Page - 165 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Conclusion | 165 Just as the Volkssänger take up the notions of a Jewish nose and Jewish speech patterns and attempt to strip them of their antisemitic sentiment, the distorted portrayal of the Jewish man was intended to dissolve the widespread prejudice of his eff eminacy into laughter. Th e frequent reference to the feeble Jewish man underscores that Viennese Jews were preoccupied with the stereotype of the ef- feminate Jew and endeavored to respond to it. An analysis of Volkssänger plays, I have argued throughout this study, allows us insight into the everyday life of the Jews around 1900, their sensitivities, problems, and concerns. Th e explorations I have undertaken in this book began with the question why the topic of Jews in the general Viennese popular culture around 1900 has re- mained relatively unexplored. One of the reasons for this neglect may be the analytical tools that historians use. In the following chapters, I have introduced Jewish Volkssänger groups and a series of plays that they produced and performed. By analyzing these works and their historical contexts, I have deduced several features that constituted Jewishness among the Jewish Volkssänger. Th eir relations with non-Jewish colleagues, in summary, were notably complex and interwoven. Dichotomous categorizations cannot account for this complexity. Th ese Jewish– non-Jewish interactions were also fraught with tension, and anti-Jewish hostility sometimes expressed itself. Antisemitic sentiment, however, was likely less pro- nounced among the Volkssänger than in other areas of Viennese society. Notes 1. Hannes Leidinger, Die Bedeutung der Selbstauslöschung: Aspekte der Suizidproblematik in Österreich von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Zweiten Republik (Innsbruck: Studien- Verlag, 2012). 2. Because many scholars have already written about the prejudice of the “eff eminate Jew” based on physical and medical characteristics, I do not discuss it in detail here. On this, see in particular Sander L. Gilman, Th e Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); Klaus Hödl, Die Pathologisierung des jüdischen Körpers: Antisemitismus, Geschlecht und Medizin im Fin de Siècle (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1997), 164–314. 3. Albert Hirsch, “Der Apostel vom Schottenfeld,” Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv [NÖLA in subsequent citations] (Th eaterzensur), Box 21/22 (1902), 51. 4. Bernhard Haskel, Im schwarzen Rössl, NÖLA (Zensur), Box 115/35 (1898), 81. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.