“Das wahre Programm der Zeit hieß: Jazz”: Zum Stellenwert des Jazz als (musik)kulturelle und literarische Chiffre in der österreichischen Zwischenkriegszeit

Usually the early European jazz reception is associated, after Paris, with Berlin and the culture of the Weimar Republic, while Austria and particularly Vienna are paid but scant att ention in this context. When looking more closely at the cultural and artistic dynamic in Vienna during the 1920s, however, one encounters a surprising density of both the reception of jazz and independent contributions as differentiations of existing artistic practice in the areas of literature, music, theater, and feuilleton writing. This paper on the one hand reconstructs the broad spectrum of jazz presence based on contemporary sources and, on the other hand, investigates the cultural and discursive meaning of the latter, that is, to what extent it can be regarded as a cultural code of the time and how it interfaced with other parallel artistic phenomenons (for instance, debates about new music) and political discourses (Americanism, national stereotypes, racism, and so on).