Page - 71 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 | 71 tween various ethnic groups and how to communicate meaning without ambigu- ity dominated political debate at the time and occupied many scholars and intel- lectuals.137 Especially this situation throughout the monarchy infl uenced, for ex- ample, how the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Fritz Mauthner engaged with questions related to language.138 Writers and intellectuals such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and especially Karl Kraus devoted themselves to the question of language’s potential as a form of expression.139 Jewish Volkssänger also entertained these kinds of questions. Viennese Hospitality illustrates how divisions between people are maintained despite—or perhaps even because of—their shared lan- guage and the underlying concept of a German cultural nation. Th e construction of identity based on language thus proves to be a myth. Th e play calls to mind the adage, incorrectly attributed to Karl Kraus, that nothing separates the Germans and the Austrians quite like the language they have in common. Notes 1. Mary Gluck, Th e Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). 2. See the bibliography for additional information. 3. Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1985), 46. 4. Das Variété 17 (25 February 1903): 1. 5. Ruth Beckermann, Die Mazzesinsel: Juden in der Leopoldstadt 1918–1938 (Vienna: Löcker, 1992). 6. Marsha L. Rozenblit, Juden in Wien 1867–1914: Assimilation und Identität (Vienna: Böhlau, 1989), 85, 87. 7. See Peter Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 8. See Andreas Resch, “Die Wiener Kulturwirtschaft um 1910 und die Partizipation von Juden, Tschechen und ‘Staatsfremden,’” in Migration und Innovation um 1900: Perspek- tiven auf das Wien der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Elisabeth Röhrlich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 165. 9. Gluck, Jewish Budapest, 168. 10. Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt (IWE in subsequent citations) 309 (9 November 1899): 8; 310 (10 November 1899): 15. In some instances, the opening date is erroneously given as 1 November 1899. See Johannes A. Löcker, “Vom Donaukanal zum Praterstern,” in Artistenleben auf vergessenen Wegen: Eine Spurensuche in Wien, ed. Birgit Peter, Robert Kaldy-Karo (= Wien – Musik und Th eater 4, Vienna: LIT, 2013), 36. 11. IWE 66 (8 March 1900): 5. 12. IWE 320 (26 September 1899): 19. 13. Verena Schäff er, “Th eater und Varieté im Nestroyhof: 1899 bis 1938. Vier Jahrzehnte theatraler Produktion in der Wiener Leopoldstadt” (unpublished thesis, Vienna, 2008), 42–43. 14. Gerhard Müller-Schwefe, Was haben die aus Shakespeare gemacht! Weitere alte und neue Shakespeare-Parodien (Tübingen: A. Francke, 1993), 75. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.