena Simon (1929-1936) Otto Zoff (9 April 1890 – 14 December 1963) was an Austrian author, script writer, dramaturge, journalist and "all-round Bohemian".
His father, Otto Andreas Zoff, who had served time in prison before he married,[2] is variously described as a senior railway inspector and a military official.
[3] When the boy was aged 2 the family relocated to Sankt Pölten, the first substantial town along the main railway line from Vienna travelling west.
[1] Friends during his time at university included the novelists Felix Braun and Max Mell, as well as the art historian Leopold Zahn.
[1] What was, perhaps, his most important novel, "Die Liebenden" appeared in 1929, and stimulated a certain amount of controversy with its mixture of "new worldly" and "tearfully conventional" aspects.
In the meantime, under circumstances that remain unclear, the ban against publishing Zoff's books had been lifted in Germany where his historical presentation "The Huguenots" appeared in 1937.
Like thousands of others following the German invasion from the north, they now became involved in a desperate struggle to obtain the visas and other documents necessary to exit France, traverse Spain, and then to emigrate to the United States of America.
Due to the scale of the enforced exodus from central Europe of Jewish (and other) intellectuals, Otto Zoff had arrived in New York to find plenty of influential contacts, such as the publisher Kurt Wolff and his wife Helene and the writers Alfred Neumann and Hermann Kesten.
[1] Another familiar face belonged to Bertolt Brecht who remained a friend despite his marriage to Zoff's younger sister having ended more than ten years earlier.
Although he had ready made social network in the literary world, Otto Zoff barely set foot in it himself, having apparently lost the necessary spark of spontaneity.
In the later 1950s he also experienced a moderate return to form with his writing, notably with his 1959 comedy "König Hirsch" ("King Stag"), adapted from a piece by Carlo Gozzi.