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INTRODUCTION
d
On an icy December day in the year 1900, a mother was found wandering
with four children along the bank of the Danube Canal in Vienna. She
made a move as if to throw herself and her little ones from a bridge into the cold
water. A lineman heard the children’s cries and was able to keep the woman from
following through with her plan. He brought the family to the nearest police sta-
tion. Th
ere, it was learned that the suicidal woman was an impoverished peddler
who could no longer feed her children and was facing eviction. Her husband, a
“wandering performer,” had taken a job as a ventriloquist and was working far
away from the city. In the last letter she had received from him, her husband had
advised her to sell the bedsprings and the kitchenware and use the money to buy
food for the children.1 She had eaten nothing in the two days leading up to her
suicide attempt. After these living conditions came to light, a plea was made to
the Viennese population, a call for help for this family in their distress. It was ru-
mored that the money collected amounted to a considerable sum. Th
e donations,
however, did not result in a sustained improvement in the family’s situation. After
the family once again accumulated debts they could not pay off
, the woman dis-
appeared with her children, leaving the apartment behind. What happened to the
family following this episode remains unknown.2
By and large, the social situation of the Katz family (the family named in
the previous anecdote) scarcely diff
ered from that of thousands of other Jewish
families in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twen-
tieth century. A signifi
cant number of them lived in dire circumstances and had
few resources to cope with the diffi
culties they encountered over the course of
their everyday lives. Jews, and non-Jews as well, sometimes lived in dark, damp
quarters with several people crammed into one room, often sharing a single bed.
Sometimes families also temporarily housed strangers within their already con-
fi ned domestic spaces, Bettgeher (bed lodgers) who rented a bed or a place to sleep
just for the night. Moral delinquency, illness, and social neglect found an ideal
breeding ground in such conditions.3 Some media outlets even described the
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Entangled Entertainers
Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Titel
- Entangled Entertainers
- Untertitel
- Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
- Autor
- Klaus Hödl
- Verlag
- Berghahn Books
- Datum
- 2019
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-78920-031-7
- Abmessungen
- 14.86 x 23.2 cm
- Seiten
- 196
- Kategorien
- Geschichte Vor 1918
- International
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 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