Seite - 23 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900 as Research Topic | 23 and thereby infl uenced the further representation of the characters. During one performance, however, the actors apparently did not respond to the satisfaction of the audience members, who were worked up over the miser’s treatment of the peddler and even wanted to beat up the actor playing the miser after the perfor- mance.54 In this instance, the spectators (a group that may have also included non-Jews) were clearly rooting for the Jewish character. Whether the favorable portrayal of the Jewish peddler infl uenced the audience’s attitude toward Jews in everyday life remains unclear in this particular instance. Constructions of Jewishness in Popular Literature Th e performance of Der Findling by the S. Fischer Society suggests how Jews and non-Jews mutually negotiated Jewishness. Additionally, American literary scholar Jonathan Hess deftly analyzes in a recent article how Deborah, a melodra- matic folk play from the 1840s, portrays this process of negotiation. Deborah was written by the German-Austrian Jewish writer Sa lomon Hermann Mosenthal (1821–77) and was one of the greatest successes of nineteenth-century German- language theater. Deborah has been performed in various European countries as well as in the United States and has been translated into fi fteen languages. Due to audience enthusiasm for the drama, Mosenthal came to be known as the “Jewish Schiller.” After Mosenthal’s death, his play continued to fi nd resonance for a pe- riod of time, especially in English-speaking countries, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were even several fi lm adaptations of his theater piece.55 Deborah tells the story of a secret love between a young Jewish woman and a non-Jewish man in a small town in the Austrian province. Social conventions and prejudices prevent public acceptance of this relationship and ultimately bring about its demise. Mosenthal charged (if not perhaps overcharged) Deborah with lofty, tragic emotions, and without the outstanding performances of the actresses, who in this specifi c case were non-Jewish, the play never would have reached the stage of the Vi enna Burgtheater or any other renowned theater. What was remarkable about the depictions was that they elicited in the audience a strong empathy for the experiences of the Jewish protagonist, including her despair at the prejudices and the stubbornness of the predominantly Christian world in which she lived. In other words, the play was able to achieve its particular eff ect because the non-Jewish actors were so attuned to their roles that they gave sen- sitive, insightful performances. Th e drama thus provides a vivid example of the formation of cultural meaning by both Jews and non-Jews. Th eir cooperation, as Jonathan Hess writes, produced an “aff ective community” that, at least for a short time, showed solidarity with a Jewish fi gure.56 Another example of how non-Jews participated in the depiction of Jewishness in popular culture is the 1863 novel Der lange Isaak (Th e long Isaac), written by Julius von Wickede (1819–96), who was the scion of an old German aristocratic This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.