Page - 110 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

110 | Entangled Entertainers tural code.” According to this concept, antisemitic thinking was part of the basic attitude of a large part of the Viennese population, irrespective of whether an individual who entertained antisemitic ideas exhibited animosities against Jews. A person’s antisemitic views indicated that they were familiar with (Viennese) non-Jewish society. “Th us, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance,” Volkov argues, “came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice.”123 Individuals could therefore bring Judeophobic sentiment into alignment with their specifi c personal relations with Jews. An observation that Arthur Schnitzler made in his 1908 novel Th e Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie) is illuminating in this context. In the novel, Schnitzler described the Habsburg metropolis immediately before the turn of the twentieth century as a city in which antisemitism was no- ticeably on the rise, but the relationships between Jews and non-Jews remained unaff ected.124 Th e Volkssänger were a part of this ambiguous situation too. We see this ambi- guity exemplifi ed in the antisemitic body of songs that also belonged to the per- forming musicians’ repertoire. As part of Viennese society, above all through the anchoring of the Volkssänger in Viennese culture, it should come as no surprise that these songs expressed the attitudes of the petty-bourgeois Viennese milieu, including antisemitic ideas, in one form or another. One of the notorious authors of antisemitic texts was Carl Lorens (1851– 1901), who was also one of the most important composers of Wienerlieder. He owed his breakthrough not least to Julius Löwy, a Jewish editor of the Illustr irtes Wiener Extrablatt, who reprinted the song “D’Mutterliab” by Lorens in the news- paper and helped him gain prominence.125 But that did not stop Lorens from incorporating anti-Jewish stereotypes into his songs. His satirical song “Jeiteles, Mauscheles, Isak Silberstein,” for example, focuses on the ostentatious wealth of the Jews, which even the stock market crash failed to diminish. According to Lorens’s song, “Jewish” wealth was evident in the Jewish-owned Palais am Wiener Ring, in the guests of the Hotel Sacher, where primarily Jews dined, as well as in the opera, whose ticket holders were predominantly Jewish. Wealthy Jews thus frequented expensive locales that Volkssänger audiences tended to avoid because they could not aff ord them. Due to the presence of Jewish wealth, no matter how much this group represented a minute fraction of the overall population, Jews were seen as the polar opposite of popular “folk” culture.126 Th e song “Der Jüd” (Th e Jew) demonstrates, albeit in a more vulgar fashion, this popular image of Jews. Th e explicit nature of the song’s antisemitic lyrics might well seem jarring: “Who goes in and out of the stock exchange all year round? Th e Jew. Who drinks champagne at the Hotel Sacher? Th e Jew . . . who eats everything but nothing from the pig? Th e Jew, the Jew, the Jew. Who takes 20 percent even on a gulden? Th e Jew.”127 Lorenz even composed some of his songs in jargon to emphasize the foreignness of Jews using linguistic codes. For example, in his song “Der kosher This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.