Page - 129 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | 129 European context of historicism. Likewise, the notion of an idyll on the Vien- nese periphery that was largely free of the imponderability of the present was a reaction to processes of modernization, the eff ects of which were at once felt in people’s immediate environments, and to the orientation toward the future that industrialization brought with it.33 Historicism not only imbued the past with great importance, but also allowed for a pluralization of the past.34 It was accompanied by a loosening of traditions and an undercutting of standardized interpretations of history.35 Th is fundamental openness toward pluralistic inter- pretations of the past made it possible for Jews to introduce their own ideas about the history of Vienna to the contemporary discourse on modernity, which, like their conceptions of Old Vienna, diff ered from those of non-Jews. Th e open juxtaposition of diff erent representations of history was not to last long. At the end of the nineteenth century, professional historians, experts, and conservationists impeded laymen from interpreting the past, and these profes- sionals alone increasingly determined how it was to be construed. A single, com- prehensive narrative developed out of many histories presented to the public at museums and exhibitions. History no longer led people to “empathize,” and the past was no longer “felt,” but rather interpreted and rationalized according to strict methodology. Th e majority of the population who were enthusiastic about history thereby lost their access to the subject. In other words, it became foreign to them. Consequently, there was a renunciation of the past and an orientation toward the present. We observe this reversal in the understanding of time in many areas of art and literature, as well as in numerous academic disciplines, and it was a t ransnational phenomenon. It found clear expression in the works of the Impressionists, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, particularly in Claude Monet’s painting Quai du Louvre. Th e painting depicts people strolling in the city from the high vantage point of an onlooker. In the process, the observer turns his or her back on the Old Masters in the museums. For them, prosaic movement in the here and now was far more signifi cant than the creative endeavors of long-dead painters.36 Felix Salten provides a concrete example of this shift toward the present. Spe- cifi cally, it concerns his reaction to the demolition of t he Stalehner in 1907. Th e Stalehner was a tavern where Volkssänger groups held performances. It was located in Hernals, on the city’s outskirts, and symbolized the Old Viennese way of life. Correspondingly, the daily paper Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt evoked this when it wrote about the demolition of the Stalehner. Th e report maintains a maudlin tone throughout, and its representation of the history of the locale idealizes its lo- cation in the outskirts.37 By contrast, Salten’s commentary on the disappearance of the Stalehner is rather distanced. For him, the demise of the Stalehner meant the loss of a place where people of diff erent social origins could come together and fraternize.38 Nevertheless, he recognized that the conditions necessary for This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.