Page - 87 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 87 months, until the confl ict climaxed in the Volkssänger war. Whether Hirsch artic- ulated this position because of xenophobic sentiment or as a strategy for protect- ing his own interests was not clear at the time. Th e “Polish” in Vienna Th e fact that Recher even brought up the “Polish” ensembles probably had some- thing to do with the fact that a few days before the meeting at the Goldener Luchs there had been a highly publicized police intervention in two establish- ments in Leopoldstadt where groups performed using Jewish jargon. Th e police raided Marietta Kriebaum and Paula Baumann’s ensembles (see chapter 2). Th e police crackdown brought an abrupt end to the short-lived hype about Jewish ensembles from the eastern part of the Habsburg monarchy. Performances were completely prohibited. Th e reason that the police gave was that “Jewish jargon cannot be permitted because no one understands here.”40 Th e real reason, how- ever, was censorship. Groups had to receive approval in advance for each piece that they wished to perform. Th e two ensembles that the police shut down were accused of performing their farces in “Jewish jargon” after previously submitting their manuscripts to the authorities in German. Several anonymous letters claim- ing that the two groups were deviating signifi cantly from the German texts that they had submitted and were performing their plays in jargon triggered police action. Th e ban remained in place, even after Albert Hirsch, whom the police consulted as a language expert, testifi ed that the plays in question not only were in compliance but also demonstrated markedly patriotic content.41 Th e only individual in the Viennese entertainment industry who had reason to fear Marietta Kriebaum and Paula Baumann’s groups as potential competition for a numerically limited audience was Fritz Lung, the owner of the singspiel license for the aforementioned Edelhofer’s Leopoldstadt Folk Orpheum. He was clearly the party responsible for denouncing them to the police. Th e slander against Kriebaum and Baumann’s groups was thus more the result of competition among Jewish groups than Judeophobia. Th e First Austrian “Volkssänger and Vocal Artists’ Day” (27 October 1902) Despite the enthusiasm with which the Volkssänger attending the meeting at the end of 1901 greeted the news that Hungarian authorities had overturned the pro- hibition against German-language performances in Budapest, their excitement was to remain brief. Because the authorities followed up the announcement with no course of action, Viennese ensembles continued to be harassed in Hungary. It was nearly a year before the Viennese Volkssänger could once again formulate This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.