The peregrinations of popular performers were some of the red threads that knit together the cities of the Habsburg Empire, the rest of Europe, and the United States—at least after dark. Susanne Korbel's new monograph examines the popular performers who traveled between Vienna, Budapest, and New York at the fin-de-siècle and in the first decades of the twentieth century. Travel was, as Korbel makes clear, a financial necessity as performers required fresh audiences. It was also a source of creative inspiration. One only has to look at the repertoires of some of the best-known performers to observe the foundational artistic consequences of their near-incessant mobility. Viennese piano humorist Hermann Leopoldi's most celebrated songs, for instance, drew inspiration from travels throughout the Empire: “Powidltatschkerln” was named for a plum turnover that originated in the Czech-speaking territories. Despite the clear importance of mobility for the evolution of popular entertainment at the fin-de-siècle and a growing interest in the Jewish presence in urban and popular culture, Auf die Tour! is the first monograph to weave these themes together. Building on the work of Mary Gluck on Budapest and Klaus Hödl on Vienna, Korbel delivers a much-needed, ambitious, and well-researched transnational history of Jewish and non-Jewish interactions in popular entertainment around 1900.
One of the book's many strengths is Korbel's focus on mobility as both a social reality and a theme explored on stage—even a way of thinking. For Korbel, the stage offered a space for transgression. Mobility, she argues, should not only be characterized by a change in physical location. Travel could also be intellectual, theoretical, or symbolic as popular performers used the stage to think beyond binaries and stereotypes. To this end, Korbel's fascinating discussion of gender-bending reveals how experiences of misogyny and antisemitism were linked but could be transgressed on stage. The presence of the soubrette, a female performer playing a feminine role, within traveling companies brought anxieties about prostitution and human trafficking to the fore. These fears provided a source of humor and drama in theatrical productions, and a rationale for gender-bending as a means to limit the supposed risks associated with appearing as a woman in public. The well-known production Yidl mit Fidl (1936) is but one example discussed: the narrative features a protagonist, played by Molly Picon, who had disguised herself as a boy, Yidl. In this case, gender-bending served as a form of self-protection and an expression of the patriarchal control exerted by the father over the female actresses’ self-expression. It is only the concluding scene, which takes place on stage, that reveals Yidl's true identity as a woman. As Korbel makes clear, it is only on stage that the truth is revealed.
Korbel suggests that the stage offered opportunities for Jewish and non-Jewish performers to explode Jewish stereotypes by revealing the impossibility of using them to identify individuals as Jewish or Christian in a world where the boundaries between these groups were frequently blurred. To this end, travel appears as a motif in popular entertainment that offers space for thinking about similarity and difference. In Der Afrikareisende, a production by Heinrich Eisenbach, travel to Africa, where one would assume to find only difference, turned up similarities instead. Jewish and non-Jewish popular performers employed the structure of a journey to suggest that relations between Jews and Christians were marked more by similarity than difference—a point driven home by the presence of Jews and non-Jews together on stage. Indeed, as Korbel frequently points out, the theme of travel could allow performers to get controversial messages past the censor.
To be sure, the transgressive potential of the stage is well-founded here and elsewhere. However, one might also wonder about those moments when performances—even those with subversive elements—reaffirm the status quo. In those moments, how might the performance of difference or similarity uphold binaries while also potentially redefining the meaning of mainstream culture by absorbing qualities of the so-called “other”?
In final assessment, Auf die Tour! is a remarkable accomplishment. Korbel reveals that the increasingly critical discourse of assimilation, which developed around 1900, was not limited to a single national context. Rather, the popular performers at the heart of this study present Jewish and non-Jewish relations as a transnational tale. The consequences of this observation are far-reaching geographically but also temporally. The rise of National Socialism across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s challenged in fundamental ways the world that Korbel illuminates. In part due to their history of mobility and the essential role it played in their professional and artistic lives, Jewish popular performers occupy a fascinating place in the history of Nazi Europe. Popular performers were uniquely gifted when it came to adapting to new contexts and to living life on the road; this adaptability would play a role for those able to flee during the 1930s. At the same time, their profession and art demanded their freedom to move across borders and languages, the boundaries of which became increasingly rigid, with tragic consequences. In this sense, Auf die Tour! provides the reader with a unique window into a world of mobility—physical, intellectual, and symbolic—that would be altered beyond recognition just a few decades later.
