Page - 37 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 37 ticular historical perspective can infl uence the assessment of Jewish–non-Jewish relationships and how controversial this assertion can in fact be. Notes 1. Barbara Hahn, Die Jüdin Pallas Athene: Auch eine Th eorie der Moderne (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch, 2005), 121; Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Histor- ical Ba’al Shem Tov (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013 [fi rst edition 1996]), 56f. 2. Martin Schenk was born in Vienna. He made his debut in 1881 at the Deutsches Th eater in Budapest and subsequently performed at various venues throughout Europe. In 1884, he switched to vaudeville, performing fi rst as a member of the Establissement Drechsler in Vienna, before taking the stage again in Budapest. After performing in Cologne, Munich, Danzig, and other places, he was engaged with the Budapester Orpheumsgesellschaft. Later, he moved to the Gartenbau variety show, where he garnered considerable success as a director and comedian. See Das Variété 17 (25 February 1903): 1. 3. Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt [IWE in subsequent citations] 266 (25 September 1904): 18. 4. Mel Gordon and Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), 7–8. 5. Th e language in this quotation is reminiscent of the anti-Jewish polemic that Richard Wagner (1813–83) expressed in his 1850 essay Das Judentum und die Musik (Judaism in music). In this essay, he writes that “the Jew who is innately incapable . . . of articulating himself to us artistically . . . [has] nonetheless been able to attain mastery of public taste in the most widespread of modern art forms, i.e., music” (Gottfried H. Wagner, “Ni- etzsches Dynamit in der Bewertung des Judentums und Wagners Antisemitismus,” in Rudolf Kreis, Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden [Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1995], 12). 6. For more on this, see Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). At times, mauscheln (speaking Yiddish or Yiddish-infl ected Ger- man) was also associated with anatomical characteristics attributed to Jews. See Bernhard Blechmann, “Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Juden” (published medical dissertation, Dorpat, 1882), 11. 7. IWE 205 (25 July 1904): 4. 8. For more on Modl, Pick, and Krakauer, see below. 9. For more on this stereotype, see Jay Geller, “Of Mice and Mensa: Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Genius,” Centennial Review 38, no. 2 (1994): 361–85. 10. See Eleonore Lappin, “Jüdische Lebenserinnerungen: Rekonstruktionen von jüdischer Kindheit und Jugend im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Wien und die jüdische Erfah- rung 1900–1938: Akkulturation, Antisemitismus, Zionismus, ed. Frank Stern and Barbara Eichinger (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 35. 11. Harpists were the cultural predecessors of the Volkssänger. Th e Volkssänger had replaced them in the entertainment industry by the end of the fi rst third of the nineteenth cen- tury. See Hans Hauenstein, Chronik des Wienerliedes: Ein Streifzug von den Minnesängern über den lieben Augustin, den Harfenisten und Volkssängern bis in die heutige Zeit (Kloster- neuburg: Jasomirgott, 1976), 35–70. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.