Seite - 46 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

46 | Entangled Entertainers A part of Viennese entertainment culture at the end of the nineteenth and be- ginning of the twentieth centuries took place in an ethnically diverse and cultur- ally plural environment in which Jewish and non-Jewish migrants, recent arrivals to the city, encountered a local population that was equally diverse and refl ective of a rich array of cultural traditions.8 Th is hybrid situation constituted the cul- tural atmosphere of the singspiel venues and the milieu in which the folk singers zeroed in on the characters that they satirized in their songs as the “Jew,” the “Bo- hemian,” and the “Croat.” And though Jews and non-Jews mutually built and maintained the entertainment landscape in and around the Praterstrasse, there were, without a doubt, performance venues that were more popular among Jews than non-Jews, not to mention the so-called suburban theater groups, whose audiences were, at least at certain moments in time, either mostly or entirely non-Jewish. Nevertheless, we cannot draw clear lines distinguishing between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” ensembles. Th is lack of division seems to be partially the result of the milieu surrounding the singspiel halls, an expression of a new, urban culture that did not concern itself with such binaries or was perhaps possi- ble precisely because of the lack of such oppositions.9 A second aspect of Roth’s quotation speaks to the venues that were situated in the Praterstrasse. Th is street housed not only the cafés that he men tions but also a number of theatrical establishments and other entertainment options. Th e Carltheater wa s perhaps the most famous of these, a Volksbühne (people ’s theater) that the Austrian dramatist Johann Nestroy (180 1–62) directed, starting in the mid-ninenteenth cen tury. He was also the namesake of a building constructed in 1898 in close proximity to the Carltheater, designed by the Zionist architect Oskar Marmorek. Th i s building named after Johann Nestroy, the Nestroyhof, fea tured an entertainment venue located on the ground fl oor called the Halls of Nestro y (Nestroy-Säle), which opened on 11 November 1899.10 Th e man who leased this space was Emanuel Adler or, as he also called himself, Adler-Müller. As I briefl y mentioned in the previous chapter, Adler had previously performed up until this time under the name de Brye or Gaston de Brie as a “female impersonator.” One of the venues where audiences admired his acting skills was the Ronacher, the most important variété (vaudville th eater) in Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century. With the Halls of Nestroy, he sought to establish himself as an indepen- dent entrepreneur in the entertainment sector.11 Karl Steidler, the dire ctor of an entertainment venue named after him, served as co-director.12 Because the Halls of Nestroy were classifi ed as a singspiel venue that was only permitted to perform one-act plays alongside musical performances, we may conclude that Adler-Müller required the support of his colleague on account of Steidler’s license, which al- lowed him to produce multi-act plays, and for this reason joined his company.13 Compared to some other Volkssänger venues, the performances held by the Halls of Nestroy demonstrated markedly high quality. Caprice, a former salescl erk from Pest, was the Hausdichter (house poet). He was born Antal Lövi, changed This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.