Page - 109 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 109 In addition to the close professional connections that Jewish and non-Jewish Volkssänger shared (which I discussed in chapter 2), they also had numerous pri- vate groups or in-crowds, a phenomenon that even involved Hirsch and his later opponents in the Volkssänger war. An individual’s Jewishness did not matter. Jews and non-Jews not only ate together and celebrated their festivals together, but also maintained intimate relationships and sometimes married each other. Salomon Fischer, who married Gisela Josefi ne Pichler in a civil ceremony in 1905 after he had separated from his second wife, Mitzi Jäger, was one of the Jewish Volkssänger who had an interdenominational marriage. In this context, we can also mention Josef Armin. He met his wife Kathi Rieder, a singer, during a stay in Lemberg (Lvov). Th ey then moved to Vienna, where they initially worked together for the Hirsch ensemble.118 Th e world of Jewish and non-Jewish Volkssänger was closely intertwined and sometimes marked by entirely contradictory developments. Antisemitism and Jewish–non-Jewish intimacy coexisted alongside Jewish diff erence and mental similarities between Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues. On the one hand, Jewish Volkssänger ensembles, as I will demonstrate in the following, belonged to an Auff ührungsgemeinschaft (community of performers), meaning that they had their own cultural milieu and perhaps even demonstrated their own separate “Jewish” humor. On the other hand, these groups performed the same farces and bur- lesques as the non-Jewish ensembles, suggesting that they all shared a common understanding of humor and roguishness, in particular the specifi c contexts that comedians poked fun at for the audience’s amusement. It is interesting to note that the plays that Jewish groups performed were often written by Karl Rötzer. Th e Volkssänger war apparently had no detrimental eff ects on this relationship. Only a few days after its completion, the S. Fischer Society introduced Rötzer’s Alt- und Jung-Heidelberg (Old and young Heidelberg). Members of the ensemble included, among others, one of Albert Hirsch’s daughters and her husband Karl Kassina, who had actively supported his father-in-law during the disputes with Recher and Rötzer.119 Before the confl ict arose over the Folies Caprice, Hirsch also benefi ted from Rötzer’s ingenuity. In 1896, he produced the play Ein Wiener in Constantinopel oder im Harem! (A Viennese in Constantinople or in the ha- rem!).120 But non-Jewish ensembles also staged pieces containing Jewish themes, such as when the Ludwig Kirnbauer Singspiel Hall performed Der Herr Hekler (Th e lord Hekler) by Louis Taufstein (1870–1942).121 Th e play portrays hidden and accepted forms of Jewishness, the characters use a variety of common Yiddish terms, and only a cooperative Bohemian servant named Ladislaus suggests that there is also a non-Jewish world beyond the depicted milieu. Both antisemitism and close private relationships with Jews existed in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century and were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Th e two may have even been inseparable.122 I argue that we can explain this anti- semitism by taking as a point of departure Shulamit Volkov’s concept of the “cul- This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.