Page - 26 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

26 | Entangled Entertainers Viennese Jewish newspapers explicitly established their specifi c scope in their program implementations. For example, in its fi rst issue from 1 January 1899, the newspaper Die Wahrheit declared that it would “foster all things capable of awakening and preserving Jewish life.”67 Die Wahrheit confi rmed that it would focus on Jewish themes and concerns. Th e statement indicates only implicitly that it would report on general social events, insofar as they concerned Jewish in- terests. Many Jewish national and Zionist media were even more explicit in their commitment to reporting specifi cally on Jewish matters. Die Welt stated, “Our weekly newspaper is a ‘Judenblatt’ [a Jewish newspaper]. . . . Die Welt will be the news outlet of the men who wish to lead Judaism from this moment in time to better times in the future.”68 Th e publication then focuses solely on Jewish interests—specifi cally Jewish Zionist interests. Selective Reporting in the Jewish Press With regard to the programmatic establishment of news reporting, we might expect that Jewish media overlooked events that involved Jews if these events did not entail specifi c aspects of Jewish religion or culture or if they were of no relevance to larger portions of the Viennese Jewish community. We can see the legitimacy of this argument in the example of the aff air surrounding the suicide of the Jewish merchant Heinrich Löwy at the beginning of 1899. Th e man who committed suicide was the owner of a commission business located in the city center of Vienna. He made his living by purchasing goods from a Bohemian supplier and reselling them to Viennese businessmen. Unfortunately, and to his detriment, Löwy’s customers included members of a gang of swindlers and rack- eteers. Moriz Rosenberger, Samuel Schmilowitz, Sigmund Kohn, Samuel Weiss, and several others started sham businesses, which they outfi tted with goods from Löwy. Th ey failed to pay him, but they nevertheless sold the goods to other mer- chants. Löwy was thereby driven to ruin. He saw suicide as the only way out of his misery. On the last day of 1898, he arrived home late for lunch—the main meal of the day. His family was already sitting at the table, waiting for him. After entering the apartment, he walked wordlessly past his wife and children, opened a window in an adjoining room, and plunged from the fourth fl oor to the court- yard below. Heavily injured, he was carried to the apartment of the caretaker living on the ground fl oor, where those helping the seriously injured man awaited the ambulance. Löwy succumbed to his injuries while in the hospital.69 Th e newspapers were full of reports of his tragic death in the fi rst few days of January. He seemed to symbolize the powerlessness of individual people in the face of criminal activities. Despite his diligence and a degree of business acumen, Löwy was unable to prevent his social collapse. Th e bottom line seemed to be that bourgeois virtues off ered no protection against unfeeling fellow citizens. But although the perpetrators, as well as the injured party, were all Jews and although This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.