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Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 19
In turn, this tendency makes it diffi
cult for scholars today to indentify archival
evidence that points to Jewish participation in popular culture.
Jewish Volkssänger not only violated the accepted norms of decency and artic-
ulated salacious ideas, but they also sometimes attacked bourgeois values directly.
Th
e aforementioned composer Alexander Krakauer provi
des a key example of
a Jewish artist who engaged in this kind of anti-bourgeois performan
ce.28 His
songs, which have a radically pessimistic basic tenor and are deeply disillusioned,
celebrate the destruction of positive sentiments such as love, joy, and success.
Above all, marriage and the assurance that marriage brings happiness are frequent
targets of his sarcasm. In one of his songs, he even describes marriage as suicide.29
Krakauer was not alone in his criticism of marriage and family life. Th
is critique
of traditional bourgeois values formed a recurrent and central theme in many
pieces composed and performed by Jewish Volkssänger.30 Above all, this critique
entailed an examination of traditional Jewish gender relationships, according to
which women sometimes played the role of family breadwinner.31
Jewish Volkssänger tended to oppose social conventions and were therefore
provocative. At times, the pieces that they performed were considered by many
to be off
ensive and obscene. No matter how these performances were under-
stood at the time, one thing remains certain: these performers and artists acted
as anything but guardians of bourgeois values. Th
is ribald behavior has not only
contributed to their overall neglect in the Jewish press at the turn of the century,
but this lacuna also creates diffi
culties for contemporary historians who endeavor
to integrate such artists and their work into their historical narratives. Most of
these historians assume that Jews habitually adopted bourgeois values.32
Th e Historiography of Acculturation
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, academic studies on Jews in
Austria were rather rare.33 And only a few such studies refl ected larger interna-
tional trends in their methodological approach. But in the late 1980s, a shift
to ok place in the Austrian research landscape. In the wake of the Waldheim af-
fair, initiatives were established that ushered in an intensive examination of the
history of Jews and Judaism in Austria.34 Without wishing to reconstruct here
the multiplicity of activities that resulted from this larger cultural examination,
I mention here only the most salient aspects, which have also found a perma-
nent institutional foothold. Th
e most important institution, whose foundation
was announced at the height of international criticism of Austria’s engagement
with its Nazi past, is the Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdi
sches Museum der Stadt
Wien).35 Since Danielle Spera took over the management of the institution in
2010, the Jewish Museum Vienna has signifi
cantly shaped the national conver-
sation regarding Jewish history in Austria. Th
e Institute for Jewish Histor y in
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.
Entangled Entertainers
Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Title
- Entangled Entertainers
- Subtitle
- Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Author
- Klaus Hödl
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Date
- 2019
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-78920-031-7
- Size
- 14.86 x 23.2 cm
- Pages
- 196
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
- International
Table of contents
- Introduction 1
- 1. Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic 13
- 2. Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 44
- 3. Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger 78
- 4. Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 121
- 5. From Difference to Similarity 148
- Conclusion 163
- Bibliography 166
- Index 179