Fin-de-siècle Vienna has long been recognized as a city “suffused with sex” (3). In this cultural history of the creation and dissemination of sexual knowledge in Vienna from the late imperial period to the imposition of the Austro-Fascist Ständestaat, Britta McEwen uses the well-trodden encounter of Freud and Ida Bauer (aka Dora) as a jumping-off point for the identification and establishment of a larger trend, namely, that “the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in Vienna underwent a dramatic shift… from a form of scientific inquiry practiced largely by medical specialists to a social reform issue engaged by and intended for a wide audience” (2). In demonstrating the concomitant popularization and sanitization of sexual knowledge in Vienna, McEwen maintains a clear focus on the public dissemination of sexual knowledge and how it was understood by those involved in its creation and dissemination. The central issues that emerge are “sexual hygiene and education, sex advice and birth control information, and romantic and familial love” (18).

Whereas a more textually oriented scholar would look to literary, theatrical, and filmic productions, McEwen's approach is shaped by published and unpublished sources that include “hundreds of sex manuals, advice columns, Catholic theological texts, medical journals, children's sexual education pamphlets and municipal reports… city administration records, personnel records, clinic forms and propaganda materials” (5). Readers of the Austrian History Yearbook will be familiar with the material in the first chapter, as it appeared in her 2010 article on Julius Tandler's rassenhygienische vision for interwar Vienna, which examines the eugenicist argumentation underpinning the Social Democratic minister of public health's policies on housing, health care, and welfare services. The next two chapters look at the sources of sexual education available to children and women in the interwar period and the melodramatic, Catholic tone of confession that resulted from struggles that took place over their provision. Further chapters trace the rise of advice clinics in the 1920s (specifically, the Marriage Advice Center, the clinic run by the League Against Forced Motherhood, and the Proletarian Sexual Advice Centers); the fate of Hugo Bettauer, whose publication of Er und Sie: Wochenschrift für Lebenskultur und Erotik and the censorship trial and assassination that followed are shown to complicate easy “doomed Atlantis” narratives of Red Vienna's demise, and finally, the fourth conference of the World League for Sexual Reform that was held in Vienna's Konzerthaus in September 1930.

What emerges is a solid description and convincing explanation of the historical circumstances in Vienna that allowed for the transformation of sexual knowledge from a scientific discourse into a nonspecialist one that has arguably in the meantime become hegemonic in global popular media. Making such connections more explicit would have made the study more relevant beyond the narrow confines of Austrian historical scholarship. One wishes that rather than merely revising the dissertation she defended at UCLA in 2003 by adding a conclusion and a few sources such as the 2007 volume on Sexuality in Austria edited by Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dagmar Herzog (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers), McEwen had taken the challenge of that volume's national focus seriously and explicitly stated the theoretical ramifications of her decision “to limit the range of inquiry to a city, rather than a nation” (4). She acknowledges in the “Methodology” section that this is the most significant methodological choice she made, but in the following “Historiography” section she falls back into the snare of modern Austrian history and its propensity to account for failure (6). Rather than taking her cues from urbanists and historians of sexuality and popular culture and finding material that could provide the historical context for understanding what Herzog rightly sees as the profoundly political implications of sex becoming a spectator sport, McEwen allows her frame, material, and conclusions to be overdetermined by nationally and print-oriented historiographical practice. Following in the wake of Bischof, Pelinka, and Herzog's Sexuality in Austria volume, McEwen's study thus adds to the burgeoning scholarship on Austrian sexuality that deserves to be integrated into, and has a significant contribution to make to, the interdisciplinary, comparative work done in the fields of sexuality and media studies.