Spaces of Gendered Jewish and Non-Jewish Encounters: Bed Lodgers, Domestic Workers, and Sex Workers in Vienna, 1900–1930*

Abstract

This article presents findings on encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the context of daily life in Vienna between 1900 and 1930. In the early twentieth century, the Habsburg capital underwent tremendous population growth, which increased the opportunities among its inhabitants of interreligious and cultural interactions, but also confronted them with a housing shortage. Up to twenty per cent of the population had to share housing or even beds with their fellow citizens. Those who could afford more comfortable living conditions, such as private apartments, also shared them with non-family members. The middle and upper classes employed domestics who lived with the families they worked for and had rooms within the family apartments. Homes thus provided spaces in which Jewish and non-Jewish relations thrived. This article sheds light on the range of encounters that took place in homes, how Jewishness and gender were negotiated in such encounters, whether relations were formed as a consequence, and, if so, what they looked like. Based on a close examination of memoirs, novels, and court records, I argue that the range of Jewish and non-Jewish relations was much broader than historiography has hitherto suggested, due to the shared experiences triggered by the urban making of Vienna. Fin-de-siècle Vienna provided a pluricultural urban setting characterized by a new quality of mobility. A large number of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, were on the move, new professions emerged, and increasing possibilities for leisure and entertainment spread along the Danube. These developments occurred in a climate of antisemitism, popularized and * Research for this article was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant P31036-G28. I wish to thank Gabriel Finder, Klaus Hödl, Joachim Schlör, and the anonymous referees for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 1 Moritz Csáky, ‘Hybride Kommunikationsräume und Mehrfachidentitäten. Zentraleuropa um 1900’, in Elisabeth Röhrlich (ed.), Migration und Innovation um 1900. Perspektiven auf das Wien der Jahrhundertwende, Vienna 2016, pp. 65–97. The concept of pluriculturalism builds on the assumptions of multiculturalism, although, in an attempt to overcome the problematic singularity of the concept of multiculturalism, scholars have begun to focus on how cultures resonate, interact, and merge through mutual mediation, rather than merely tolerating one another or coexisting. See Anil Bhatti, ‘Plurikulturalität’, in Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl (eds), Habsburg neu denken. Vielfalt und Ambivalenz in Zentraleuropa—30 kulturwissenschaftliche Stichworte, Vienna 2016, pp. 171–180. 2 Mary Gluck, The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Madison 2016; Klaus Hödl, Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, New York 2019; Susanne Winner of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook Essay Prize 2021 2 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license. made socially acceptable by Mayor Karl Lueger’s transformation of the religious into racist agitation. This strong animosity towards Jews was rooted in a type of biologistic thought termed ‘Moderner Antisemitismus’ (‘modern antisemitism’). ‘Arierparagraphen’ (‘Aryan paragraphs’) expelling Jewish students from fraternities competed with institutions like the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Association to Counter Antisemitism). Nonetheless, everyday life provided inhabitants with seemingly endless opportunities for encounters between Jews and non-Jews that were nourished by the city’s pulse. The massive growth of its population transformed Vienna into a metropolis of more than two million inhabitants, leading to citizens having to share housing with their fellow citizens. The vast majority of the population shared lavatories with their neighbours on the same floor or even with the entire building. They got running water from the ‘Bassena’ (a communal basin) in the hallway, their children played in the courtyards, and the adults gathered in the ‘Zimmer’, ‘Küche’, or ‘Kabinett’ (the room, kitchen and connecting room that constituted many Viennese apartments at the time). Those who could afford more comfortable conditions lived in private apartments with their family members, but also others. Both high society and average middle-class families employed domestic workers— maids, nannies, caretakers—who lived together with the families they worked for and had rooms in their homes. In this article, I explore intimate spaces such as apartments and shared bedrooms in fin-de-siècle Vienna as places that facilitated encounters between Jews and nonJews, and investigate the overlapping of Jewishness and gender as spatial experiences. What Korbel, Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika um 1900, Vienna 2020. 3 See Victor Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie. Juden in der europäischen Moderne, tr. Judith Klein, Frankfurt am Main 1999, 203–221. 4 Albert Lichtblau, ‘Antisemitismus 1900–1938. Phasen, Wahrnehmungen und Akkulturationseffekte’, in Barbara Eichinger and Frank Stern (eds), Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900–1938. Akkulturation— Antisemitismus—Zionismus, Vienna 2009, pp. 39–58. 5 Between 1890 and 1930, Vienna’s population increased threefold. In 1880, approximately 730,000 people lived in Vienna. In 1890, the population had crossed the one million threshold, with 1.1 million people settled there, and by the turn of the century it had 1.6 million inhabitants. By 1910, the population had again increased by a quarter, with two million people, including 175,000 Jews, living in the metropolis. Ivar Oxaal, ‘Die Juden im Wien des jungen Hitler. Historische und soziologische Aspekte’, in Gerhard Botz, Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak and Nina Scholz (eds), Eine zerstörte Kultur. Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Vienna 2002, pp. 47–66 and pp. 50–51. 6 ‘Zimmer, Küche, Kabinett’ became a characteristic flat design for Vienna; a perfect scheme for having as much space to rent out as possible. Bruno Frei, Jüdisches Elend in Wien. Bilder und Daten, Vienna 1920, pp. 44–53. 7 Jewish studies is currently witnessing the heyday of the spatial turn. See for example Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (eds), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, New York 2017, and especially Anne-Christin Saß, ‘Reconstructing Jewishness, Deconstructing the Past: Reading Berlin’s Scheunenviertel Over the Course of the Twentieth Century’, in ibid., pp. 197–214. Winner of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook Essay Prize 2021 3 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license. kinds of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters took place in private spaces in Vienna? How were Jewishness and gender negotiated in such encounters? Were relations formed through these encounters and, if so, what did they look like? SHARED LIVING SPACES Vienna around 1900 offered multifarious opportunities for encounters between Jews and nonJews. Not only public spaces provided regular coincidental and unintended meetings with people outside of the family; in supposedly private spaces such as apartments, people also encountered their fellow citizens. These spaces were not divided between Jewish and nonJewish spheres, but rather the opposite: Jews lived together with non-Jews, Jews worked for non-Jews, Jews had non-Jewish nannies and maids, Jews produced goods together with nonJews, and even Jewish sex workers might have had non-Jewish clients, and vice versa. However, the historiographic view of Jewish and non-Jewish co-residence in Vienna around 1900 still remains within the limits of a narrative that emerged in important studies during the early 1980s. For example, in her classic account of Jewish life in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Marsha Rozenblit writes, while examining the phenomenon of intermarriages as ‘the final stage in the process of ethnic assimilation’: The Vienna Jews lived with other Jews. The creation of Jewish neighbourhoods in the city served to separate Jews from gentiles and install more deeply the perception–– among Jews and non-Jews alike––that Jews formed a distinct group. Within their neighbourhoods, Jews came into contact chiefly with other Jews. Their residential concentration thus hindered them from forming friendships and other intimate relationships with non-Jews. I have found that this was not the case. Many memoirs by Viennese Jews contradict Rozenblit’s findings, as Ivar Oxaal emphasized when he stated: ‘Viennese Jews undoubtedly lived principally among other Jews during the half-century of internal migration before 1914, but a great many of them lived in close proximity to non-Jews, too’. Nevertheless, 8 Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity, New York 1983, pp. 126–131 (p. 126). 9 Ibid., p. 71. In addition, Rozenblit argued that ‘Jews lived not in areas which accorded with their economic status but in Jewish areas’. Vienna’s second district, Leopoldstadt, and ninth district, Alsergrund, constituted these areas. Ibid., pp. 78–79. 10 Oxaal, pp. 52–53. Winner of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook Essay Prize 2021 4 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license. narratives of Jewish particularism, as embodied in the ostensible spatial segregation of Jews from non-Jews in the cityscape, continue to be perpetuated by historical scholarship, as well as in literary, cultural, and social studies. Notions of shared Jewish and non-Jewish daily life have only rarely and recently come to the fore of research. This article begins by presenting seven examples of memoirs and/or memories that portray Vienna during the fin-de-siècle as a spac