"The Ballad of Poor Jacob formed part of a camp show called What a life!, meant to represent the main aspects of camp life and staged in September 1940. Elias wrote it for the second series of performances. The ballad relates the story of the eternal Jew – ending up between the lines wherever he appears, with the fighting parties finally reaching an agreement to his cost. Thus the chorus recites: ‘Und dann schlugen alle im Verein auf den armen Jakob ein’ (And then everyone ganged up together to beat up poor Jacob). The ballad is written for a speaker, chorus and piano, and it is a peculiar mixture of prose and verse. Gál’s music, which distinctly reflects his qualities as an opera composer, begins to play when prose turns into verse and closes the periodically recurring episodes with formal intermezzi." 

source: Heike Hammer: Hermann Korte’s valedictory lecture on Die Ballade vom Armen Jakob and its first staging in Germany, in: Figurations, Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation, no. 13,  June 2000