Seite - 160 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

160 | Entangled Entertainers Kohn has impregnated Spitzer’s daughter and is therefore a part of his family. Th is is exactly what antisemites feared the most—that Jews would implant themselves in the Volkskörpe r (body of the people) and become part of it. Eugen Dühri ng’s Judenfrage serves as an example of a shoddily argued piece of propaganda that highlights this racist ideology.35 In Austria, Karl Ritter von Schönerer, the leader of the German National Party, advocated the acquisition of Dühring’s book by local libraries. But real life of course diff ered from the ideologically driven opin- ions that this kind of text promoted.36 Th e social consequences that arose out of the similarity between Jews and non-Jews could not be suppressed. It is not only Leopold Kohn’s future paternity that prevents Spitzer from be- ing able to “de-Kohn” himself. Other circumstances that point to a signifi cant similarity between the two men also seem to make this endeavor impossible. At the beginning of the play, there is a marked polarity between Marcus Spitzer and the Jew Leopold Kohn. Th e banker acts condescendingly and hostile toward his bank teller. Th e play does not explicitly explain whether antisemitism is the motivation behind Spitzer’s actions. Over the course of the plot, however, the contrast between Kohn and Spitzer decreases. Any diff erence begins to dissolve when Spitzer refers to himself as meshugge (crazy). As I have already argued, lan- guage was an important, albeit not conclusive, indication of a person’s ethnic background. In this context, we could argue that Spitzer’s self-description belies a sense of Jewishness. Th is interpretation is reinforced when Spitzer learns that his wife sits in a train compartment with Kohn. He initially reacts to this news with dismay. His reac- tion is similar to when he receives word of the theft. He begins to stammer, and his syntax is strongly reminiscent of Yiddish. Language seems to expose him as a Jew. Th e initial Jewish–non-Jewish polarity that characterizes the relationship between Spitzer as employer and Kohn as employee becomes a constellation in which eth- nic dividing lines grow indistinct. It is not clear whether the confl ict between Spitzer and Kohn is an altercation between two Jews or a confrontation between a Jew and a non-Jew. Doubts about Spitzer’s Jewishness persist. In the end, we see that the play emphasizes a sense of similarity between the two characters. Spitzer cannot simply dismiss the overlap between himself and his counterpart. Notes 1. Grammeln are rendered from pork fat. 2. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 139–48. 3. Albert Hirsch, Der Apostel vom Schottenfeld, Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv [NÖLA in subsequent citations] (Th eaterzensur), Box 21/22 (1902), 53. 4. See Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 213–14. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.