Prior to the First World War, countless Germans sought release from their regulated and restrained lives in Jargon theaters. To date, however, the subject of Jargon theaters has not received much scholarly attention. In this section the spotlight thus falls on Berlin's Gebrüder Herrnfeld Theater, founded in 1896, and on its rival, the Folies Caprice. Together they introduced a theatrical genre that came to impress Berlin's theater world. The Herrnfeld and the Folies Caprice were the only theaters in which the majority of actors were of Jewish descent and, through their performances, embraced, problematicized, and even satirized their own Jewishness. Unlike circuses, which sought to transcend issues of ethnicity by inscribing performers into an imaginary world beyond the boundaries excluding them in the real world, Jargon theaters addressed on center stage the desire to belong, the costs of assimilation, and the roles of religion and family in contemporary (urban) life. Hence the conversations between spectators and performers that unfolded in these theaters differed considerably from those that took place in the circus tent or arena. Whereas circuses created ideal worlds in which equality was imagined through the disappearance of visible differences and the appropriation of formerly exclusive status symbols, Jargon theaters projected a vision in which these differences were acknowledged without necessarily entailing the automatic exclusion of the minority.