Page - 1 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

INTRODUCTION d On an icy December day in the year 1900, a mother was found wandering with four children along the bank of the Danube Canal in Vienna. She made a move as if to throw herself and her little ones from a bridge into the cold water. A lineman heard the children’s cries and was able to keep the woman from following through with her plan. He brought the family to the nearest police sta- tion. Th ere, it was learned that the suicidal woman was an impoverished peddler who could no longer feed her children and was facing eviction. Her husband, a “wandering performer,” had taken a job as a ventriloquist and was working far away from the city. In the last letter she had received from him, her husband had advised her to sell the bedsprings and the kitchenware and use the money to buy food for the children.1 She had eaten nothing in the two days leading up to her suicide attempt. After these living conditions came to light, a plea was made to the Viennese population, a call for help for this family in their distress. It was ru- mored that the money collected amounted to a considerable sum. Th e donations, however, did not result in a sustained improvement in the family’s situation. After the family once again accumulated debts they could not pay off , the woman dis- appeared with her children, leaving the apartment behind. What happened to the family following this episode remains unknown.2 By and large, the social situation of the Katz family (the family named in the previous anecdote) scarcely diff ered from that of thousands of other Jewish families in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twen- tieth century. A signifi cant number of them lived in dire circumstances and had few resources to cope with the diffi culties they encountered over the course of their everyday lives. Jews, and non-Jews as well, sometimes lived in dark, damp quarters with several people crammed into one room, often sharing a single bed. Sometimes families also temporarily housed strangers within their already con- fi ned domestic spaces, Bettgeher (bed lodgers) who rented a bed or a place to sleep just for the night. Moral delinquency, illness, and social neglect found an ideal breeding ground in such conditions.3 Some media outlets even described the This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.