This monograph offers a broadly conceived study of a particularly important piece of Weimar legislation, the National Law for Combating Venereal Diseases of 1927, which decriminalized prostitution and abolished police regulation of the sex trade in favor of a public health approach. This law was a major part of the effort to democratize gender relations in Germany, and Roos's book is a much-needed reexamination, from a quite fresh perspective, of its origins, success, and failure.

Roos analyzes the prehistory, passage, and impact of the law from multiple perspectives. Chapter one sets the stage by laying out the legal, institutional, and ideological structures that supported the police regulation of prostitution in the Imperial and early Weimar periods, and the history of debates over that system between about 1900 and the early 1920s. Chapter two examines the lives and problems of prostitutes, their organizational initiatives in the early Weimar years, and their responses to the 1927 law. Chapter three assesses the role of the mainstream women's movement in achieving the passage of the law, with particular focus on the question of the political potentials of bourgeois feminists’ attitudes toward women in the sex industry. Chapter four examines socialist perspectives on prostitution and the 1927 law, stressing in particular the bitter debate between Communists and Social Democrats over the balance between the imperatives of public health and the rights of women in the sex industry. Chapter five examines the intense backlash against the law, after 1927, among moral conservatives, who saw it as a prime example of the—as they saw it—moral catastrophe of German democracy. The conclusion is effectively a sixth chapter, on the reimposition of regulation and indeed an extensive brothel system by the Nazis.

Throughout this book Roos consistently rejects interpretations that have seen in the development of Weimar social and health policy harbingers of the failure of democratic politics in 1933 or of Nazi measures thereafter. Thus, for example, she finds that while bourgeois women displayed sometimes quite intense class bias in their approach to prostitution, they nevertheless were genuinely champions of the rights of women as people and citizens. Social Democrats’ commitment to collective public health made them open to compromise on some issues, but ultimately they did secure important improvements in prostitutes’ legal and social status. The 1927 law did create an extensive and intrusive public health system, and some of the methods used to impose treatment were quite coercive; but the law clearly created real and substantial gains for women in the sex trade. Roos has a very high tolerance for ambivalence, and her analysis in each of these chapters is careful, nuanced, and balanced. Some readers will no doubt wish she had settled on a simpler, less qualified “bottom line”; but ultimately Roos's appreciation for the multiple and often contradictory potentials and dynamics in play in the histories she recounts is very convincing, and perhaps the greatest strength of this book. One of the aims of this book is to offer a positive assessment of the ways in which “Weimar-era women's emancipation successfully challenged central aspects of established patriarchal hierarchies and sexual mores” (p. 4). It accomplishes that aim in very convincing fashion—all the more so because it does so without denying the complexity and ambivalence of Weimar history. In doing so, it deepens our understanding of the Weimar Republic in an important way.

A second central aim of this book is to “underscore the importance of gender analysis for a deeper understanding of major social and political developments in the history of the Weimar Republic”—to move debates about gender relations to the center of our understanding of Weimar politics, as an independent rather than a dependent variable. This is a theme that is particularly central to chapter five and the conclusion. Here Roos argues that the success of feminists and the Left in reforming prostitution was a significant contributor to the failure of the republic, because it mobilized moral conservatives and misogynist police and medical authorities against what they saw as the corrosive materialism, individualism, and moral relativism of the Weimar state. Much less explicitly, however, in the earlier chapters Roos also argues that the issue of prostitution, and the broader gendered politics it focused, contributed to the success of the republic in its early years by helping to build political cooperation between women across the political spectrum from conservative Christians to Social Democrats. What made the difference between the two periods was above all the Depression, the (real and imagined) social and moral chaos engendered by economic crisis. Here again, this book succeeds admirably. Roos does not present “smoking gun” documents or statements that prove that prostitution reform, as part of the broader debate about morality and gender relations, played a central role in the specific political decisions that stabilized or doomed the republic. But the density and wide range of her analysis make it obvious that the preponderance of the evidence clearly supports that conclusion.

This is a deeply researched, highly detailed, meticulously footnoted monograph, drawing on an impressive number of archives (including those both of key private associations and of public authorities at the central, regional, and municipal levels), periodical publications from across the ideological spectrum, parliamentary papers and government reports, and a wide range of published primary sources. Roos has also read widely in the relevant scholarly literature not only on the German case, but in other national literatures as well; and she makes sparing but intelligent and illuminating use of a comparative perspective. Roos's argumentation is consistently clear, judicious, nuanced, and convincing.

All in all, this is an admirable piece of scholarship, and one that presents a new interpretive perspective with very broad implications for our understanding of the Weimar Republic and of the history of modern Germany more broadly. It deserves a wide audience, and it should spark fruitful discussion and debate in the coming years.