Looking at early twentieth-century commercial entertainments where different media shared the same space, this essay defines two forms-or rather two aspects-of commercial intermediality as they were developed in early twentieth century New York City. The thriving mixed media scene in the city's Jewish immigrant neighborhood, the Lower East Side, developed what I call an intermediality of hunger, which often (but not only) emerges on the cultural periphery and refers to a market-driven media voraciousness, where the incorporation of additional media increases the range of appeals, thus diversifying a potential audience. A little bit later, Times Square developed what I call an intermediality of effect, which is more often located at the cultural center, seeks to orchestrate a more coherent and unified media and sense experience but remains indebted to the intermediality of hunger.
German American theatre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City became a model for both a national American theatre and other diasporic theatres in the US. This theatre aspired to an autonomous, class-free, universal culture, which was seen as the legacy of a German Enlightenment tradition epitomized by Schiller's national(izing) theatre. German Americans were thus exceptionally positioned to claim the ideology of a universal culture as a national characteristic. At the same time, however, the theatre was structured by market demands and the need to appeal to a diverse German American constituency. This oscillation between idealistic and commercial culture made the German American theatre attractive. In the end, the theatre not only helped legitimize New York City's cultural periphery, but became a model when a new American ‘national’ culture, the national theatre, was being imagined, which ultimately illustrates the importance of the concept of legitimacy for hybrid public cultures.
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