Samson in Vienna: the theatrics of Jewish masculinity.

Publication: Jewish Social Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University Press

In the winter of 1923, dramatic political events were unfolding in and around Vienna. Bloody confrontations were taking place between monarchists and socialists; the nascent Nazi Party was flexing its political muscle on the city's streets; the treaty of St. Germain became a flashpoint for Vienna's nationalists; and pan-German passions were inflamed by the French occupation of the Ruhr. Yet, for several months, these events were practically eclipsed by a most unlikely episode in Viennese popular culture. The Viennese public was held in breathtaking suspense "by a phenomenon that has simply never been witnessed," reported the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung:



A human being of supernatural powers. Breitbart. He bends steel as if it were soft rubber, bites through chains as though they were tender meat, drives nails into thick wood with his bare fist.... A bridge loaded with hundreds of kilograms of concrete block is lowered onto his gigantic body, and the blocks are pounded with hammers.... He uses his body as a support for a manned carousel which revolves at a dizzying speed. (1)

All of this, enthused the reporter, "is enough of a sensation to astonish the Viennese. Breitbart, Breitbart, Breitbart. No one talks of anything else. No one else is the subject of so much admiration."

Within the volatile political environment of postwar Vienna, a stunning array of Vienna's residents--Jews and non-Jews, nationalists and liberals, men and women--found themselves captivated by Europe's newest entertainment sensation. Billed as "The Strongest Man in the World," Siegmund ne Zishe Breitbart, son of a Jewish blacksmith, was born in 1893 in Starowieschtch, in the city of Lodz, then part of Imperial Russia. He was the second of seven children in a poor Yiddish-speaking religious family. In his autobiography, he reported that his family discovered his unusual strength when, at age three, he managed to free himself from a heavy iron bar that had fallen on him in his father's smithy. By the age of four, he had already begun casting iron with his father. (2) Expelled from a succession of religious schools for the intemperate use of his strength against fellow students, the young Breitbart dreamed of grander venues that would showcase his powers and earn him public adulation. Having embarked upon a career as a circus strongman, clown, and acrobat, Breitbart also performed on the Yiddish stage with a traveling Yiddish theater troupe. (3) Inducted into the Russian Army at the beginning of World War I, he was captured by the Germans and, remaining in Germany after the war, earned a meager living by performing at local markets.

It was at one such market in Bremen in 1919 that the director of Circus Busch spotted Breitbart and decided to pick up his strongman act. (4) Featured first as an opening act at the circus, Breitbart made the move into theater and eventually became a prime draw on Central Europe's vaudeville stage. Having reached the apogee of his fame in Vienna in 1923, he spent part of the following year touring the United States, also to great acclaim. Although his career was cut short by a stage accident in Poland that led to his death at the end of 1925, during the few years of his reign as Europe's "Iron King" and preeminent strongman, a veritable cult of Breitbart flourished with the production of two German films and a Yiddish screenplay, burlesque parodies of his many challengers, product endorsements, a physical culture correspondence course, jokes, poems, songs, and collectibles. (5) There was even a "Breitbart March" composed.

Breitbart's career as a world renowned strongman and self-styled "artiste" took off precisely at a time when the body was increasingly being taken as a measure of racial quality and antisemitism had reached its postwar peak. Antisemitic agitation during the five years of the Austrian republic was particularly fierce, targeting the recent arrivals from Galicia and Bukovina who had come to Vienna as war refugees. (6) Hence, alongside daily installments on the Breitbart affair appeared press reports of a more menacing nature. The Neue Freie Presse reported, for example, that antisemitic student organizations sought to introduce a numerus clausus to restrict the admission of foreign Jewish students to the University of Vienna. In early February 1923, the Wiener Morgenzeitung published a story that Jewish medical students had been barred from performing autopsies on "Aryan" cadavers. (7) During the same week, the Ignaz Siepel government acceded to right-wing pressure to include race as a category in the census of 1923. (8) Most worrisome of all were the series of antisemitic political demonstrations on Vienna's Ringstrasse. On January 15, 20,000 Viennese citizens supporting Christian-Social, conservative nationalist, and National Socialist parties, together with sports groups, students, professors, and war veterans, had marched on City Hall to demand the curtailment of Jewish rights in Austria. (9) Similar demonstrations continued through February. (10) The Wiener Morgenzeitung noted that antisemitic agitation in Vienna had become so widespread during the month of January that "even the Social Democrats, who are normally indifferent to popular hostility toward the Jews, have stood up and taken notice." (11)

Yet amid a hostile and racialized discourse, the body of Vienna's most popular Galician Jew was probably viewed and admired by more Viennese than any entertainment or sports figure in at least a decade. In this article, I seek to trace the intersecting and competing cultural forces that contributed to the production and reception of this Jewish popular icon. How did Breitbart's extraordinary body and expert showmanship succeed in capturing the contemporary cultural imagination at this particular moment in postwar Central European history? In particular, I will examine the content and the cultural significance of Breitbart's sensational performances before both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. How was his Jewishness construed by diverse audiences? What role did the scandal plotted by his rival Erik Jan Hanussen play in Breitbart's Viennese reception? To what extent could his performances be read as both reinforcing and contesting normative social ideals?

Within the context of popular urban entertainment, I will explore how what otherwise may have appeared a fixed stereotype of the Jew was mitigated, diminished, and even sometimes overturned by the transgressive possibilities of theater. In presenting inversions of the everyday, or by displaying and reinforcing social norms, theatrical productions are like written texts, subject to multiple readings that themselves are dependent on the values and desires of the audience. (12) Viewed as a cultural text, any performance can thus be analyzed as a site of cultural negotiation, an occasion upon which a culture or society can reflect upon and define itself, dramatize its collective myths and history, "present itself with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while remaining the same in others." (13)

Because performance is by its very nature symbolic and representational, the stage can also function to de-essentialize social categories otherwise considered to be "fixed" in normal life. Performance gives both spectators and performers the opportunity to transcend the constraints of the everyday and provide a new, if temporary, lens through which to view such naturalized concepts as gender and race. Even the most fundamental distinctions between self and other become negotiable, making publicly visible, in the words of Performance Studies scholar Joseph Roach, "both the tangible existence of social boundaries and, at the same time, the contingency of those boundaries on fictions of identity, their shoddy construction out of inchoate otherness, and consequently, their anxiety-inducing instability." (14)

The instability and contingency of Breitbart's "racial" identity, both on- and offstage, is perhaps the most striking feature of what became known in Vienna as "the Breitbart affair." The Jewish strongman's public persona challenged and evaded traditional social categories. At the same time, his beautiful and well-built body undercut popular notions of the Jew. Looking at Breitbart's reception by a range of audiences enables us to explore the interplay between his self-fashioning as a performer and the remarkable ease with which stereotypes and notions of otherness could be shifted, suspended, or creatively rearranged.

The Breitbart Affair

Breitbart's visit to Vienna began as it did in other cities, accompanied by a massive publicity drive. In the fall of 1922, the director of the Ronacher Theater, Vienna's oldest and largest vaudeville establishment, booked Breitbart for a one-month engagement to commence at the beginning of January 1923. (15) The pressure of intense competition had forced variety theaters into an ongoing search for fresh acts and new sensations, and this was particularly so at a time when popular theater was suffering under the combined burden of crushing inflation and a new entertainment tax. (16) For days preceding Breitbart's arrival, advertisements in the most widely circulated Viennese dailies heralded the "Iron King's" arrival in Vienna, promising never-before-witnessed, nature-defying feats.

Even before setting foot on a Viennese stage, Breitbart took his crowd-pleasing act to the streets. The Neuigkeits-Weltblatt reported that the streets of the capital were flooded by thousands of people eager to witness "the `Iron King,' decked out as a proud Roman gladiator, single-handedly pulling a wagon loaded with 40 people by holding between his teeth an iron chain that was rigged up to two horses" (Figure 1). (17) The paper's front page featured an artist's rendering of Breitbart's act of "Herculean strength." (18) Other papers joined the Weltblatt in reporting on Breitbart's momentous entrance into the city. The Zionist daily, the Wiener Morgenzeitung, simply announced to its Jewish readership that Samson had arrived in Vienna. (19)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Unlike in other cities, however, what began in Vienna as an aggressive advertising campaign eventually escalated into a series of less orchestrated public scandals. Although the leveling of a challenge against a reigning champion had long been an integral part of the circus strongman act--this, in fact, is how Breitbart claims to have gotten his start--Breitbart's rivals took the convention to new heights. In Breitbart's Vienna, the challenge played itself out not only onstage, in the theater, in the streets, and in the press but also, eventually, in the courts. An ever-expanding audience followed the exploits of the fabled strongman both on- and offstage, often blurring the boundaries between public and private, art and life.

At the Ronacher, Breitbart's nightly appearances played to sold-out crowds of over 1,500. Viennese of all classes came to marvel at the

fine athlete [who] at first performs pompously attired as a Roman gladiator, and then, much to the audience's delight, in the simpler garb of the Teutons. With his bare hands he bends one-centimeter-thick iron bars into artistic wrought-iron spirals and twists. He makes horseshoes "the cold way," using only his hands. With his fist he forces fifteen-centimeter carpenter's nails through three half-inch-thick boards. Then he breaks the nails apart with his fingers and jams the broken...

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