Seite - 78 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Chapter 3 JEWISHNESS AND THE VIENNESE VOLKSSÄNGER d The interpretation of Jewish history remains open and up for debate. Th e fact that for several decades after W orld War II historians viewed and thus narrowly interpreted Jewish history from the point of view of anti-Jewish perse- cution and antisemitism can be linked to the post-Holocaust context.1 Such a perspective on Jewish history is not fundamentally wrong. Nevertheless, it pres- ents the Jewish past as one-sided and incomplete. It overlooks aspects of Jewish experience by largely ignoring the coexistence and interactions between Jews and non-Jews that did in fact take place. Th e encounters between Jews and non-Jews and their cultural interdependencies were signifi cant events, because they shaped Judaism and Jewish (and non-Jewish) self-understanding and had a lasting in- fl uence on social developments. Th is is why we would be remiss if we ignored the evidence of interconnectedness between Jews and non-Jews. An examina- tion of Jewish and non-Jewish interactions helps fi ll in the incomplete narrative that results from an analysis limited to antisemitic structures and processes or an exclusive analysis of Jewish life that fails to take into account relationships to non-Jews. Taking a look at the larger picture provided by an investigation of the overlap between Jewish and non-Jewish life thus off ers a more complete under- standing of Jewish history. A confl ict that took place among Volkssänger in fi n-de-siècle Vienna illustrates to what extent we can interpret Jewish history in a wide variety of ways and how a specifi c interpretation of this history is invariably rooted in the respective views of the historians who treat the subject. Th e immediate trigger for this con- fl ict was the rumor that the well-known and successful Budapest troupe Folies Caprice was planning to move to Vienna. A large part of the city’s professional This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.