Antje Dietze and Alexander Vari, eds. <i>Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment: Experiences from Northern, East-Central, and Southern Europe, 1870s–1930s</i>

Walter Benjamin famously declared Paris the capital of the nineteenth century. What this book presupposes is: Maybe it wasn’t? Or, to put it somewhat more precisely: What if the “capital” model of cultural diffusion—whereby brilliant metropolises, like arrogant suns, radiated modernity ever outwards to illuminate the benighted provinces—fails to capture the far more complex realities of how city dwellers handled popular culture in the boom age of European urbanization? Antje Dietze, Alexander Vari, and the eleven other scholars represented in this edited collection propose instead a different paradigm, moving away from the “solar” and hierarchical to the multidirectional and negotiated. Their contributions explore “the rise, development, and cross-border transfer of urban entertainments” (2) from the vantage points of places often left out of historical surveys of Europe—though not, in fact, left out of the loop artistically. In aggregate, the essays take up the “cultural transfer approach” (3), focusing on mediating figures like performers, publishers, and impresarios who took material and practices from abroad and made them attractive to distant, “transregional” publics (5). This perspective—deeply local, yet attuned to the world beyond—reveals just how dynamic, current, and inventive culture could be on the so-called periphery.The volume is divided into broadly thematic halves. The first deals primarily with agents of change and intermediation, particularly traveling artists and entrepreneurs plying the trade of international culture. The second looks at the response of institutions and audiences to “foreign” entertainments, and at how those bodies sought to regulate (or not) outside influence on the supposed cultural integrity of the nation.Susanne Korbel opens part I with a chapter on fin-de-siècle entertainment spaces across the Habsburg monarchy. Korbel finds that as talent traveled from city to city, and one Varieté and music hall to another, it created a Central European professional network whose members, clientele, and performances shrugged off the mandates of contemporary politics with “national indifference” (42), finding it more profitable to peddle in foreignness rather than cultural loyalty. Nuppu Koivisto-Kaasik and Saijaleena Rantanen offer an examination of early 1900s Vyborg, then within the Russian-controlled Grand Duchy of Finland, as a “cosmopolitan music city” (53). Closely examining two performance seasons, and focusing especially on the Fennia women’s orchestra, the authors uncover how, in the midst of intensifying Russification and antisemitism, cultural life in the border town was not the product of some binary national struggle but of “many transnational exchanges” across Europe (68). We then shift from the Baltic to the Aegean with Eliza Anna Delveroudi’s study of the Athenian film industry in its infancy. Zooming in mainly on exhibitors and exhibition spaces, Delveroudi meticulously lays out numerous pieces of this understudied puzzle, from its ad hoc origins to eventual gentrification, arguing that cinema was adapted dynamically to local circumstances rather than transplanted wholesale from abroad. Rikard Hoogland introduces us to Swedish “theater king” Albert Ranft as a maverick mogul whose dominance of the scene put his country’s theatrical history on an idiosyncratic path. Through savvy importation of Central European hits and patronage of commercially successful modernist forms, Ranft amassed wealth and influence by Europeanizing Swedish “national” theater. Rounding out the first half is Alexander Vari’s investigation of how French chanson came to dwell within the cabarets of Budapest. Starting out as a Parisian novelty in the 1880s, received warily by critics preoccupied by Magyarization, it was through the admiration of singers like Yvette Guilbert that chanson became not only accepted but assimilated, culminating in the rise of star Hungarian diseuses in the 1920s and 1930s.Part II begins with an installment from Rubén Pallol Trigueros and Cristina de Pedro Álvarez on the evolution of nightlife in pre-Civil War Madrid. Approaching the question spatially as well as socially, the authors map the expansion of nocturnal amusements onto coeval developments in the city’s rapid modernization, as both the variety and locations of entertainment venues grew to encompass all social classes and integrate global trends, vexing the moral sensibilities of local authorities—royal, dictatorial, and republican alike. Next, Ivana Vesić details the formation of popular culture in interwar Yugoslavia. This, shows Vesić, is another case of the widespread enjoyment of the fashionable and the foreign among mass audiences—in this instance: dance styles, Schlagers, and sound film—and the hand-wringing of elites over the harm these things might cause to the maintenance of a common Yugoslav (or here, Serbian) national culture. Anna G. Piotrowska surveys the multipronged influences on pop music in newly revived Poland. She attests that in the happy-go-lucky twenties, older and Russian-associated “Gypsy” songs mingled ambivalently with Central European operetta and Western foxtrots, tangos, and jazz, with no single source clearly triumphant. G. Carole Woodall’s tour of “Constan Town”—a.k.a. 1920s Istanbul—issues a challenge both to the historical conception of jazz as a straightforward American export (or imposition) and that of the “neat transition” to a “homogenous [Turkish] culture” (257). Instead, Woodall argues for a more capacious and contextualized understanding of “jazz,” which emerged from the interplay of disembarked American “sailor-musicians,” traveling professionals, and local amateurs (266). Finally, Ólafur Rastrick delivers us both the end of the volume—and the ends of the earth—with a chapter on the reception of jazz in postcolonial Iceland. Rastrick brings to light not only the uniquely difficult circumstances of consumption that prevailed there, where recordings and sheet music (let alone visiting practitioners) were relatively hard to come by, but also the remarkably fraught backlash against jazz as a racially degrading phenomenon that threatened Iceland’s already tenuous place within European “civilization.”Though its locales be far-flung and its topics kaleidoscopic, this book provides an excellently convergent “view from below” of how globalizing cultural currents took hold of people at a crucial historical juncture and of the many ways they devised of channeling those currents for themselves. The emphasis on agency across multiple levels of society—that is, on intermediary agents and the empirically visible impression they made on their milieus—appreciably fixes these essays in the concrete and the material in a way many studies of popular culture do not. Even if the cultural phenomena described therein are, at times, abstracted to the point of mere commodification—one gets little impression of what the many songs mentioned are actually about, for example—they have the virtue of being carefully tethered to human action. Culture here does not simply waft across frontiers like wind-lofted seeds; it is communicated from person to person, in definite times and definite places. Thus the authors help us see what “transnationality” meant in practical terms and to better measure the true place of the great metropolises in popular consciousness. And, in what I judge to be the book’s most memorable subtext, they show just how unconcerned the mass of paying consumers tended to be about the moral or national purity of their divertissements. Bark as they might, the ostensible watchdogs of culture seem to have lost out in nearly every case presented.For all that, however, there was one specific imprecision that nagged me throughout: What, exactly, should “cosmopolitan” mean as a historical concept? Some authors in the volume, most notably Koivisto-Kaasik and Rantanen, use it as an unspecified crutch descriptor; Woodall for her part briefly problematizes it, largely to set it aside (268). But in a book that is otherwise so careful with its key terms, and especially in its accounting of the language of crossing borders, the word skids around like a loose cannon. What is its relationship to “transnational,” or “nationally indifferent?” Are we to understand it as a conscious cultural position, or can it be a condition of naïve supranationality? When are historical agents “cosmopolites,” and when are they not? Finally, and maybe most pertinently, how are we to handle that term in view of the pervasive antisemitism of the era according to which it was no compliment but rather a potentially deadly accusation of treachery?Other scholars may or may not be inspired to take up these questions; but I do hope they will take inspiration from this volume’s agency-oriented methodology. East Central Europe specialists will likely be drawn to Vari’s, Vesić’s, and Piotrowska’s entries, and deservedly so. But there is much to be gained from thinking broadly about how the other contributions too might be extended elsewhere in our field.

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