Seite - 142 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

142 | Entangled Entertainers the protagonists are in such deep conversation with one another that they take no notice. Th ey fail to board the train, and it departs without them. In Th e Journey to Grosswardein, the train station constitutes a liminal space.86 It stands between the past, which was defi ned by oppression, and the future represented by Grosswardein. Th e events at the station take place in the present. However, it is not the fl eeting present, which we can only apprehend as transitory moments of the here and now that are fused together. Rather, the period that is defi ned by waiting for the train is expanded. Th ere is no action to interrupt the tedious boredom that overtakes the passengers; nothing happens to rip them from their stupor. Time does not seem to pass quickly. And this excess of time allows those who are waiting to begin a conversation with one another, in which they increasingly immerse themselves, thereby allowing them to form a sense of community. Th e bonds between them become so strong that they even give up their original intention to travel to Grosswardein. Ignoring the train’s arrival, they let it depart without them. Being together at the train station is more important for the characters than achieving their intended outcome. Conclusion Th e analysis of Th e Apostle of Schottenfeld, Little Kohn, and Th e Journey to Gross- wardein brings to light concepts of place and an understanding of the present that other Jewish cultural fi gures articulated as well. In the longing for Old Vi- enna, Jews realized the potential of writing themselves into the history of Vienna. Th rough evidence of their historical presence in the Danube capital, they wanted to divest themselves of their status as foreigners who had come from somewhere else and therefore did not truly belong to society. Th e inscription in the past is tied to the delineation of a largely harmonious relationship between Jews and non-Jews. In this manner, they set forth a counternarrative to the history of an- ti-Jewish animosity. With the shift from the past to the present, a liminal space thus replaced one that was constructed in retrospect. Indeed, this space exists in Vienna, but the events that take place there are distinct from everyday urban life in that similarities rather than diff erences come to the fore. As Stephen Kern ob- served with respect to Jewish European intellectuals, Jews in Vienna likewise seem to have articulated a preference for an “expanded present” in art and literature.87 Th e social context clarifi es the diff erence between a Jewish and non-Jewish understanding of time and space. Jews in Vienna around 1900 regimented time and experienced space diff erently than Jews in other epochs and in diff erent so- cial contexts.88 In Vienna, this understanding appeared distinct, in a manner that replaced religion and other prevalent signifi ers of Jewish diff erence, but without running the risk of being essentialized. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.