Page - 135 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | 135 information exchanged and coordinated acts with one another.”63 Further, these mutually created and interdependent experiences can build alliances and connect people to one another. In Stefan Zweig’s abovementioned horse race at the Prater, for example, there is a charged communal sense of conviviality that brings the on- lookers together as a group and minimizes their diff erences. Likewise, for Salten, collective action and intensifying emotionality are the most important prerequi- sites for a new sense of solidarity that transcends divisive nationalisms and ethnic isolation. In a description of the dancing at the Prater, he writes: For all the simple and humble ones who stream into Vienna from the empire’s colorful provinces, for all the youth who move to the metropolis from the villages and smaller cities, . . . there is comfort here. . . . Th e musicians play an Austrian Ländler. . . . And now Steiermark, Salzburg, Tirol are here. . . . Th e music plays a Kreuzpolka. . . . Now Bohemia is here, the sunny hilly country of Moravia is here. . . . Th e orchestra be- gins playing a Hungarian czárdás, and now Hungary is here. . . . Here no one revolts against the song of another.64 Independent of their backgrounds and traditions, the dancers move to the rhythm of the music and merge into a group of boisterous revelers. Th e following section analyzes Jewish Volkssänger plays in which the diff erent regimentations of time—the fragmented present and the expanded present ex- perienced as ongoing—play a major role. Th e fi rst piece, Der kleine Kohn (Little Kohn), demonstrates that momentary experiences of time make it impossible to build interpersonal relationships and can lead to antisemitism. In the sec- ond piece, Die Reise nach Grosswardein (Th e journey to Grosswardein) by Josef Armin, the extended present plays a signifi cant role, as it leads to the develop- ment of relationships between Jews and non-Jews. Th e Fleeting Present Georg Simmel articulated an insightful analysis of just how much a present that is constructed of selective, ephemeral impressions prevents human interaction and leads to individual isolation. Th e German painter Less er Ury (1861–1931), who like Simmel was Jewish, was also a sharp observer of this context. In his 1889 painting Café, we see a guest smoking a cigar and a few tables away another man who is absorbed in his newspaper. Although they do not sit far from one another, there is nothing to bring them together. Outside the coff eehouse, pedes- trians hurry by, and life in the metropolis takes its course. Despite the lively bus- tle on the nearby street and the presence of other people in the café, each guest remains alone, virtually trapped in an impenetrable cocoon.65 Lesser Ury was the fi rst painter in Germany to capture the experience of big-city dwellers, while his colleagues often remained imprisoned in the past and devoted themselves to This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.