Seite - 79 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 79 singers feared that this infl ux of Budapest performers would dramatically exacer- bate competition among them. Th e ensuing dispute among Viennese performing musicians reached its climax in the spring of 1903 and was conducted with such bitterness that the print media even referred to it as a “Volkssänger war.” In this chapter, I provide a detailed account of the “Volkssänger war” for three principal reasons. First, I employ the confl ict as an example that demonstrates just how diff use and blurred the dividing lines between Jews and non-Jews were in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Second, this dispute underscores how the acculturation narrative that chroniclers of Jewish history sometimes employ fails to accommodate the complexities of Jewish and non-Jewish relationships. Furthermore, an analysis of the Volkssänger war brings to light Jewish Volkssänger Albert Hirsch’s eff orts to be recognized as a peer by his non-Jewish colleagues without having to submit to any specifi c process of adaptation. Instead of understanding the connections between Hirsch and his colleagues as the result of acculturation, I demonstrate the performative character of these relationships. And third, comprehensive outline of the lives and work of Viennese Volkssänger around 1900 allows us to understand better the confl icts that shaped their experience as Jews in Vienna. Th e “Volkssänger War” in the Early Twentieth Century On 24 December 1901, the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt (IWE) reported that there would be a meeting of Viennese performing musicians and artists immedi- ately after Christmas to discuss a ban that the Hungarian authorities had issued, which forbade a troupe of Viennese Volkssänger from giving a guest performance.3 Th ree days after the announcement, the meeting took place at the Golden er Luchs (Golden Ly nx), a tavern in the Viennese district Ottakring. Th e choice of meeting place was to a certain extent symbolic: Ottakring was located on the outskirts of Vienna and was fi rst incorporated as a district only when the city annexed its outlying areas during the late nineteenth century. During the process of annexation, the originally independent town of Ottakring merged with Neu- lerchenfeld but retained its original name.4 Th e new Viennese district was partly composed of a village structure with taverns and inns where Volkssänger gave performances and idealized the city’s past, the so-called Old Vienna, and praised Viennese “hospitality” in their songs.5 At the same time, Ottakring was home to the workforce employed at the various industries located in the area. Th ese workers made up a signifi cant portion of the audiences who attended Volkssänger performances. Th e decision to hold their meeting at the Goldener Luchs situ- ated the Volkssänger in the primarily proletarian and lower-middle-class suburb, simultaneously positioning them in juxtaposition to “high” culture, whose insti- tutions were located overwhelmingly in Vienna’s city center.6 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.