Seite - 122 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

122 | Entangled Entertainers capture the scenes of nature before their eyes and their impressions thereof. In painting outdoors, they followed the example of the Barbizon School.1 From a broader point of view, they were not merely concerned with a new method of painting. Instead, nature became more signifi cant as a motif against the backdrop of contemporary urbanization and industrialization.2 Nature was understood as a retreat, and they depicted a premodern landscape that was in the process of disap- pearing. For those who questioned the acceleration of life in urban surroundings, this landscape became a site of longing. Tina Blau, an Austrian Impressionist, also painted spaces of retreat within the sphere of tangible reality. Born in Vienna in 1845 and having converted from Judaism to Protestantism in 1883, the landscape painter achieved fame in Austria and beyond.3 Among her large and varied painterly oeuvre are depictions of Vienna’s periphery and past. Th ese include Aus der Wiener Vorstadt (On the outskirts of Vienna; 1905) and Altwiener Hof (Old Viennese courtyard; 1910). Th ey depict idyllic settings that had already been lost during the modernization of Vienna or were in danger of being demolished. Industrialization and the new construction boom, which demolished entire streets to replace seemingly peace- ful rows of houses with new living quarters built from scratch, ripped many people from their familiar surroundings and awakened in them a desire for a simpler way of life. Th ese were then located on the city’s outskirts (V orstadt) or in the topos of Alt-Wien (Old Vienna). In the late nineteenth century, these spaces were often confl ated, their meanings intermingling. Old Vienna was localized on the periphery, and the outskirts respectively embodied conditions that were supposedly characteristic of Vienna’s past. For Tina Blau, these locations assumed the same purpose that nature held for other Impressionists. Blau’s representations of spaces of retreat from the ostensible rigors of the present are similar to those of F elix Salten, a member of the literary circle J ung Wien. Salten was born as S iegmund Salzman in Budapest in 1869. His father, who came from a renowned family of rabbis, moved with his wife and children to Vienna, where Siegmund went to school. Shortly after completing secondary school, he became a member of the writers’ circle Jung Wien. Bambi and Josefi ne Mutzenbacher are among his most famous works, although the authorship of the latter has not yet been fully clarifi ed. Salten also wrote about the outskirts. He himself had spent part of his childhood on the periphery of Vienna, after his fa- ther had lost his fortune to speculation and his family had to give up their apart- ment in a bourgeois neighborhood. Salten’s excursions to the outskirts therefore were motivated in no small part by his childhood memories.4 In this manner, he associated them with a sense of safety and security. Occasionally, he was able to discover them in the way of life associated with the outskirts, as well as in some of the taverns and establishments in Vienna’s city center. Essentially, he sought a place where people of various social strata, classes, and ethnicities, including Jews and non-Jews, came together and were able to forget their diff erences and This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.