The Yearning for the “Old” Metropolises and the Appearance of Mobile Popular Entertainment

The article in the Internationale Artisten Revue was published at a time when residents of the Hungarian royal capital were lusting after the good old Színház (theater), residents of the Austrian imperial capital, Vienna, were yearning for the golden days of the Volkssängertum; and the Great Yiddish Theater in New York was said to be on the verge of disappearing. The act of mourning for the “good old times”—the urban life of the metropolises in previous decades—had become a transnational phenomenon seen all around the world: Vienna mourned for Old Vienna, Budapest for Old Budapest, and New York for Old New York.Footnote ⁶ The yearning was an internationally shared reaction to the growing urbanization in which city landscapes were rebuilt: streets were enlarged, avenues constructed, and parts of suburbs incorporated.Footnote ⁷ Was that lamenting for the allegedly better, “good old times,” the nostalgic “back-then”?Footnote ⁸ Can any connection be drawn between this phenomenon and the heightened mobility of vaudeville groups? Or, seen from another perspective, did the audience and society even become afraid of the mobility of popular entertainment?

When the urban population yearned for better days, mobility in society in general was about to change. The cultural historian Moritz Csáky argued that mobility gained a new quality: migration for social, economic, political, and professional reasons began to determine the patterns of everyday life and everyday entertainment.Footnote ⁹ Between 1890 and 1914, approximately fifteen million people from Europe, including 3.8 million residents of the Habsburg monarchy, left for the United States.Footnote ¹⁰ The number of Jews in this movement was disproportionally high, which is why scholarship calls it the “Jewish mass migration.”Footnote ¹¹ Roughly 280,000 Jews made their way toward the United States, most of them, 240,000, from the eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy, especially Galicia and Bukovina, the monarchy's most populous but least advanced regions in economic terms.Footnote ¹² The Jewish population in these regions had relied more strongly than non-Jews on trading and agriculture, sectors that late industrialization had most affected. An economic depression, severe poverty, and demographic growth in the preceding decades had turned Galicia and Bukovina into the launching points for transatlantic migrants from Habsburg territories.Footnote ¹³ The Jewish migrants from there were part of a total number of around two million Jews who emigrated westward from Eastern Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ They relocated either to the larger cities of Austria-Hungary or attempted to reach the goldene medine—the golden land, the United States—and travel to New York,Footnote ¹⁵ nourishing the pluriculturalFootnote ¹⁶ urban environment.Footnote ¹⁷ Budapest, Vienna, and New York—the cities I focus on in this article—were among the most prominent sites of immigration from the eastern provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. Migration, however, did not solely go westward; indeed, about one-third of the migrants returned to their homelands.Footnote ¹⁸ New findings provide evidence that the rate of Jews among returnees was lower, although 20 percent of Jewish migrants returned to the Habsburg monarchy or made the journey between the continents more than once.Footnote ¹⁹

Not only migrants were on the move: the Volkssänger (folksingers) and participants of the vaudeville scene were part of this broader societal movement too. They formed a kind of seasonal migration pattern. Popular entertainment artists frequently traveled around the monarchy as well as between Europe and the United States. Temporary seasonal migrations like those of performing musicians had a significant impact on the number of people on the move,Footnote ²⁰ though they did not leave much of a paper trail in official records and thus remain difficult to trace.Footnote ²¹ We can gain knowledge about the temporary mobility in popular entertainment mainly from its internal organization. From sources such as newspapers for traveling performers we learn that performers were hired to work abroad and (trans)migrated from one city to another. Usually, travel agents arranged and organized the performers’ mobility and provided them with contracts from establishments in the countries to which they went. As the opening anecdote aptly puts it, artists usually traveled in mixed groups of men and women—a travel habit that unsettled observers.Footnote ²²

At first glance, the performers’ habit of coed travel displayed similarities to another growing field of migration: sex migration and the increasingly organized trafficking in women. Mobility in popular entertainment was therefore often (mistakenly) associated with white slavery and the mobility of sex workers who were brought to overseas regions by human traffickers.Footnote ²³ Labor migration and sex migration synchronized in many terms: according to the historian, both “occurred at roughly the same moment, both engendered risks and abuses, and both were subject to nationalist pressures and imperial restrictions.”Footnote ²⁴ Narratives of intrigue, seduction, and conspiracy formed around these migration patterns, such as that women traveling alone relied on selling sex and ended up in groups of young female and male companions who were sold into slavery to brothels abroad.Footnote ²⁵

Simultaneously with the mass migration and the increasing mobility of performers, popular entertainment developed into what research has depicted as “mass culture”—various types of entertainment that answered the quest for amusement of a huge number of people and, likewise, was available to and part of the everyday life of the vast majority of the people.Footnote ²⁶ They enjoyed the infinite pleasure of reading the so-called Groschenromane (penny novels), attending music halls and vaudeville shows, or strolling through amusement parks such as the Prater in Vienna, the Stadtwäldchen in Budapest, or the Vaudeville Park near Washington Square Park in New York.Footnote ²⁷

An analysis of precisely how these two simultaneous developments—the (Jewish) mass migration that led to a new quality of mobility and the emergence of mass culture in entertainment—intertwined has been lacking until now.Footnote ²⁸ Relatively little research has been done to date to explain the fact that many of the most popular actors and actresses, directors, and managers in the vaudeville scene were Jewish.Footnote ²⁹ Historians Mary Gluck and Klaus Hödl state that this was because much of the historiography has tended to associate Jews in Budapest and Vienna mainly with so-called high culture.Footnote ³⁰ Investigating examples of interactions between Jews and non-Jews in mobile popular entertainment promises innovative insights into everyday lives and experiences during the new transatlantic migration movement at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Making of Mobile Popular Entertainment

At the onset of the twentieth century many newspapers for the entertainment sector, such as Der Artist or the Internationale Artisten Revue, published articles discussing the “gradual expansion” in the Artistenwesen (a general expression for the field of vaudevilles and music halls) and reported on the spread of popular entertainment.Footnote ³¹ Increasing numbers of artists traveled between cities to stage their repertoires. In addition, the vaudeville scene was closely associated with migration because becoming an artist or working in a Varieté offered migrants their first opportunity to earn money. It emerged as a field that was limited neither to location nor to a small group of people and was open and approachable for creative minds who dared to have the courage to try making a living in this new economic sector. It thus provided conditions in which Jews could become many of the most popular performers and directors.

The new opportunities for mobility led to a general change in popular entertainment. Whereas in previous years the Volkssänger had mostly performed individual acts in taverns for which they had been hired by their own arrangement,Footnote ³² by the turn of the century popular entertainment had become better organized. Up until the 1880s it was common for taverns to employ singers as entertainment for their guests, or at least as an accompaniment for dining or drinking. In those days, only a few people—the so-called old folksingers or “alte Volkssänger”—plied this trade; there were far fewer of these individuals than inns and it was thus easier for the singers to find employment. Serving beverages and food to the guests was the main purpose of these inns. Enjoying entertainment with their food and drinks, however, gained popularity among the guests. From the 1880s onward, directors, who were predominantly former Volkssänger, founded venues and ran fixed stages where they offered entertainment on a permanent basis. Artists no longer performed alone in taverns and inns but staged their repertoire with a group of artists and musicians in programs consisting of several different acts in the new music halls and vaudevilles. The programs there lasted about one to two hours and were repeated several times a day during afternoons and evenings. By performing as part of a program, the artists from abroad could use the same facilities as the ensemble they joined, including the “name of the stage” and its concession. Thus, the traveling performers gained the administrative benefit of avoiding the effort involved in acquiring permits of their own to stage plays in each new city they visited.Footnote ³³

The administrative advantages that an increasing number of artists were able to make use of led to an increase in entertainment spaces. From 1890 to 1900 the number of registered Varietés and Etablissements in Budapest and Vienna doubled, while the number of venues in New York even quadrupled (in the case of music halls, but not the big Yiddish theaters, which suffered from the competition music halls represented). In addition to fixed stages, open-air venues were established. Over the summer, when the local ensembles were on tour, the cities offered several stages, mostly in (entertainment) parks, to ensure that their inhabitants would not face a lack of amusement. The Sommeretablissement at the Kaisergarten in the Prater welcomed traveling entertainment groups and offered them not only the stage but also costumes, instruments, and even engaged musicians whom they could use for staging their repertoires.Footnote ³⁴ The venue in Budapest's Városliget (also called Stadtwäldchen, central park), surrounded by the amusement park's carousels, and the small entertainment park at Washington Square Park or Fort George, known as “Harlem's Coney Island,” in New York did likewise.Footnote ³⁵

Managers, agents, and other associates of the popular scene created more organizational infrastructure for the music business; newspapers operating on an international basis and agencies supporting the traveling stars emerged.Footnote ³⁶ Artists and vaudeville managers built international relationships and exchanged and evaluated information about forms of social insurance, simplifications of transatlantic travel routes, and the foundation of associations.Footnote ³⁷

The Internationale Artisten Revue was one of these newly evolved newspapers. Founded in Budapest in 1891 by Ferdinand Steiner, a member of the famous Viennese Jewish entertainment family Steiner, the weekly newspaper corresponded with cities all over Europe and made frequent exchanges with its North American counterpart, the New York Clipper.Footnote ³⁸ As early as 1900, only nine years after its foundation, the Internationale Artisten Revue was corresponding with more than two hundred establishments and eighty agencies in more than sixty cities around the world.Footnote ³⁹

Strolling through the Fin de Siècle in Budapest, Vienna, and New York

Changes in urban landscapes reflected the mobile trend in the popular entertainment sector. Budapest's Kérepesi út (Kérepesi Street), which leads from the Erzsébet bridge over the Danube to the Keleti pályaudvar (east train station) and the Fuimei cemetery, was a characteristic boulevard of the fin-de-siècle metropolis. This modern boulevard was peppered with theaters, Künstlerheime (hotels for performers) and—by and by—Varietés, Etablissements, and music halls. Situated in Erszébetváros, the seventh district of Budapest, the boulevard was bounded at its far end by the Andrássy út, directly in one of the most popular areas of Jewish life. Strolling down the Kérepesi boulevard also meant passing through a vibrant center of Jewish life. Here, the most famous vaudeville, Folies Caprice, served as a model for the Varietés (Mustervarieté) that were then springing up in Budapest, Vienna, and New York—all of which were undergoing similar developments in their urban entertainment scenes.Footnote ⁴⁰

Inspired by the Chat Noir de Paris, the Folies Caprice, founded by Antal Oroszi, was one of the very first venues of this kind. Oroszi was not only the director of a Varieté but also a famous playwright. Using the pseudonym Caprice, the Jewish playwright wrote some of the most popular pieces of the time, including Klabriaspartie and Romeo Kohn und Julie Lewi.Footnote ⁴¹ The Wiener Extrapost, a Viennese weekly newspaper, compared the Folies Caprice with one of Vienna's most famous Volkssänger taverns of decades past, saying that it was as famous “[a]s the Sperl had once been in Vienna.”Footnote ⁴² Visitors from abroad flooded the Folies Caprice, and international actors and actresses were continually part of the programs staged there. In 1901, numerous audience requests for guest performances by the actors from the Folies Caprice in Budapest led to an ongoing discussion as to whether to establish another venue in Vienna. This caused what would later be called the Volkssängerkrieg (folksinger war), a phenomenon that revolved around fears of competition on the part of the directors of the Varietés and members of the Viennese popular scene.Footnote ⁴³

That they served as role models for the steadily growing urban entertainment scene was not the only connection between the two metropolises of the monarchy. The interaction between the Viennese and Budapest performers was especially close regarding the exchange of artists: Mendel Rottmann regularly performed as Max Rott at the Mustervarieté Folies Caprice. The Viennese Volkssänger and playwright Heinrich Eisenbach also performed at Somossy's Orpheum, the “first Vaudeville of the capital,” as well as at Herzmann's Orpheum in Budapest. The performers from Vienna were so close to the Budapest scene that Eisenbach even married his long-term partner, Anna Ferry, in Somossy's Orpheum between their guest performances in November 1893.Footnote ⁴⁴

Apart from the large number of Jews operating as actors, Soubrettes, or directors, the vaudeville scenes were closely, but not exclusively,Footnote ⁴⁵ connected with districts that had relatively high Jewish populations and were associated with Jewish cultures: Budapest's Erszébetváros, New York's Lower East Side, and Vienna's Leopoldstadt.Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition, the Viennese vaudeville scene flourished in the sixth and ninth districts as well as in the very city center, where Max Rott opened his Varieté Max und Moritz in the direct vicinity of St. Stephan's cathedral.Footnote ⁴⁷ Unlike Budapest, the Viennese scene was made up of ensembles that staged productions in more or less fixed arrangements, but which worked to attain better conditions in the different possible venues over the years. For this reason it was customary for an audience to see one group at Taborstraße 12 one year and find another there the following year.Footnote ⁴⁸ In New York, the part of the Lower East Side bisected by Broadway—the Bowery—was in especially high demand when it came to the quest for amusement. A huge number of theaters and, later, music halls were to be found in the middle of the neighborhood, which was home to three-quarters of New York's Jewish population between 1890 and 1900.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Journal of Old New York wrote as early as 1890 that “the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Russian, who has not visited New York, still knows that its glory is Broadway.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Broadway was not only beloved by its audience but also by the artists, who tried to become part of it themselves so they could perform in one of the small cafés or the recently emerging music halls in Lower Manhattan.Footnote ⁵¹

The flourishing entertainment scenes in these neighborhoods welcomed a highly diverse, pluricultural audience. The sites of popular entertainment played an important role in the everyday life of the bulk of the population. They provided a space where people from different social, political, and ethnic backgrounds could gather, meet, and interact. The sites of popular entertainment functioned as spaces of Jewish and non-Jewish relations and provided the space to address and discuss issues such as antisemitism or gender norms. The unique composition of the spaces of popular entertainment as places to which people ran in search of amusement enabled these discussions. In pursuit of their goal, they were largely indifferent to controversial political, cultural, and social issues. Thus, issues that were not negotiable in other contexts could be discussed—a topic to which I will return shortly.Footnote ⁵²

Risks for Mobile Performers in Popular Entertainment

Despite the new opportunities for mobility, it was still not easy to cross the Atlantic. Vaudeville managers provided good traveling and working conditions as well as contracts for actors from the Habsburg monarchy and Europe so that they could work for months at a stretch on stages in the United States. Artists and vaudeville managers built international relationships, exchanged views, and evaluated themes, including social insurance, ways to simplify transatlantic travel, and settings for the foundation of associations.Footnote ⁵³ The members of Vienna's popular scene were among the first to establish such an association for artists and actors in 1893. They called their association Der lustige Ritter and advertised it with the slogan “Dem Humor eine Gasse, das Wohlthun als Ziel!”Footnote ⁵⁴ Members of the Budapest scene initially joined this association before establishing their own, the Budapester Artisten-Verein, in 1900.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both associations actively intervened for social security and old-age provision for artists and actors and tried to provide for their poorer colleagues whose success in the profession had declined or who were unable to pursue their profession due to an occupational injury.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although these associations also supported the traveling activities of their members, further associations catering specifically to traveling vaudeville managers were subsequently founded in the years preceding World War I. These aimed to provide help and information for ensembles and directors who wanted to arrange and optimize their transatlantic tours independently. As part of the Association of Vaudeville Managers of the United States, the Association of Traveling Variety Managers organized regular meetings and formed a committee that provided information for managers on request.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Europe, after the end of World War I the Internationale Artisten Organisation was founded to work cooperatively beyond the structure of the new propagandized nation-states.Footnote ⁵⁸

Crossing the Atlantic, however, naturally still entailed several risks, and this was one reason for the establishment of an international artists’ organization and network. In January 1894, an artist who had just arrived back in Europe after having traveled through North America wrote a letter to the editor of the Internationale Artisten Revue, seeking to have it published and read by other traveling artists:

With this letter, the author wanted to warn his colleagues about the agent who had betrayed him and the ensembles he worked with and thereby protect other artists from a similar fate. The artist, however, also requested help and tried to find support among the readers of the newspapers in the hope that the fraudulent agent could be arrested and he would finally receive payment for his work. The newspaper Internationale Artisten Revue provided help during the search for Imre Fox—as it did frequently in other, similar cases—and in the next issue it reported that he had been caught in Vienna due to the assistance of the readers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Support within the international artists’ scene was strong not only in preventing financial but also sexual abuse.Footnote ⁶¹

Mobility and the Allegation of Selling Sex

While the creation of organizational features such as the Internationale Artisten Revue provided artists with help, their mobility and the newly developed infrastructure related to it (such as housing) led to allegations being raised against the popular entertainment scene. The places where the traveling artists slept, the Artistenheime or theatrical lodgings, made the scene appear quite similar to that of prostitution. Artistenheime were located either next to or directly above the performance venues and provided rooms where artists from abroad could spend the night. Because these rooms were private and could thus not be easily monitored, some members of the public assumed that they served as locations for “silent prostitution.” This allegation led to what would soon be called “adverse circumstances.”Footnote ⁶² Moreover, the alleged “ungrounded attitude” of the traveling performers raised concerns among members of the public. These allegations were directly connected, on the one hand, to an argument about the use of space and, on the other hand, to an argument about movement and traveling that was strongly interrelated with gender attributes, both female and male.

The mobility of the popular entertainment scene included many traveling female performers. They traveled together with either their ensembles or their—mostly male—agents. The image evoked by these (mostly young) women en route with male agents and companions was similar to that of women who were victims of human traffickers. Especially in Galicia and Bukovina as well as along the routes between the Habsburg capitals and Eastern European provinces, the threat of trafficking women increased enormously in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶³ Human traffickers contacted women either in their hometowns or while they traveled alone. Keely Stauter-Halsted illustrates that traffickers convinced women to follow them by claiming that they would hire them in honest positions or by proposing to them.Footnote ⁶⁴ Instead, these women found themselves in brothels. Although Nancy Wingfield argues that “these girls and young women were not simply victims, but sometimes willing participants, or something in between,”Footnote ⁶⁵ the discourse of the last decades of the nineteenth century focused solely on the subject of seduced female victims. Thus, women traveling alone led to a “panic” concerning seduction by human traffickers. Parents were warned to take care of their daughters so as to prevent them from becoming victims of traders in white slavery and being kidnapped to Southeastern Europe, the Russian Empire, or South America.Footnote ⁶⁶

Female voyagers in popular entertainment coincided with the stereotype of trafficking in women. Damenkapellen (ladies’ orchestras)Footnote ⁶⁷ were among the first performers to make their living by traveling around, performing all over Europe. As such, they were the first to stand in the spotlight of what would become frequent public allegations. There is evidence that in some cases the Damenkapellen led women into prostitution, albeit randomly.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the perceived link between traveling performers and clandestine prostitution spread immensely and confronted female performers in vaudeville in the following decades. The international artistic business boom and the appearance of a new infrastructure for traveling stars in the fin de siècle caused this perception to grow, and the Soubrettes who performed in the Varietés on both sides of the Atlantic only nourished it further.Footnote ⁶⁹

Soubrettes were tough actresses who wrote and staged their own songs as part of the various programs of Varietés. These confident female singers won the hearts of their audience by charming them during performances—a way of interacting with their audience that was considered by some to be obscene. Moreover, the female Varieté stars operated in the public sphere. Because this conflicted greatly with the view of women at the time—namely that they, like all things feminine, should be confined to the private sphere—these female performers were accused of violating several stereotypes of femininity. Two arguments were put forward stating why the female singers could not be professionals but were instead only interested in earning easy money as prostitutes: first, the fact that the music performances took place outside the home and second, that these performers were travelers and the audience therefore had no idea where their home (or what they considered home) might be.Footnote ⁷⁰

One of the allegations was that, due to the “obscene” acts of the Soubrettes and the directors who exploited them, the whole vaudeville scene would become a hotspot for “rough obscenities” (rohe Obszönitäten) and, accordingly, for clandestine prostitution. Regarding the Folies Caprice, the Budapesti Hírlap reported that “two or three secret rooms existed, which the police were not aware of.”Footnote ⁷¹ These private rooms could provide spaces for silent prostitution, and critics propounded that infringements against morality would occur more frequently due to the growing number of vaudeville halls and Artistenheimen: “In the vaudeville halls, infringements occur regularly despite police controls.” The Soubrettes were allegedly engaged in duplicity, and the director compelled them “to stay together in separate coffee shop-like establishments and tempt men whom they addressed during the performance to consume drinks” in the restaurants owned by the vaudeville directors.Footnote ⁷²

Additionally, the agencies that tried to connect international artists and musicians with directors and managers were accused of exploiting young and impressionable girls. The male agents and managers would betray their female clients and lure them to establishments and ensembles under false pretenses. In October 1912, the Ministry of the Interior became aware of grievances lodged against a hotel and Varieté. Jacques Weiser, who, according to the police record was a Jewish artists’ manager from Budapest named Jakob Weiss,Footnote ⁷³ was accused of seducing young girls in a Hôtel-Varieté. Of Weiser's activities, the Zentralstelle zur Überwachung des Mädchenhandels (Central Office for Monitoring the Trafficking in Women) informed the Ministry of the Interior that “for the Hotel-Varieté Opera—a low-class location—underage girls are engaged by Viennese performing artist agencies under the guise of artistic productions; but they are aware that the women will be exploited by the so-called directors and members of the artistic management and forced into prostitution as well.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The accusation brought against Weiser illustrates both the close interrelatedness of the discourses on traveling vaudeville performers and on traffickers of women, and the increasing antisemitism in the panic of trafficking.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nancy Wingfield argues that, since the Lemberg trial in which twenty-seven Galician Jews were charged with hijacking women in brothels against their wills, both Jewish organizations and antisemites in Austria focused on the preponderance of Eastern European Jews in trafficking in women.Footnote ⁷⁶

Such accusations devalued the whole scene of etablissements, traveling Volkssänger ensembles, and variety shows and were thus welcomed by critics of the popular scene. They held up these allegations as proof that confirmed their reservations, assuming that the standards held by all members of the scene were low and vulgar. Both men and women were suspected not to be working as professional artists or serving their art, but to be either perpetrators or victims of exploitation instead. However, whereas men were depicted as the acting subjects—agents who could influence and exploit the women—the women's voices were silenced and their words were not entered into the police reports.Footnote ⁷⁷

The passivity assigned to female actors seems particularly striking since the anecdote in the Internationale Artisten Revue cited in the preceding text depicted the Soubrette “Miss X” as the most important member of the ensemble. But what kind of picture did the anecdote of the traveling Soubrette present? The anecdote portrayed the actress as traveling with a group and thus specifically did not allow the abduction fear for women traveling alone to arise.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another method of prevention from becoming seduced into prostitution was financial security, a point the article confirmed in assuring that the Soubrette traveled with sufficient money. What might be perceived as enterprising was also a reference to financial security, which women needed to have while traveling. The anecdote thus rejected any necessity on behalf of traveling actresses to earn money by any means other than through performances and suggested that female members of the popular scene did not need to earn money as prostitutes.Footnote ⁷⁹

Gender and Jewishness in the Urban Experiences of Popular Entertainment

The spread of the vaudeville and entertainment scene into the urban and private spaces that the Varietés and their accompanying accommodations provided for the mobile performers led to the creation of harsh gender-based clichés and allegations of clandestine prostitution. In the context of the panic concerning trafficking at that time, the topics of masculinity and femininity had become subjects of in-depth discussions as a result of the expansion and mobility of the scene. The male agent who hired Soubrettes under the guise of working in popular entertainment was depicted by the police as Jewish and the active part of an entrapment scheme, whereas neither any signifiers of Jewishness nor further personal affiliations on the part of his victims were addressed.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, unlike in the discourses on trafficking and clandestine prostitution as they appeared, for example, in the previously quoted police report, signifiers of “Jewish” affiliation of protagonists were not mentioned at all for performers in popular entertainment. Although antisemitism was observed in most contexts at the time, newspaper critics, reports on Varietés, and other such publications made few statements about Jews, either as actors and Soubrettes or as directors of establishments. This leads me to the question of how Jewish and gendered identifications intersected in the vaudeville experience.

The plot and the composition of spaces of popular entertainment diverged concerning affiliations of Jewishness. Firstly, delving into the interrelatedness of Budapest, Vienna, and New York, I highlighted that Jews took part in the popular entertainment scene in all three cities and that this scene in each of them was located in areas with a large Jewish population. Secondly, a substantial number of actors and Soubrettes in popular entertainment were Jews. Many of them performed under stage names, which has often been interpreted in research hitherto as a particularly “Jewish” practice.Footnote ⁸¹ However, in popular entertainment non-Jews also tended to invent an international-sounding nom de plume to garner more interest. Considering the paradox of these three observations, the international sphere of popular entertainment created by the new mobility seems to have enabled a kind of Jewish “passing.”Footnote ⁸² Although the society made few references to a “Jewish” affiliation of performers, artists strongly addressed Jewishness in their songs and plays, a phenomenon that led historian Mary Gluck to describe the vaudeville scene in fin-de-siècle Budapest as a space in which the otherwise “invisible Jewish Budapest” became visible.Footnote ⁸³

In the last part of this article, I will therefore focus on the experiences in the vaudevilles, specifically questioning the part of the urban experience therein; this will lead me to investigate the notion of Jewish passing in the international sphere of popular entertainment and compare it to the notion regarding gender assertions made due to mobility. In both contexts there seems to be a gap between the gendered/Jewish allegations and the way gender and Jewishness were staged in performances. Were Varietés only discussed as covers for clandestine prostitution? Or did the Varieté also provide a space to negotiate Jewishness and gender norms? And what impact did mobility have on the plot of popular entertainment at the time? Did it result only in allegations—or might it even have enabled negotiation of such stereotypes?Footnote ⁸⁴ A glance into the contents discussed in popular entertainment might not only answer these questions but also give an idea why society became afraid (of the possibilities) of mobility in popular entertainment.

A few examples can serve to make these points more concrete. I will introduce an actor and an actress, both of whom came face to face with mobility and its practical effects and also with (negotiating) Jewish passing and visibility. Risa Basté was one of the most famous Viennese Volkssängerinnen (female folksingers) and Soubrettes in the fin-de-siècle Habsburg monarchy. She staged songs and couplets in the most popular Etablissements and the newspapers widely reported this Soubrette's activities. She was married to another well-known performer in popular entertainment, Adolf Glinger. Glinger was born Adolf Hargesheimer in the Hungarian capital of Budapest and migrated to Vienna to work as a Volkssänger and playwright, during which time he assumed his nom de plume. The young couple traveled continually between the cities of the Habsburg monarchy. The newspapers of Budapest, Prague, Linz, and many other towns and cities were filled with stories featuring their names. Over the years, they became acquainted and worked together with both notable Jewish and non-Jewish Volkssänger of the time: Heinrich Eisenbach,Footnote ⁸⁵ the couple Paula Walden and Otto Taussig, and Max Rott—all of whom performed and lived under pseudonyms.Footnote ⁸⁶ Their meeting points were the Budapester Orpheumgesellschaft, the group Max and Moritz, and other ensembles, in all of which Jews and non-Jews performed together.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was here that Risa Basté and Adolf Glinger met and fell in love. They married in March 1904, and henceforth their traveling activity in the variety scene was a prime occupation of their lives.Footnote ⁸⁸ The work and lives of the two were closely interrelated. Performers in general associated themselves with their profession so strongly that they even settled matters of their private lives in the Varietés; that the marriage of the Viennese performers Heinrich Eisenbach and Anna Ferry took place in Somossy's Orpheum in Budapest during a tour is a case in point.

Because mobility had a fundamental impact on popular entertainment, it comes as no surprise that mobility and migration also influenced the performances of the vaudeville groups. The Volkssänger and Varieté stars continually addressed mobility and traveling during their performances, and in doing so picked up different stereotypes along the way, formed troupes, or played on subjects to reinterpret them—all under the angle of mobility. The popular plays positioned themselves in the context of utopian texts that emerged in unison and sought to offer alternative perspectives on class, ethnic, or gender barriers and conflicts. Literature also used the metaphor of traveling to locate contested gender relations or antisemitism in remote or (alleged) imaginary spaces.Footnote ⁸⁹ Likewise, traveling was interpreted from manifold perspectives, and just as trips could have many different reasons, the images of travelers in the performances were multilayered and not exclusively positive. The artists often juxtaposed those images in the broader context of (antisemitic, anti-Bohemian, etc.) stereotypes in their pieces.

In her song Der Reisekoffer, Risa Basté told the audience about a journey she took to see her aunt. She assumed the role of a woman who traveled alone. Embodying the panic of human trafficking, the Soubrette herself and the setting of the scene created a scenario that was hard to imagine in fin-de-siècle society: “I am coming from a journey, as you can tell from looking at me / and a terrible mishap occurred on the train / a man sat in a corner, at night we tittle-tattle a bit / And we swapped our luggage in the heat of the moment.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The Soubrette informed the audience that she had to promise that she would travel in the Damencoupé—a train compartment for women only. She also promised not to make contact with any men. However, she broke both promises. As it turned out in this 1902 song, the woman swapped her luggage with another person; after a stimulating encounter with a travel companion, she now had a man's suitcase instead of her own luggage. She was therefore afraid of what her aunt would think. Portraying the image of the supposedly innocent bourgeois daughter she asked the audience for advice:

At this point the song turned out to be more subversive than one might expect: at the turn of the century, it was not appropriate for women to talk about men's clothing. In Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), Stefan Zweig wrote that new words had to be invented so that women would not need to use intolerable words such as “trousers”; women had to refer to trousers as the “unspeakable” (die Unaussprechlichen).Footnote ⁹² Instead of singing about the Unaussprechlichen, the Jewish Soubrette sang about the “missing” content of the suitcase. She did not use the words for what she found in her suitcase—namely the men's clothing that she, as a woman, was not allowed to talk about. Instead she showed the audience what she found. Considering that women were not allowed to use most of the words for male garments, Risa Basté acted confidently. She held a mirror up to the audience expressing what her aunt—who represented the rest of society—expected from a young woman, but also expressed that she wanted neither her aunt nor these members of society to tell her what to do.

The silencing of women's voices in the official discourse of the previously quoted police records obscured the role the actresses played within the ensembles and the confidence expressed by the female musicians and Volkssängerinnen (Soubrettes) in their performances. Risa Basté exposed and challenged the gap between supposedly forbidden behavior and the sexual pursuits of women and confronted her audience with the fact that she preferred traveling in a shared train compartment with men. As the Soubrette continued her performance of Der Reisekoffer, the stage became covered with pieces of men's clothing. Referring to this situation, the newspapers emphasized that the Soubrette knew how to turn the atmosphere of the Varieté into a private bedroom. Nonetheless, the censorship (which was restrictive concerning sexuality at the turn of the century) did not prohibit her from staging the song.Footnote ⁹³

Notwithstanding society's restrictive attitude, in the unique atmosphere of popular culture the actors and actresses even managed to spark a vivid and in-depth discussion about gender boundaries by utilizing the metaphor of mobility. Transferring the scenario to a neutral enclosed space of a train allowed the performers to act out what was not possible in reality. At the Varietés around 1900 the actors and actresses established the practice of gender bending. Risa Basté perfected this kind of gender bending together with one of her partners, Mr. Man de Wirth. Unlike in earlier performances of Hosenrollen, not only one actor made up the scene, but two—a man and a woman—each performing the other sex: “Mr. Man de Wirth and Ms. Risa Basté still exert the most powerful force to draw attention. They both contrast with each other in an interesting way—Mr. Man de Wirth as a lady and Ms. Basté as a gentleman. Both successfully studied the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘other’ gender and provide imitations which cannot be distinguished from the originals.”Footnote ⁹⁴ By having a female and a male performer each staging the opposite sex it became possible under the guise of mobility and internationality in the urban sphere of popular entertainment to both mention in public and discuss gender and sex from the perspectives of both men and women.

A different piece, Der Afrikareisende, utilized the key of suggesting mobility together with the international sphere of popular entertainment to negotiate Jewishness, juxtaposing it with colonial stereotypes. Der Afrikareisende was written by the Jewish Volkssänger Heinrich Eisenbach, who was popular for deploying and making fun of “jargon”—an often antisemitic depiction of a mixed language of Viennese dialect, Yiddish fragments, and German.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Afrikareisende, Wenzel Jerabek, is depicted as a Bohemian citizen and quite an unsavory characterFootnote ⁹⁶ who is a famous man after having traveled through Africa and who wants to convey his global knowledge to the audience. He unfolds his observations while sharing his life story. In doing so, the Jewish Volkssänger performing as a traveler to Africa compares the experiences he has made on the journey with (his) socialization in the Habsburg monarchy, all performed in a mixture of Yiddish, Czech, and Viennese dialect.

The play Der Afrikareisende applies the metaphor of traveling to replace stereotypes, transferring them from the Habsburg monarchy to a new and faraway surrounding—in this case to Africa. The setting functioned as a dummy for the censorship and audience to respectively relocate and distance political problems of the time. This was an expanding approach also known in literature, opera, and operetta. For example, the forgotten 1885 operetta of the same name (Der Afrikareisende) by Franz von Suppé, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1901 novel Afrika's Semiramis apply the same strategy to discuss problems of the Habsburg monarchy by proxy outside its territory. By relocating the setting, Eisenbach's play pokes fun at and exaggerates the stereotypes with which most members of the audience were familiar.Footnote ⁹⁸ Every second person living in fin-de-siècle Vienna had not been born in the city. Czech speakers constituted the largest group of immigrants in Vienna, followed by the Jewish migrants from the monarchy's eastern provinces. The stereotypes of these two groups were the most common in the daily urban experience, as reflected by Eisenbach in this text:

The play thus adopts signifiers of Jewish, Czech, and colonial ascriptions. While Africa is totally unfamiliar, the Afrikareisende is able to communicate in Yiddish and Czech and assigns a Jewish connotation to the place when he mistakes it for the Jewish desert “Sahrah.” The play employs the phonetic proximity of the German pronunciation of the African desert “Sahara” and the (allegedly Jewish) female name “Sarah” to superimpose the Zionist discourse of the time, when Palestine was commonly spoken of as the “Jewish desert.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Strolling through the faraway “Jewish desert Sahrah,” he meets a lion. What is more, although the protagonist is not familiar with the animal in its “new” appearance, he identifies it as Czech by associating it with the Czech language and heraldic symbol. He survives this dangerous encounter because he is able to communicate with the allegedly dangerous lion. Moreover, the Afrikareisende expects the audience to understand this reference to something that was usually denounced as Böhmakeln—speaking in Bohemian idiom—in the Habsburg monarchy.

It may seem as though these performances were mainly highlighting differences, yet whatever these assertions were meant to evoke, the director of the piece never created a total opposition between the self and the other. Der Afrikareisende used an irrelevant setting (as far as the censorship was concerned, i.e. Africa) to negotiate not only the problem of pejorative clichés but also colonialism. The Afrikareisende depicts the Bohemians as stupid, greedy, uneducated, and unwilling to work. However, the Afrikareisende calls himself Wenzel, which is intended to be recognized as a Bohemian name. Even if the character Wenzel Jerzabek, staged by Heinrich Eisenbach, is supposed to recall the stereotype of the uneducated Bohemian, the character is invented and portrayed in such a way that the audience would react with empathy. Moreover, the audience of course experiences the play through this character, who simultaneously functions as a communicator between Yiddish, Czech, and Viennese slang, as well as between familiar and unknown spaces. With the character Wenzel staged by a Jewish Volkssänger, the audience experienced a twofold passing, both that of several Jewish spheres—lingual and spatial—and that of the immigrant's experience, represented by the allegedly non-Jewish immigrant per se, the Czech-speaking immigrant. Tough Bohemia in particular was cast in the discourse of the time as a territory with an almost entirely Jewish population. Finally, the play indirectly ascribes thinking in stereotypes to those holding a colonial perspective of the world. It pokes fun at those who attended the new kind of “anthropological” evening lectures in which a supposed scientist-traveler presented a European audience with pictures of the “exotic” indigenous population they encountered on their journeys.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In Der Reisekoffer, the initially harmless situation of traveling enabled the mutually intended, sexual contact between two strangers. On the stage, the tête-à-tête could be negotiated by referring to traveling and settling the scenario in a mobile and neutral space. These performances of the Soubrettes conveyed vivid images of confident women who cleverly used the metaphor of traveling to transfer content that was considered critical by the censorship of the time to an allegedly harmless and unimportant location. Thus, as a part of their performances, they were even able to convert gender stereotypes. Risa Basté addressed gender differences with regard to masculine characteristics as perceived by her as a woman. However, she not only referred to her handling of the unfortunate situation but also introduced the male position and accordingly included both sides of the stereotype.

The performances played along a distinguishable “scale” between total difference and total similarity, a strategy that was intended to help the audience members become more familiar with the content of the piece.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus, I argue that by presenting this composition of multilayered differences to the audience, the director stressed the perception of similarities equally. With reference to Sigmund Freud, a joke cannot be appreciated if no one can empathize with the person/character who is telling it. A feeling of empathy is only evoked when an (apparent) opposition arises, which also retrieves similarities in the situation.Footnote ¹⁰³ By enabling perceptions of similarities under the guise of mobility, reversing antisemitic stereotypes, and transferring controversial issues to faraway places, the performers were able to pass various ostensible boundaries, such as gender and Jewish visibility and invisibility. The metaphor of traveling was used as a dummy for censorship while functioning virtually as a figure of vagabondage. In doing so, the plays went beyond mere political and cultural critique and engaged the audience in self-critique.