Seite - 17 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 17 Stage names do not always pose a problem for historians. Occasionally, we fi nd that various studies and publications have already researched individual Jewish artists, comedians, and Volkssänger and identifi ed their real names and identities. Examples include Josef Ar min (1858–1925), who was actually called Josef Ro ttensteiner; Heinrich Eisenbach (1870–1923), the singing comedian of the Budapest Orpheum Society, who was born Heinrich Mandl and also known by the nickname “Wamperl”; Armin Be rg, also known as Hermann Weinberger; and Josef Mü ller, whose real name was Josef Sc hlesinger. Th is is just to name a few, as the list of these artists and performers goes on and on. Th e use of artist names on the part of Jewish artists and Volkssänger engaged in Viennese popular culture around 1900 makes it diffi cult, not only in histor- ical retrospect, to engage in scholarly studies about them. Sometimes even their contemporaries were mistaken about the ethnic-cultural or religious affi liation of these entertainers. We see a particularly interesting example of this kind of error in the announcement of the alleged death of the “humpbacked wine tavern poet [Heurigendichter]” Loisl Ungr ad. He was famous for his “impromptu” Gstan- zeln (short satirical songs), which he performed on the Brettl—the stages where Volkssänger performed. Ungrad, like many of his colleagues, performed under an assumed name. His real name, so people assumed, was Kohn. Only through an obituary printed by mistake do we learn that he was actually named Vopitschka (Ungrad even read the report of his own death in the newspaper).18 Th e choice of stage names also exerts an infl uence over historical research in other ways. For example, Koller’s 1931 overview of Viennese folk songs, Das Wiener Volksängertum, states that Franz Krieba um, longtime director of Dan- zer’s Orp heum and a former Volkssänger, was “actually called Grünbaum.”19 W e fi nd this piece of information in almost all subsequent scholarly discussions and mentions of Kriebaum, including Ernst Weber’s 2006 article in which he refer- ences “Franz Xaver Kriebaum (a.k.a. Grünbaum, 1836–1900).”20 Although not specifi cally mentioned, this kind of formulation contains an implicit reference to Kriebaum’s ostensible Jewishness.21 Even the 1994 Historisches Le xikon Wien (Historical lexicon of Vienna) gives the name “Grünbaum” in brackets follow- ing the name Kriebaum.22 Th e proliferation of this kind of information occurs despite reference in the encyclopedia entry to an article from the Wiener Zeitung stating that the name Kriebaum can be found listed in the baptismal records of the parish Nussdorf, indicating that his family was never called Grünbaum.23 But the particular formulation of this artist’s name, “Kriebaum a.k.a. Grün- baum,” has apparently become so popular that it has been taken for granted, meaning that Kriebaum’s connection to Judaism has persisted in the scholarship as a given fact. Th is approach seems to be the product of what might be described in Yiddish as Efn a zeml un aroys a yid, “Wherever you turn, you meet a Jew.” In other words, This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.