Page - 56 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

56 | Entangled Entertainers ties of the Lemberg Singspiel Society, in order to benefi t from the popularity that the “Polish” had gained in Vienna.56 Before Marietta Kriebaum ran the Polish Variety Show from Lemberg, she belonged to a troupe in which Käthe and Jo- sef Armi n were also members. Both had been employed for a long time at her husband’s Danzer’s Orpheum, a further indicator that the Kriebaums enjoyed relationships with Jewish colleagues and friends.57 If the Lemberg Singspiel Society performed in Yiddish and if Kriebaum and Baumann’s troupes, following their example, also gave their performances in Yid- dish, then the majority of the Yiddish ensembles performing in Vienna at the time would have been directed by non-Jews. Th is is, to my mind, very unlikely. Th at two groups, led by non-Jewish directors, employed Jewish jargon in their productions is already surprising. But this phenomenon only serves to demon- strate that Jewish jargon was part of the Viennese linguistic landscape and was seen as such. Th is linguistic feature was the result of the overlapping of German, Jewish, Polish, and other cultural and communicative spaces, and we may even understand it as emblematic of the linguistic and cultural plurality of Vienna.58 In any case, non-Jews did not necessarily feel alienated by the use of Jewish jar- gon, especially when they were familiar with the interstitial spaces in which Jews moved and operated. Th is was the case, for example, with the opera singer Leo Slezak (1873–1946 ) from Moravia. He was, as the Illustrirte Wiener Extrablatt writes, a “perfect Aryan [Bravourarier].” However, he is said to have been inti- mately acquainted with Jewish jargon and to have “spoken with a Yiddish accent [gejüdelt],” “as if his cradle had been in Half Asia.”59 And it was a similar situ- ation with Lung and Kriebaum. Marietta Kriebaum and her folk-singer groups demonstrably overlapped with various cultural spaces. Kriebaum was not only active in Leopoldstadt, but she also organized performances in the tavern Zum grünen Th or (the G reen Gate), located in Lerchenfelder Strasse, where she pro- duced both “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” plays.60 And Paula Baumann was not just connected to the Jewish milieu, but also maintained a balancing act between diff erent cultural worlds. After Baumann’s jargon troupe was banned from per- forming, she founded a new group. Th is group’s repertoire included popular folk pieces as well as aspects related to the Jewish world.61 A fi nal reason why it is doubtful that the Lemberg Singspiel Society gave performances in Yiddish concerns a dispute among the Volkssänger regarding the announcement that the “Jewish” group Folies Caprice from Buda pest intended to relocate to Vienna (for more on this, see chapter 3). In particular, the direc- tors of three singspiel theaters that were located right next to the proposed new home of the Folies Caprice protested the move. Th e outraged directors were the managers of the Budapest Orpheum Society, the Lemberg Singspiel Society, and the Folies Comiques. If the “Polish” had indeed performed in Yiddish, then their director would not have perceived the presence of the Folies Caprice to be a threat, because their productions would have targeted a diff erent segment of the This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.