The Politics of Visibility: “Jewish” Accents in Imperial German Theatre

In the popular theatres of Imperial Germany many plays featured Jewish stage-characters speaking or “relapsing” into a presumably “Jewish” accent. This way of speaking was supposed to sound like Yiddish, but was largely comprehensible for a German-speaking audience. It was not only making stage characters visible as Jews, but also worked as a source of laughter. While so called Jargon-theatres like the highly successful Herrnfeld-Theatre based their entire conception on this stage-accent, a great number of popular plays such as Die von Hochsattel (Leo Walter Stein/Ludwig Heller, 1907) or Der gutsitzende Frack (Gabriel Drégely, 1912) featured protagonists “slipping” into such a “Jewish” accent at specific moments in the plot.

The artists that made use of these invented “Jewish” accents in Imperial Germany were mostly of Jewish descent. However, they adapted a theatrical convention that was created by non-Jewish artists parallel to the debates on emancipation in Germany by the beginning of the 19^th century. Plays such as Unser Verkehr (Karl Borromäus Sessa, 1813) featured Jewish stage characters that tried to show themselves as acculturated but eventually “slipped” into the “Jewish” accent.

This presentation investigates the politics and meaning of this “Jewish” stage-accent in their varying contexts. Focusing on the theatres of Imperial Germany it connects the plots of exemplary plays, their performance on stage, and the reactions of the audiences with debates about embourgeoisement, acculturation, and behavior. Thereby it seeks to shed light on a theatrical dimension of the Jewish experience in modern Germany.