Sexuality in Austria, the fifteenth issue of Contemporary Austrian Studies, comprises a useful and well-written historiographic introduction by editor Dagmar Herzog and eight interdisciplinary articles. These richly textured case studies range chronologically from the Viennese fin de siècle to the present. The authors address a variety of topics including homosexuality, sex counseling during the interwar era, postwar fraternization with occupation troops, and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on sexuality.

David Luft and Scott Spector locate their contributions in sexually saturated, late imperial Vienna. Luft, drawing material from his recent book, writes about the crisis of the male ego, whereas Spector argues that letters to the editor from self-identified homosexuals in response to the short-lived Oesterreichische Kriminal-Zeitung's campaign against pederasty brought the homosexual community in Vienna into the public eye in a way it had never previously been. These aggressively self-defensive letters can be considered “constitutive elements in early twentieth-century male homosexual subjectivity” (43).

Pieter Judson and Matti Bunzl consider homophobia in contemporary Austria from divergent perspectives. Bunzl traces the deployment of “Europe” beginning in the late 1970s in the changes in Austria's formerly draconian postwar treatment of gays and lesbians (most consensual same-sex sexual activity was decriminalized only in 1971), arguing that pan-European organizations generated the most significant pressure on Austrian politics resulting in ongoing political reform of laws concerning homosexuals. In his discussion of the sex scandals at St. Pölten seminary in summer 2004, when pornography—including child pornography—was found on the main computer, Pieter Judson shows how that story was quickly superseded by accusations of homosexual perversion and pedophilia, tropes often connected with the church.

Maria Mesner and Franz Eder address issues of popular sexual values starting in the interwar period. In her examination of sex counseling in Austria in the first half of the century, Mesner analyzes this site of intersection between members of the working class and educated professionals. The marital and sexual advice clinics founded in the wake of World War I—all of them in Vienna—shared a common feature with other, similar centers throughout Europe: “they supported sexual reform and implicitly advocated new regimes of the body” (48). Because the social visions inherent in these clinics offered workers knowledge that had previously been, for the most part, unavailable to them, they were personally empowering. Eder examines popular sexual attitudes from the 1930s through the 1960s. He demonstrates continuity over several regimes, as well as suggesting similarities to Germany in which public discourse and media coverage fostered a “positive sexualization” in the Foucaultian sense. Indeed, an erosion of conservative ideals of sexuality especially distinguished the postwar years.

Contributions by Ingrid Bauer and Renate Huber and by Julia Woesthoff address the question of sexual encounters—primarily female—with a variety of “Others.” The Bauer/Huber article looks at post-World War II fraternizing between Austrian women and quadripartite occupation soldiers, analyzing the wide spectrum of these relationships, which ranged from prostitution to marriage. Woesthoff considers a more recent example of “fraternization”: numerous fictitious marriages since the mid-1990s, especially between Austrian women and immigrants from outside the European Economic Region, to permit the latter to remain in Austria. Woesthoff points to the gender and racial bias in concern about bi-national couples, most of which focuses on partnerships between Austrian women and foreign men. She asserts that there has been far less legal and public scrutiny of Austrian men and their foreign partners. One reason for this she posits is the recent difference in home country between foreign husbands and wives. Although the main foreign marriage partners for Austrian women are Turks, since the late 1990s, the top five countries of origin for non-Austrian wives are European, and the majority of them now European Union member-states (Romania, Germany, Slovakia, and Poland), which may help to explain the relative lack of publicity these marriages receive. Woesthoff concludes that it remains an open question if fantasies and anxieties of financially desperate and/or pathetic Austrian women and racist notions of undesirable foreign men are driving policy—or if these stories are deliberately circulated in an attempt to justify policy (168).

Despite Herzog's effort to tie them together in her excellent introduction, these wide-ranging and varied articles do not form a coherent whole. This is not a weakness, however, because each article stands alone, making this volume more valuable to specialists than it might otherwise have been. These, for the most part, well-written and interesting articles offer a variety of starting points for further research on sexuality in Austria in particular and Habsburg Central Europe in general. Moreover, they can be assigned individually or collectively in courses ranging from gender and sexuality through Habsburg history to modern European history.