It's up to us

"It's Up to Us!" introduces American readers to a kind of Austrian literature which, though not art of the literary canon, has proved of such enduring value and relevance that even histories of literature can no longer overlook it. Written during the depression of the 1930s, Soyfer's works stand out as documents of the human spirit in an inhuman time. The volume includes all of Soyfer's major works and selections from his political verse and short prose. His five plays combine political engagement with the tradition of Viennese popular comedy in the spirit of Nestroy: The End of the World, Soyfer's warning against impending world destruction; Trip to Paradise, protesting technological determinism; Astoria, a satire on the State as an inhuman abstraction, Vineta, a surrealist nightmare of a dead society, and Broadway-Melody 1492, an anti-Columbus play written fifty years before the controversial quincentennial. Soyfer's most important prose work, Thus Died a Party, combining political analysis and literary imagination, examines the underlying causes of the Social Democratic defeat in 1934. The volume closes with Soyfer's "Dachau Song," a triumph of human dignity over barbarism.