Habsburg Melodies on the Move: Jewish Popular Performers and Their Repertoires from Pre-Nazi Central Europe to Postwar Austria

The peregrinations of popular performers were some of the red threads that knit the cities of the Habsburg Empire together. A network of travelling popular performers linked establishments and audiences in Vienna to Budapest and Prague, as well as Pressburg (Bratislava), Agram (Zagreb), Lemberg (Lvov). Repertoires reflected the near constant migration demanded by their profession: performances that moved between the languages and dialects of the empire. For performers whose professional success and artistic practices relied on their ability to cross physical, linguistic, and social boundaries with relative ease, the hardening of borders with the rise of National Socialism forced a transformation of their repertoires and artistic practices.

This paper examines how Jewish popular performers in exile in the United States and Latin America confronted the challenge posed by the Nazi period. How did their experiences with itinerancy inform encounters with forced migration after 1938? In what ways did they alter their repertoires to suit their new audiences and linguistic contexts? Migration within the Habsburg Empire made performers endlessly malleable and provided them with a cultural toolkit that helped adaptation to new homes after 1938. Performances offered sites for the constant renegotiation of boundaries between host countries and Jewish, Austrian, and European identities. At the same time, forced migration led to a fundamental transformation of the status of central European popular performers: previously marginal figures, exile ironically made select popular performers into ambassadors of European culture abroad. This translation project continued after 1945 when a significant number of popular performers returned to Vienna. Once again, remigrating performers adapted their repertoires--this time to the monolingual context of postwar Austria. The history of Jewish popular performers during the twentieth century ultimately demands that we view forced migration as a multidirectional process with long-term consequences for European and Jewish cultural history.