English summary: How Jews engaged in popular culture in Vienna around 1900 is an area of study that has not received as much attention in the scholarly literature as it deserves. Klaus Hodl hopes to remedy this situation with this study, which investigates various aspects of Jewish cultural engagement in the entertainment culture of Vienna around 1900, with a particular emphasis on the Jewish folk singers and vaudevillian players. The central assertion of this work is that so-called popular culture in Vienna around 1900 ...
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English summary: How Jews engaged in popular culture in Vienna around 1900 is an area of study that has not received as much attention in the scholarly literature as it deserves. Klaus Hodl hopes to remedy this situation with this study, which investigates various aspects of Jewish cultural engagement in the entertainment culture of Vienna around 1900, with a particular emphasis on the Jewish folk singers and vaudevillian players. The central assertion of this work is that so-called popular culture in Vienna around 1900 was shaped both by Jewish and non-Jewish persons. Through a series of concrete example, Hodl shows how closely the two groups worked together, in a variety of ways, in public as well as the private sphere. Despite such collaboration, Vienna was still a place where antisemitism was a reality, although it was less rampant in some social circles than in others. On the one hand, Jewish folksingers reacted to antisemitism through performative engagement of ethnic and cultural belonging as opposed to looking at ethnic origins or lines of descent. On the other hand, they also reflected on Jewish existence in the past. They struggled to create with words what we might call in contemporary language a concept of a "shared" or "entangled" history. German description: Die Untersuchung des Engagements von Juden in der Wiener Popularkultur um 1900 ist ein in der Forschung bisher vernachlassigtes Vorhaben. Daher widmet sich Klaus Hodl eingehend ausgewahlten Aspekten judischer Beitrage in der Unterhaltungskultur um 1900 und legt seinen Schwerpunkt auf judische Volkssanger und Varietes. Die zentrale Aussage des Manuskriptes ist, dass die sogenannte Popularkultur in Wien um 1900 von Juden und Nichtjuden gemeinsam gestaltet wurde. An einer Reihe konkreter Beispiele zeigt Hodl auf, dass die Kooperationen zwischen ihnen mannigfaltig und ihre Beziehungen auch auf privatem Gebiet sehr eng waren. Trotzdem gab es aber auch Antisemitismus. Allerdings scheint er weniger ausgepragt und radikal als in anderen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen gewesen zu sein. Judische Volkssanger reagierten auf ihn, indem sie einerseits die Grundlage fur eine ethnische und kulturelle Zugehorigkeit im performativen Engagement anstatt in Herkunft und Abstammung sahen. Andererseits schrieben sie judische Existenz in die Vergangenheit ein. Sie bemuhten sich mit anderen Worten um das gegenwartig sehr populare Konzept der shared oder entangled history.
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