Anette Horn (University of the Witwatersrand)
The Jura Soyfer society and its journal understand themselves as a platform for international cultural studies. This is also a goal towards which the German Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, strives. Thus there are many points of intersection between the JSG (Jura Soyfer Society) and teaching and research in the German Studies Department at Wits.
Professors Kathleen Thorpe and Peter und Anette Horn have participated in conferences held by the Jura Soyfer Society with contributions in which Jura Soyfer´s antifascist commitment was compared to and brought into dialogue with the anti-Apartheid struggle and post-Apartheid society.
Jura Soyfer is by virtue of his personality, as well as his Jewish identity and his oeuvre particularly suited to teaching German language and culture to students. This presupposes that one distinguishes between Austria and Germany, because there are both commonalities but also differences between both countries, not to mention the linguistic differences which don´t only manifest themselves in the pronunciation but also in the vocabulary. This can broaden and differentiate what students understand by the attribute of „German“. This would include an awareness of the German speaking parts of Eastern Europe, which belonged to the Habsburg Empire and which played a decisive role in the development of German and Austrian literature. Jura Soyfer with his distinctive voice belongs to these German speaking minorities. The Habsburg Monarchy was a multicultural country and this fact is crucial to an understanding of contemporary literature and culture both in Austria and South Africa.
Jura Soyfer´s writings could be well integrated into German Studies from second year onwards, where texts by Austrian, German and Swiss authors are read in the original. With his unique and vibrant language and his critical social and political stance, Jura Soyfer would fit into this curriculum perfectly. Here one could discuss the themes of the Holocaust and the Shoa from the perspective of a Jewish writer, who was himself murdered in a concentration camp rather than just teaching such writers as Brecht, Frisch or Schlink.
At an advanced level Jura Soyfer could play a meaningful role in a course on the way the German language is being renegotiated through writers with a multicultural or migrant background. They critically reflect on and change the language. In this regard Jura Soyfer can be compared to writers such as Yoko Tawada or Rafik Shami. This is in line with the demand for curriculum transformation that was made during the student protests from 2015-2017 at South African universities. There is a particular interest in authors who are not part of the literary canon since they disrupt and change normative ways of seeing.