Entangled Entertainers

Viennese popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century was the product of the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike. While these two communities interacted in a variety of ways to their mutual benefit, Jewish culture was also inevitably shaped by the city’s persistent bouts of antisemitism. This fascinating study explores how Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios reacted to prejudice, showing how they articulated identity through performative engagement rather than anchoring it in origin and descent. In this way, they attempted to transcend a racialized identity even as they indelibly inscribed their Jewish existence into the cultural history of the era.

Klaus Hödl is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Graz, Austria. His publications include Kultur und Gedächtnis (2012) and Wiener Juden – jüdische Wiener: Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19. Jahrhundert (2006).

Klaus Hödl is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Graz, Austria. His publications include Kultur und Gedächtnis (2012) and Wiener Juden – jüdische Wiener: Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19. Jahrhundert (2006).

“This book provides an interesting outlook on the life and work of previously understudied popular singers and entertainers in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Informed by the most recent empirical studies and theoretical considerations within Austrian Jewish studies, it presents a new angle on the antisemitic climate of fin-de-siècle Vienna and a new reading of the ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish worlds overlapped and entangled, producing a rich and flourishing popular culture. It thus widens our understanding of the vast heterogeneity of Jewish influence in Austrian and Viennese history, which hopefully will continue to be a subject for further studies.” • Central European History

“Hödl’s work reveals something new and important about fin-de-siècle Viennese popular culture, which appears in his analysis as a space of unexpected entanglements and complexity that belies the relevance of commercial and unreflective properties that were attached to it for so long. Works such as this make historical research in the field of European popular culture engaging and intriguing, bringing Vienna to the attention of a larger community of scholars once again.” • H-Habsburg

“This is an excellent book, based on fascinating primary sources, and set within a sophisticated scholarly and theoretical frame. Klaus Hödl has for many years been one of the most dedicated and interesting scholars in the field of Austrian Jewish studies, and this book shows the fruits of his efforts.” • Steven Beller, author of The Habsburg Monarchy 1815–1918