Page - 81 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 81 Another court case concerns a complaint that Josef Armin, in his capacity as playwright, brought against the director of the Budapest Orpheum Society, Karl Lechner.10 Armin was under cont ract to write six comedies for the Budapest Orpheum over the course of 1905. In exchange for these six pieces, he was to receive 300 crowns and be listed on the group’s playbills as “in-house dramaturg” (Hausdramaturg). Although Armin deli vered the set number of plays, Lechner withheld paying him the total sum of the fee that they had agreed upon. Lechner stated that his reason for refusing payment in full was that two of the six farces that Armin wrote were so obscene that the group was unable to perform them. Th is might sound surprising coming from Lechner. Th e Budapest Orpheum had a reputation for putting on indecent plays. Armin could not believe that the director of this particular ensemble was suddenly keen on preserving decency. Th erefore, Armin sued Lechner in court for the entire amount that they had contractually agreed upon. Ultimately, the judge was able to persuade both sides to reach an agreement.11 Th e two court cases that I just mentioned were the result of ordinary confl icts that can happen anytime or anywhere business interests are involved. Such disputes were common among Volkssänger. We might also even describe the Volkssänger war as a trivial dispute for much of its duration. However, what clearly distin- guishes the “war” from the “Schöpf aff air” and the lawsuit between Armin and Lechner was the fact that the Volkssänger war provoked anti-Jewish sentiments. Th e reason for this distinction may well be rooted in the particular constellations that made up these individual confl icts. In these two instances, antisemitism, as a potential strategy for defaming the Jewish party in a dispute, was a factor neither in the Schöpf case, which happened to involve no Jews, nor in the second case, in which the plaintiff Armin was Jewish and Lechner managed at least one pre- dominantly Jewish ensemble. Th e situation among the Viennese Volkssänger was usually no diff erent, even when Jews and non-Jews faced each other as opponents in a trial. In this con- text, I refer back to the director of the Apollo, Ben Tieber, whom I discussed in chapter 2. He seems to have been a confrontational person. He often pursued lawsuits against the managers of other singspiel venues. Th ese lawsuits usually entailed Tieber and his rivals attempting to lure performers away from one an- other. Although the parties involved in these confl icts did not hesitate to make fi erce accusations and sometimes even off ensive allegations, Tieber’s Jewishness never played a role. We see a lack of antisemitic sentiment, for example, in a con- fl ict between Tieber and Arthur Brill, manager of the Colosseum.12 Th e dispute revolved around the parodist Lene Land and the performances she promis ed to give. She was under contract to perform at the Apollo in January and February 1906. At the same time, she had a commitment to perform at the Colosseum. She took the stage at the Colosseum rather than at the Apollo. Tieber obtained a court-issued stage ban against Land, but it didn’t prevent her from performing. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.