Page - 59 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 | 59 ensembles, gesture toward the protagonists’ Jewishness by implementing osten- sibly immutable physical characteristics. We see such characteristics in the play At the Marriage Broker’s, which the S. Fischer Society performed in 1903.70 As the title suggests, the plot takes place in an agency that off ers customers match- making and marriage brokering. Audiences would have recognized its owner, Mr. Zimt (literally “Mr. Cinnamon”), as Jewish on account of his use of a number of Yiddish terms, such as chutzpah bokher (Chuzpejüngel), shiksa, geschmusst, and ganef. His employee, a young man named Leiser, is portrayed as a fun-loving type, who likes to smoke and seeks the acquaintance of non-Jewish women. One day, a woman comes to the offi ce, seeking Zimt’s matchmaking services to fi nd a groom. Unfortunately, she fi nds all the suggested candidates unappealing. When Leiser also expresses a desire to marry during their conversation, Zimt laughs at him. Zimt declares that Leiser’s big nose will prevent him from fi nding a bride. Th e customer, however, thinks Leiser is very attractive. In the end, Leiser and the woman promise to marry each other and plan to emigrate to America. At the Marriage Broker’s employs the trope of a big nose, an attribute often associated with Jews, and empties it of its stigmatizing power, interpreting it as a sign of beauty. Th e reversal of the original signifi cance of this physical character- istic occurs by way of a straightforward critique of the anti-Jewish stereotype.71 Taking the work of Homi Bhabha as a point of departure, we can understand this reversal as an act of “mimicry,” whereby a common, pejorative image associated with Jews is incorporated but then reinterpreted and given new meaning through its use in a new context.72 We also see this reference to a particular kind of nose, drained of its negative meaning and employed by Jewish authors of Volkssänger pieces as code signaling the characters’ Jewishness, in a short parody of Adolfi , Albert Hirsch’s son. In this piece, Adolfi talks about a woman whom he invites to accompany him to the Gä nsehäufl , a public bathing beach in Vienna. Th ere, he notices his friend Löbel, “[who has] a nose the size of a piece of Th onet furni- ture.”73 We can identify another example of a positive reworking of the “Jewish” nose in a 1909 play by Josef Armin. In this play, the plot revolves around a court case, during which the judge asks the (Jewish) defendant what her religion is. Before the defendant has a chance to answer, the plaintiff jumps in and says that everyone can see that she’s Jewish on account of her nose.74 Unlike the signifi cance that it had in antisemitic discourse of the time, the nose has no pejorative meaning in the examples that I have discussed. Th e trope to the “Jewish” nose often employed by Jewish Volkssänger serves, I argue, to in- validate the antisemitic stereotype rather than to strengthen it. Salomon Fischer’s son followed in his father’s footsteps and chose a life in the theater. Emil Fischer and his wife, who performed with various groups under the stage name Charlotte Kranz, established their own ensemble in 1903 and chose as their venue Zum römisc hen Kaiser (the Roman Emperor), located in the Prater.75 However, Emil Fischer was unable to achieve the same kind of success This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.