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Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | 123
create a sense of fellowship in the context of Viennese congeniality and hospital-
ity (G
emütlichkeit).5 He wrote about Brady, a tavern that off ered entertainment
in the city center: “And as young princes, offi cers, old rakes, clerks, bourgeois,
coachmen, and young women sit next to each other and sing, it feels as if one is in
a very small town, where the residents come together to form a particular kind of
family.”6 Th us, for Salten, the outskirts were not necessarily a specifi
c geographic
location in the city, but rather a place that enabled the creation of a community
that might include both Jews and non-Jews.
For Tina Blau and Felix Salten, Old Vienna and the periphery served as spaces
free from the unrest of modernity, which therefore represented a bucolic coun-
terpoint to the realities of everyday life. Further, both places evoked the past.
Old Vienna stood for a lost Vienna—fi rst and foremost for the Bi edermeier
era—although it could also reach further into the past. By contrast, the city’s
outlying districts were associated with a contemplative life in a seemingly vil-
lage-like atmosphere that had already disappeared in the rest of Vienna, or was
vanishing in principle, as it was being displaced by the modernization of the
urban surroundings.7
Incidentally, sites of retreat from the present into history were also represented
in architecture. Sometimes the facades of the palaces on Vienna’s Ri
ngstrasse that
Jews owned evinced a strong longing for a world in which the chasm between
Jews and non-Jews could be eradicated or at least bridged.8
Jewish Diff erence in the Topos of Old Vienna
Within the realms of art and literature, Tina Blau and Felix Salten depicted spaces
of retreat that were transfi gured by nostalgia. Anchored in the old Viennese past,
they largely correspond with the refuge construed by Vienna’s general popula-
tion.9 In Old Vienna, they likewise perceived an imagined counterpoint to the
transfi
gured, modern metropolis on the Danube.10 Nevertheless, it appears that
there are two substantial diff
erences between Jewish and non-Jewish conceptions
of space. Th
ese relate to the function of Old Vienna. For Jews, the embellishment
of the city’s recent history did not merely serve as a critique of the present. Rather,
Old Vienna was a foil that allowed them to inscribe themselves into the history of
the city. A Jewish presence in the past was meant to serve as a counterpoint to the
widespread view that Jews were foreign, immigrants, who did not truly belong to
society. Although the topos of Old Vienna did not generally imply a reference to
Jewish existence, Jews who represented it foregrounded this very notion. Indeed,
they presented examples of a “shared history” (to use a term prevalent today).11
One exception among the general representations of Old Vienna, in which
Jewish life in the past is indeed referenced, is found in a series of articles in the
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt. It repeatedly presents buildings that are tied to a
Jewish existence in Vienna. For instance, in a text from the early twentieth cen-
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Entangled Entertainers
Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Title
- Entangled Entertainers
- Subtitle
- Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Author
- Klaus Hödl
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Date
- 2019
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-78920-031-7
- Size
- 14.86 x 23.2 cm
- Pages
- 196
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
- International
Table of contents
- Introduction 1
- 1. Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic 13
- 2. Jewish Volkssänger and Musical Performers in Vienna around 1900 44
- 3. Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger 78
- 4. Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 121
- 5. From Difference to Similarity 148
- Conclusion 163
- Bibliography 166
- Index 179