Seite - 19 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 19 In turn, this tendency makes it diffi cult for scholars today to indentify archival evidence that points to Jewish participation in popular culture. Jewish Volkssänger not only violated the accepted norms of decency and artic- ulated salacious ideas, but they also sometimes attacked bourgeois values directly. Th e aforementioned composer Alexander Krakauer provi des a key example of a Jewish artist who engaged in this kind of anti-bourgeois performan ce.28 His songs, which have a radically pessimistic basic tenor and are deeply disillusioned, celebrate the destruction of positive sentiments such as love, joy, and success. Above all, marriage and the assurance that marriage brings happiness are frequent targets of his sarcasm. In one of his songs, he even describes marriage as suicide.29 Krakauer was not alone in his criticism of marriage and family life. Th is critique of traditional bourgeois values formed a recurrent and central theme in many pieces composed and performed by Jewish Volkssänger.30 Above all, this critique entailed an examination of traditional Jewish gender relationships, according to which women sometimes played the role of family breadwinner.31 Jewish Volkssänger tended to oppose social conventions and were therefore provocative. At times, the pieces that they performed were considered by many to be off ensive and obscene. No matter how these performances were under- stood at the time, one thing remains certain: these performers and artists acted as anything but guardians of bourgeois values. Th is ribald behavior has not only contributed to their overall neglect in the Jewish press at the turn of the century, but this lacuna also creates diffi culties for contemporary historians who endeavor to integrate such artists and their work into their historical narratives. Most of these historians assume that Jews habitually adopted bourgeois values.32 Th e Historiography of Acculturation Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, academic studies on Jews in Austria were rather rare.33 And only a few such studies refl ected larger interna- tional trends in their methodological approach. But in the late 1980s, a shift to ok place in the Austrian research landscape. In the wake of the Waldheim af- fair, initiatives were established that ushered in an intensive examination of the history of Jews and Judaism in Austria.34 Without wishing to reconstruct here the multiplicity of activities that resulted from this larger cultural examination, I mention here only the most salient aspects, which have also found a perma- nent institutional foothold. Th e most important institution, whose foundation was announced at the height of international criticism of Austria’s engagement with its Nazi past, is the Jewish Museum Vienna (Jüdi sches Museum der Stadt Wien).35 Since Danielle Spera took over the management of the institution in 2010, the Jewish Museum Vienna has signifi cantly shaped the national conver- sation regarding Jewish history in Austria. Th e Institute for Jewish Histor y in This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.