Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900

The manuscript Zwischen Wienerlied und Klabrias. Juden in der Wiener populären Kultur um 1900 deals with select aspects of the Jewish presence in popular culture in Vienna. The focus is on Jewish vaudeville popular singers and artists. This is a topic that has been widely neglected by research. Inquiry previously has concentrated largely on the Jewish middle classes and their contribution to so-called high culture in the fin-de-siècle era. Little has to date been published on the role of Jews in popular culture. In this sense, the present manuscript treads scientifically largely uncharted territory and will provide new findings. The central thesis in the study is that so-called popular culture in Vienna around 1900 was shaped jointly by Jews and non-Jews. Through a series of concrete examples, it is shown that there was substantial and diverse cooperation between them and that their private relations were also very close. Viennese popular culture was not immune to Judeophobia. On the basis of the close and multifarious relations between Jews and non-Jews, however, anti-Semitism appears to have been less pronounced and radical than in other social spheres. Jewish vaudeville Volkssänger reacted to this, on the one hand, by seeing the basis for ethnic and cultural belonging in modes of performative engagement rather than anchored in origin and descent. On the other, they inscribed Jewish existence into the past.