Abstract

Better known for her novels and Weimar-era celebrity, Vicki Baum was also of Jewish ancestry and authored two ghetto novellas (Ghettogeschichten) that appeared in 1910-11 in Ost und West, the first Jewish magazine. "Rafael Gutmann" depicts the attempt of an effeminate teenage ghetto singer, a traditional Ostjude, to break into the world of German opera represented by Beethoven and Wagner. Baum's own career parallels this narrative of social and cultural legitimization, yet the story's ambivalent attitudes toward Jews and Judentum are mediated through a discursive framework resembling that of Otto Weininger. At the same time, certain connotations are disputed by surrounding (inter)texts of Ost und West, a process challenging a simplistic "ideology of mass culture." (DAB)

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