Page - 139 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewish Spaces of Retreat at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | 139 In the following scene, Moritz Beer informs Spitzer that thieves have emptied the till at his bank. Spitzer immediately accuses Kohn of the misdeed and calls the police. Yet he is too nervous to speak on the phone himself and therefore has Beer do it for him. Beer tries to give the police a profi le of Kohn, beginning with his family name. Th e policeman on the other end of the line tells him that because there are 3,700 Kohns in the city, Beer must give more specifi c details. Th ereupon, Beer gives Kohn’s fi rst name, which is of no further help because there is a total of 2,826 Leopold Kohns. Even the tip that Kohn is small in stature helps little, since almost 1,200 Leopold Kohns are short. And Beer’s reference to Kohn’s hook nose is superfl uous, because according to the policeman, all Kohns have this type of nose.80 It does not take long before a policeman calls on the Spitzer family. However, instead of relaying the capture of the fugitive Kohn, he notifi es them of Leopold Kohn’s probable suicide. Th e policeman tells them that Kohn was seen jumping off a bridge into the Danube. Witness descriptions of the suicide leave no doubt that it was him. In order to close the case once and for all, the Spitzer family must help identify the deceased. When the policeman mentions that the perpetrator had twisted legs, curly hair, and a hooked nose and was very small, Spitzer’s daughters are certain that it was Kohn. Marcus Spitzer is nevertheless skeptical of Kohn’s suicide because he did not enjoy taking a bath and therefore would not have willingly jumped into the Danube.81 Only when the police offi cer shows him an article of clothing belonging to the drowned man is Spitzer convinced that Kohn has committed suicide. In the fi nal part of the play, Josef, the bank’s porter, enters. He tells Herr Spitzer that he has taken his wife’s suitcase to the train station. Spitzer is shocked by Malvine’s departure. When Joseph adds that he saw her with Kohn in a pri- vate compartment, Herr Spitzer is fully perplexed. Th is would not only mean that Kohn was still alive, but also that his wife had been unfaithful to him. Josef hands Spitzer a letter from Kohn, in which he admits to stealing the money from the register at the bank because he needed it for the journey. Amidst this general chaos, Malvine reappears. She tells her husband that she had not really planned to abscond with Kohn. Instead, she only wanted to shock Spitzer because he had been acting so cruelly toward her of late. In this regard, the Spitzer family is reunited, while the wrongdoer Kohn fl ees to America. Assumptions course through the entire plot of Little Kohn. Th e protagonists do not have time to question or prove them, which in turn leads to distrust among them. Th eir encounters are too brief and fl eeting for them to be able to respond to and really get to know each other. Impressions and suspicions therefore defi ne their immediate surroundings, instead of facts. In this context, Kohn appears as a thief and a heartbreaker. However, it becomes clear at the end of the performance that his surroundings have forced him into this role; he does not play it willingly. By contrast, Spitzer, who sees himself as Kohn’s victim and makes a great fuss This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.