During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour.Footnote 1 In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others.Footnote 2 “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat.Footnote 3 (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.”Footnote 4 The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.
In addition to issues such as combat losses, shortage of weaponry and parts, prisoner-of-war transfers, and food shortages, venereal disease (VD), widespread among Austro-Hungarian troops and potentially weakening the fighting force, was an important military concern. It resulted in loss of manpower, and the cure was expensive as well as time-consuming. Moreover, in contrast to the badly wounded soldier, who might lose his health and often the possibility of future employment, but posed no danger to those around him, the soldier with syphilis was thought to endanger his family. Venereal disease thus played an important role in military intervention in civilian life, especially police regulation of prostitution. The search for clandestine prostitutes—who constituted the majority of prostitutes and whom vice police forced to register when apprehended—and the tighter regulation of the far smaller number of registered prostitutes kept police busy during wartime. (Prostitutes were registered with the police and placed under their control rather than that of the courts in the Austrian scheme of tolerated prostitution, a system whose efficacy, like that of tolerated prostitution elsewhere in Europe, was heatedly debated at the turn of the century.)Footnote 5 Military-state inability to stem the spread of sexually transmitted infections was among the many indicators of societal and state breakdown in Cisleithanian Austria under the exigencies of total war.Footnote 6
Growing state control of cultural, economic, and social life in Cisleithanian Austria accompanied the advent of World War I.Footnote 7 The multinational Habsburg military, together with the foreign ministry and the treasury, was among the joint institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy that the Ausgleich of 1867 had created. Owing to its large presence in all provinces, the army was the most important pan-monarchical institution in Austria-Hungary. Following the war's outbreak in August 1914, the Armeeoberkommando (Army High Command, the AOK) aggressively expanded its influence throughout the civilian realm. The dissolution of the Austrian Parliament in spring 1914—it would not be reconvened until May 1917—helped to facilitate this.Footnote 8 Indeed, the AOK had broad powers not only in the field but also in the so-called operational zones, which eventually covered most of Austria.Footnote 9
In addition to the tolerated prostitutes whom they considered a major source of sexually transmitted infections, local and regional authorities and the military focused almost obsessively on the “imminent danger” that other “enemies” behind the lines and on the home front represented.Footnote 10 These threats were the women, many young, often poor, unemployed, or hailing from low-wage, low-education positions long assumed to supply clandestine prostitutes: barmaids, buffet servers, cashiers, and chambermaids, as well as females with petty criminal records.Footnote 11 Suspects also included national or racial Others: masses of women, often Jewish, who fled the hostilities on the Eastern Front, as Bukovina and Galicia repeatedly changed hands.Footnote 12 Many of these women lived on the margins of society and the exigencies of war rendered their already difficult lives even more arduous.
Clandestine prostitutes not only plied their trade on the streets, but they also worked in parks, bars, pubs, nightclubs, so-called Stundenhotels (establishments where rooms could be rented by the hour and more or less synonymous with brothels), and, as the war dragged on, even better hotels.Footnote 13 Increasingly any woman or girl—some as young as fourteen—seen in the company of soldiers, including officers, might be subject to accusations of leading an “immoral life,” arrested as a suspected prostitute, and obliged to undergo medical examination for venereal disease at the hands of police physicians.
The war offered myriad opportunities in all belligerent countries for new sexual experiences and for the spread of sexually transmitted infections owing to the anonymity and mass mobility it facilitated. At the same time the war disrupted traditional constraints as well as communal and familial monitoring mechanisms.Footnote 14 In this environment, the Habsburg military, together with the civilian government, sought to stem the “loss of warriors” that venereal disease had left unfit to serve, lessening numbers of soldiers and thus weakening the fighting force. There had been earlier calls to hold men accountable for contracting sexually transmitted infections. The Great War marks the first time, however, that the Habsburg authorities, in regulating society for the purposes of military strength, expanded their focus from controlling only women's bodies to include limited focus on male bodies in their battle against venereal disease. The new policies were part of a European-wide shift in the way such diseases were handled, although many Austrian military and civilian authorities remained resistant to recognizing that the male consumers of commercial sex bore responsibility for the spread of disease and holding them accountable.
Civilian and military authorities alike treated prostitutes—and other women thought to be engaging in commercial sex—as dangerous vectors of venereal disease.Footnote 15 In wartime Cisleithanian Austria, civilians, male and female, joined the police, the military, and other Imperial authorities in attempting to maintain public order.Footnote 16 They took action against those women they viewed as violating standards of contemporary propriety by practicing, or being suspected of practicing, prostitution. Civilian denunciations of moral turpitude—especially female—increased during the war. To be sure, some of the complaints were also directed at the sexual peccadilloes of the troops who were quartered among the civilians, but most were directed against women. These female targets were often the women who stepped outside assigned bourgeois gender roles, thus evading ever more stringent social control. For example, it was only after representatives of the women's organizations of all political parties in Vienna demanded in autumn 1914 that the city's nightclubs be closed altogether during wartime that the kaiserlicher und königlicher (k.k). Stadtkommandant (commanding officer for Vienna) called for nightclubs to have earlier closing hours, noting it was of “great military importance” to protect the troops who were drawn to these establishments, which prostitutes frequented.Footnote 17 Civilian efforts were little help in limiting the spread of clandestine prostitution or sexually transmitted infections, however, thereby revealing limits of state and social control in Austria during the Great War. The regime's attempts to monitor “deviant” female behavior more closely did not result in more effective control. The history of wartime prostitution, when considered together with the dual threats the Habsburg authorities faced (losing the war and the toppling of the old aristocratic/bourgeois social order), illuminates the limits of the state's powers to intervene into and control society under the conditions of total war.
The Military's Battle against Venereal Disease
The Habsburg military was interested in public morals and public health only insofar as they affected its soldiers' ability to fight.Footnote 18 Military preoccupation with the spread of venereal disease increased greatly with the outbreak of war in August 1914 as evidenced by the topic's regular appearance in official correspondence and medical journals. The greater participation of the military did not mean that consistent control was achieved over these women's bodies, which civilians and military alike considered diseased, or that the diffusion of venereal disease was consistently staunched. The number of sexually transmitted infections grew exponentially during the war and also spread to previously unaffected populations.Footnote 19 Finally, it was no more clear precisely who was a prostitute than it had been during peacetime, owing to the breakdown in civilian society and the resultant increase in the numbers of women who, owing to economic hardship, occasionally—or regularly—exchanged sex for goods or money.
In the decades before antibiotics, which became widely available only in the 1940s, military and civilian officials feared the spread of venereal disease above all through prostitution. Although medical developments had hastened recovery time since the turn of the century, treatment remained expensive. Thought to be most effective when begun early, the most common treatment was oleum cinereum (made of lanolin, mercury, and olive oil) or Salvarsan (also known as arsphenamine, an arsenic derivative) for syphilis; and protargol salve (a compound of albumin and silver) for gonorrhea.Footnote 20 Because treatment was costly and sometimes ineffective, Habsburg military physicians sought to instruct the 7.8 million men mobilized on how to protect themselves against venereal disease, ascertain where most soldiers had been infected and with which disease, and then heal soldiers—some of whom suffered from more than one sexually transmitted infection concurrently—or at least enable them to return to combat.Footnote 21 These physicians' proposals for lowering venereal disease rates varied somewhat but they invariably addressed the need to control the women who exchanged sex for remuneration. Some argued that men “in the best years of life” engaging in extramarital sexual intercourse was understandable if not entirely excusable, not least because soldiers received limited leave. Others asserted that male abstinence was the safest route, especially in belligerent territory where “strange, unknown, in part racially foreign and hostile peoples” were afflicted with “all possible venereal diseases.”Footnote 22 This language, which explicitly connected sexually transmitted infections with race and the “enemy,” helped further stigmatize prostitutes, especially Jews and Slavs.
From at least the turn of the century, the prevalence of venereal disease among the soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army had been higher than in the German, French, and some other European armies. As the defense minister and military commands were informed in 1907, venereal disease “raged” in the army, although attempts to control sexually transmitted infections among the ranks by means of prophylactics accompanied with instruction and discussion had recently been successful.Footnote 23 The increase in venereal disease rates among soldiers after the war's outbreak in 1914 alarmed Habsburg military physicians.Footnote 24 Moreover, as military physicians and other specialists recognized, the social upheaval caused by war provided more space, including military parade grounds and barracks, and additional opportunities in occupied territories, for clandestine prostitutes, including “field, forest, and meadow whores,” to offer their sexual services to the large number of men gathered there.Footnote 25
Because the Austro-Hungarian military authorities, like those of other belligerents, assumed that soldiers would visit prostitutes, whom many civilian and military leaders alike considered “a necessary evil,” they sought tight control of prostitutes' bodies to protect soldiers from venereal disease. And, owing to the number of clandestine and tolerated prostitutes found to have venereal disease, there was reason for concern. A memorandum from officers of the k. und k. Kommando der Südwest Front (Command of the Southwestern Front) to Innsbruck, Graz, Laibach, Salzburg, Trieste, and leading Etappen-commands one year into the war reflected the preoccupation on all fronts with the spread of venereal disease, including among married men.Footnote 26 The command repeated what would become one of the military's wartime health themes: the need to battle venereal disease with all means possible, because the number of men who were unfit to fight in both the short and longer term had a negative effect on the combat-readiness of the military. Moreover, the diffusion of venereal disease to the civilian population could affect population growth and thus the number of future soldiers. Therefore, the command reiterated the need for tighter control of tolerated prostitutes, greater vigilance in apprehending the clandestine prostitutes, and severe punishment for those prostitutes who, knowing they were infected with venereal disease, still had paid sex with men. These aims would prove even more difficult to achieve during the war than they had in peacetime in part because there were fewer police personnel to be marshaled to act against these women.Footnote 27
Efforts to Monitor and Control Soldiers' Heterosexual Behavior
The Habsburg military waged its battle against sexually transmitted infections on multiple fronts. Adequate supervision of registered prostitutes, including pedagogical material to help them recognize the symptoms of infection among their clientele and to prevent its spread by denying their services to infected men, constituted only a small part of the Habsburg military's struggle against venereal disease. Military and civilian authorities alike understood the futility of limiting their efforts to prostitutes.Footnote 28 The military also issued pedagogical material about venereal disease to soldiers, encouraged the rank and file to employ personal prophylactic measures, and sought to provide punctual, thorough treatment of those infected.Footnote 29 In some cases, there were obligatory preventive examinations of men precoitus and personal preventive measures postcoitus in the newly created military bordellos (Feldbordellen) and clinics for enlisted men.Footnote 30 Some military physicians recognized that providing condoms to the troops was the best way to prevent the spread of venereal disease. The question arose, however, “From where would several million condoms come, which would be used in a very short time, when there was a rubber shortage?”Footnote 31 At least one physician advocated treating anyone found to have a sexually transmitted infection free of charge, but forcibly if necessary. The Ministry of the Interior also declared that those with venereal disease, under no circumstances, could be turned away from hospitals. While soldiers were often released from hospitals as soon as they were ambulatory (to get them back to the front), hospitalized prostitutes and women suspected of practicing clandestine prostitution were under no circumstances to be released as long as they remained infected.Footnote 32
Because military authorities and the public feared “shirking” among the ranks, they were concerned that soldiers might deliberately permit themselves to become infected to avoid their military obligations. Civilian political organizations such as the Christlichsoziale Landesparteileitung in German-speaking northern Bohemia protested the number of healthy, young recruits and officers who had contracted sexually transmitted infections during military service. This group complained about the tolerated bordellos near barracks and “immigrant” prostitutes who had the audacity to stuff notes containing propositions for sexual intercourse and “shameless seduction” into the pockets of soldiers.Footnote 33 Furthermore, Viennese prostitutes were alleged to entice their clients with the “promise” of venereal disease: “Come on, you will get infected and won't need to go to the field.”Footnote 34 Such rumor-mongering placed the responsibility for the spread of sexually transmitted infections and traitorous weakening of Habsburg military strength squarely on the prostitute.
During the course of the war, physicians learned much about the proliferation of sexually transmitted infections and how to accomplish large-scale medical measures, which they did above all by the creation in October 1915 of army field hospitals dedicated to the speedy treatment of venereal disease. Physicians were interested in both where and how soldiers became infected: in the field, in the military-administered region behind the front (Etappenbereich), or in the hinterland.Footnote 35 The number of soldiers hospitalized for venereal disease during the first three years of the war was far higher in the hinterland (944,525) than at the front (331,360). Infection rates among enlisted men varied by location; rates were, for example, consistently lower among soldiers in Innsbruck, in Tyrol, than they were in garrisons in the eastern provinces of the monarchy. Moreover, the number of hospitalized soldiers in the Austrian national guard, the Landwehr/Landsturm (the second-line territorial defense or national-guard organization of Cisleithania), was consistently about half that of its Hungarian counterpart, the Honvéd.Footnote 36 Finally, the kind of campaign in which soldiers participated played a part in venereal disease levels: military physicians considered occupied towns, villages, and cities to be a major source of sexually transmitted infections, owing to both tolerated and clandestine prostitutes.Footnote 37
The military's attempt to track down sources of sexually transmitted infections took many forms. In addition to being examined before going on and after returning from leave, soldiers were provided didactic information on venereal disease and encouraged to name the source of their infections. Soldiers might identify their sexual partners as a “nice girl,” a “peasant woman,” a “widow,” or a “Jew,” some of whom they paid with a loaf of Kommißbrot (army rye bread; the term also refers to military food more generally).Footnote 38 Sometimes, the military obliged infected soldiers to sign handwritten protocols explaining when, where, and by whom they believed they had become infected, and other personal information. Military and civilian officials recorded numerous instances of soldiers being infected while traveling to and from the front on leave (“I had a three-hour wait when I changed trains at Königgrätz [northern Bohemia] and I had intercourse near the station with a woman I met on the first train”).Footnote 39 In at least one case, tracking the spread of venereal disease went the opposite direction: a physician who treated a young female post office employee with syphilis sought to verify if the corporal she had identified as infecting her actually had the disease.Footnote 40 Military-civilian administrative correspondence demonstrates, however, that many soldiers simply did not know when or where they had become infected.
In what may have been the first time Habsburg soldiers were subject to general inspections for sexually transmitted infections, as early as December 1914, the Landwehrstations-Kommando (Territorial Force Local Command) in Ostrava, a burgeoning industrial city on the Moravian-Silesian-Galician border, had men tested immediately before they took leave and upon their return. One reason for this testing was that many military officials did not consider the morals of the “grass widows” (women whose husbands were serving in the military) to be the best. They might become infected and pass the disease onto their soldier-husbands, some of whom contracted venereal diseases while on leave. As possible sources of venereal disease among the ranks, military officials considered these women—the soldiers' wives—particularly dangerous. While their husbands were serving on the front, more women were left to venture alone into the public sphere where some of them did have sexual relations with men—often, also soldiers—who had venereal disease.Footnote 41 In fact, the rate of sexually transmitted infections among the monarchy's married women increased during the war, yet another example of societal breakdown.Footnote 42
Observing the large number of soldiers in their area with venereal disease, the military in Olmütz took far-reaching measures in November 1915 to prevent its spread, including increasing examinations of soldiers for venereal disease from two to three times a month. The local military instituted obligatory prophylactic measures for soldiers and punished them for failing to use prophylactics. Soldiers were urged in five languages to “Protect yourself from venereal disease!” and reminded that “Where there are many soldiers, there are prostitutes,” “Prostitutes on the street are all diseased!,” and “Avoiding sexual congress never hurts!” Walther Pick, the regimental physician at the local military hospital, through which 10,860 soldiers with sexually transmitted infections had passed in the war's first year, wrote that prophylactic methods had had some success in lowering venereal disease rates among the military.Footnote 43
The Austrian Ministry of the Interior and the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War issued decrees in late 1915 and early 1916 aimed at limiting the spread of venereal disease among the civilian population by soldiers on leave and after the war by returning soldiers.Footnote 44 Military physicians were periodically and on a case-by-case basis to inspect the rank and file, because soldiers, including officers, who went on leave with venereal disease might infect their wives and, indirectly, their children. Indeed, Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, an advocate of marital fidelity, was so concerned about the proliferation of “devastating” syphilis that he advocated conjugal visits for soldiers.Footnote 45 (Fears of spreading disease throughout society led the Ministry of War to enact a ban early in the war on furloughing infected married men.)Footnote 46 Soon-to-be discharged soldiers were to be subjected to a thorough examination, and those with the “florid face” of venereal disease were without question to be delayed and immediately sent to the hospital. The military was to supply the relevant civilian political authorities with infected soldiers' personal data as well as information on their illness when they finished their tours of duty. The information was to be kept confidential, and civilian and military officials both were to bear in mind the family life and social relations of those being treated. Men with a sexually transmitted infection were to avoid spreading it. Those soldiers who did not use the requisite caution might be guilty of a criminal offense, even if their behavior did not result in infecting others. In some cases the man could be arrested or imprisoned for up to six months or even one year under the Austrian criminal code. This regulation was superficially observed or neglected altogether, according to sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, perhaps owing to a lack of physicians at the front, a problem dating from soon after the war's outbreak.Footnote 47
The Wartime Regulation of Heterosexual Prostitution
Parallel to its effort to make infected soldiers take some responsibility for the proliferation of venereal disease, the Habsburg military repeatedly urged civilian authorities throughout the war to keep prostitutes in their jurisdiction under the strictest medical and police supervision. The army worked together with local and regional officials to prevent the proliferation of venereal disease. The wartime process for registering females who voluntarily and involuntarily placed themselves under police regulation remained the same as in peacetime: women answered questions about their age, religion, legal domicile, civil status, family background, previous employment, and reason for becoming a prostitute. They provided the names of cities where they had previously been under police control, information on previous arrests, and dates and locations where they had been found to have venereal disease. The vice police contacted their counterparts elsewhere in the monarchy to request confirmation of the women's claims to have been registered as prostitutes in their districts, as well as ascertain whether they had police records and/or had been hospitalized for venereal disease. Vice police also sought to verify prostitutes' places of legal residence. Reflecting the deleterious effect the Russian wartime occupation of Bukovina and eastern Galicia had had on the functioning of the Austrian regulatory system, some local administrators responded that it was impossible to answer questions concerning individual prostitutes or even the total number of tolerated prostitutes during wartime because the “enemy” had destroyed the relevant records.Footnote 48 In some cases, vice police had no record of the woman in question, despite her claim to have been registered there, while in others, the prostitute's record might not have been as blemish-free as she had indicated. If the female were a minor, or someone's ward, the responsible parties were informed of her decision to register as a prostitute and encouraged to exercise lawful influence on their ward.
Wartime police reports addressed the dangerous interaction of prostitutes, whom vice police monitored ever more closely, with soldiers. Indeed, in the western Galician city of Cracow, tolerated prostitutes were examined almost daily. Police also forcibly interned infected prostitutes and, sometimes in cooperation with the military, conducted regular raids to apprehend clandestine prostitutes, register them, and subject them to medical examinations. In many locales in the monarchy, this meant going after the same old (predominantly working-class) suspects who were allegedly practicing clandestine prostitution for economic reasons. Thus, the initial response of the local police was to keep a closer watch on barmaids and other women of “questionable reputation.” There were calls for the expulsion of all “suspicious” women not registered to live in a particular locale.Footnote 49
Responding to a decree of the army high command, the Olmütz garrison commander and city authorities began to monitor tolerated prostitutes more closely, increasing their physical examinations to three times weekly during summer 1915. The garrison commander proposed that close attention be focused on the clandestine prostitutes as the largest source of the spread of sexually transmitted infections.Footnote 50 Although clandestine prostitutes may have been the major source of venereal disease in Olmütz, regimental physician Pick observed that in striking contrast to earlier experiences when tolerated prostitutes had been less dangerous than clandestine prostitutes, the number of bordello infections during wartime had reached fifty-nine percent during the first year of the war.Footnote 51 The reason for the increase was not difficult to find: the number of bordellos and tolerated prostitutes in the city was far too low. During peacetime, there had been twenty-eight registered prostitutes in the city, but during wartime, with the significantly larger garrison size, the number of tolerated prostitutes had only grown to thirty-five. Owing to the huge growth in demand for prostitutes, a woman might service twenty-five clients a night. Under such conditions, the vice police control was unable to fulfill its goal of suppressing clandestine prostitution and keeping tolerated prostitutes healthy.Footnote 52
Elsewhere, as in Sarajevo, the provincial capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of venereal disease cases among bordello-based prostitutes also increased, owing to the greater demand for these women's services. One local military physician echoed the call for stricter control of tolerated prostitutes and those women suspected of clandestine prostitution while also advocating better hygienic methods for the tolerated prostitutes at the bordello keepers' expense. This physician raised an issue perhaps specific to the provincial towns in newly annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina: they lacked both the trained physicians and the equipment necessary to provide prostitutes proper examinations.Footnote 53
Local police throughout Cisleithania conducted frequent raids to ensure that civilian behavior conformed to wartime regulations. In cities and towns in the Etappenraum, the military sometimes took part. The raids conducted in the Galician provincial capital Lemberg, whose participants included Polizei-Soldaten (members of the k.u.k. Polizei-Wachkorps, a military organization whose members fulfilled police duties in the Galician cities Lemberg, Cracow, and Przemyśl), focused on apprehending those civilians—and soldiers, even Russian prisoners of war—who violated wartime civilian and military regulations, especially curfew, from autumn 1915 through late summer 1916. The police stopped many civilians who simply lacked sufficient identification and who were released when they provided it. Others were seized because they had not properly registered with local authorities, had overstayed their residence permits, were drunk in public, or their behavior “offended public morality.” Errant enlisted men and officers, deserters, and even one student wearing a military uniform without permission were returned to their regiments or handed over to the local military command.Footnote 54
Treatment of women swept up in the Lemberg raids reflected continuing concerns about venereal disease. Civilian and military authorities alike recognized that women were more likely to be alone on the street at night during wartime than during peacetime owing to their husbands' and male friends' serving at the front, and women's presence alone on the street was insufficient reason to stop them on suspicion of prostitution.Footnote 55 Some women stopped by Lemberg vice police, primarily working-class, who simply lacked proper identification papers, however, were sent to the police medical office to be tested for VD as suspected clandestine prostitutes. The number of women police turned over to the local hospital for treatment of sexually transmitted infections was far higher in wartime—especially after the Russian occupation of 1914–15—than before the war.Footnote 56 The infractions of the tolerated prostitutes detained in the Lemberg raids were sometimes more serious than simply lacking proper identification. Their offenses ranged from carrying false identification through forgetting their health books (the books tolerated prostitutes were obliged to keep and in which their medical examinations were recorded) to skipping their required medical examinations and public drunkenness. These women were turned over to the district court for sentencing, which included arrests ranging from twelve to forty-eight hours.Footnote 57
Across Austria, women who might not have participated in commercial sex were caught up in the attempts to staunch the spread of venereal diseases. In March 1915, the Olmütz city council informed local innkeepers that effective May 8, barmaids could be employed only within strict limitations for the duration of the war owing to the large number of troops stationed at the local garrison. Barmaids were required “voluntarily” to submit to monthly medical examinations to ascertain that they had no infectious or “loathsome” diseases, while the female employees at some hotels were also to be subjected to occasional police raids to find clandestine prostitutes. Women whose employment brought them into casual contact with soldiers were placed under similar regimes elsewhere in Austria. While police control of these women was more limited than that of tolerated prostitutes, such policies constituted additional state wartime intrusion into women's lives.Footnote 58
In July 1916, the army high command issued yet another decree concerning the battle against venereal disease.Footnote 59 According to the decree, the level of venereal disease among the troops in the field had declined by late 1915, but the number of military personnel with venereal disease had remained unchanged. At least fifty percent of the venereal infections among the troops at the front came from leaves and during changes in command. Lower-level military officials had informed members of the army high command that individual cities, indeed, even particular bordellos were the source of the infection and that the major cause of the spread of disease appeared to lie in clandestine prostitution. Taking this information into account, the governor of Moravia provided all civilian administrative officials with directives in the battle against clandestine prostitution to which they were to adhere as soon as possible.Footnote 60 These directives made further demands on local authorities concerning both clandestine and tolerated prostitutes: the local commander sought the inspection, the questioning, and the regular examination of all clandestine and registered prostitutes; the removal of female “strangers” (those women not registered to live in the area) who “aroused suspicion”; and the forcible delivery of infected prostitutes to hospitals. Because there had been some success with prophylactic measures at bordellos in Pola, the Habsburg naval port on the Adriatic coast, the provincial governor wanted all of the bordellos in Moravia also to adopt them. He further recommended that prophylactics such as those in the barracks be made available in Stundenhotels. The entire effort reflected concern for the health of prostitutes only insofar as it affected enlisted men.
Elsewhere, observing a great rise in the level of venereal disease among the soldiers stationed in Karlsbad, the local military advised city officials in late October 1915 to expand surveillance of prostitutes to prevent further infections among local soldiers who had heretofore been filling the hospitals. The number of men infected, however, continued to grow.Footnote 61 The military repeatedly requested the aid of local officials in combating prostitution, especially the clandestine variety. Military authorities identified the culprits as domestics in Karlsbad and the surrounding suburbs who allegedly rented rooms in Stundenhotels to service their customers.Footnote 62 The city's response to the army's concerns was greater surveillance of the popular night spots, Moulin Rouge and Apollo Casino; the neighboring suburbs; and the area near the central railroad station, as well as to increase medical examinations of prostitutes from twice to thrice weekly, while noting that no recent cases of venereal disease had been detected.Footnote 63 Indeed, civilian authorities in Karlsbad asserted that prostitutes in a neighboring suburb, working-class Fischern, which had no bordello, were the source of many of these cases of venereal infections.Footnote 64
The response of Fischern's acting physician to this allegation reflects the tension that sometimes existed between the interests of the state/military and civilians, not only prostitutes and other women placed under police control. He rejected the military's contention that his town was the source of its soldiers' infections. In fact, he countered that any misconduct in a “public house” would soon become known and local officials would quickly place it off limits to troops. Furthermore, the ongoing police raids had brought prostitutes in for medical inspection. Drawing on his own experience, the physician noted that he diagnosed a significant minority of local venereal disease cases and sent the individuals in question to the hospital in Karlsbad. More could not be done with clandestine prostitutes, he concluded. Certainly the area near the bridge over the river that divided Karlsbad and Fischern would be difficult to close to foot traffic because it was the main pathway for the arriving passengers from two train stations. Finally, the physician reminded the military commander that the soldiers played an important role in the spread of syphilis, since the main carriers of the disease were men. The doctor noted that he himself was treating a number of “young, pretty girls” who had become infected with syphilis as a result of soldiers' sexual violence. He thus proposed barring soldiers without relatives in Fischern from visiting the town or examining their genitalia for venereal disease beforehand. He concluded that as long as soldiers had the possibility of getting venereal diseases even in trenches, the military could not simply blame the community for prostitution and the syphilis they might contract.Footnote 65 Military and civilian authorities alike ignored his opinion. The military inspected soldiers with the aim of identifying those with venereal disease to cure them as rapidly as possible so they could return to the field, not to make these men responsible for their own infections. The state supported the military in this endeavor, which mirrored its own policy of holding women who engaged in extramarital sex responsible for the spread of venereal disease.
In their battle against venereal disease, military commands throughout the monarchy suggested numerous, often creative, methods to track sexual traffic in the bordellos. From January 1916, the district police in Ostrau provided each bordello with different colored control tablets. Each prostitute had her own control tablet. She was to give every military “guest” a control coupon upon demand. According to an agreement with the local military headquarters, each soldier-guest was to keep the coupon he received when visiting the bordello. Thus, any infected soldier could theoretically easily trace the source of his infection.Footnote 66 The garrison commander in nearby Olmütz was so desperate to apprehend women with venereal disease that he advocated trying all halfway successful means to staunch its spread. He therefore proposed adopting Ostrau's practice of issuing coupons, because it would confirm the source of at least some of the infections.Footnote 67 In March 1916, the military command in the northern Bohemian town of Reichenberg recommended that the doors to the rooms of individual prostitutes in the city's bordellos—many located near the local barracks—be clearly numbered and clearly marked with the name of the prostitute. In principle, any soldier who became infected with venereal disease could then easily identify the source of his infection.
Civilian authorities in Czernowitz, which changed hands several times during the war, did not apply the creative methods used in Ostrau and Reichenberg to identify particular bordellos and prostitutes. Rather, soldiers who believed they had contracted venereal disease in that city sought to identify the women they considered responsible for their infection. Military physicians passed along the information they gleaned from infected soldiers at the front to the local vice police. One postcard sent from the front contained the observation that a particular woman accused of giving a soldier gonorrhea had earlier infected yet another man with the same disease and thus had been expelled from Czernowitz in December 1917. The woman had, however, returned to town with negative consequences (i.e., she had infected still more men; there is no mention in the records of this woman's possible apprehension and punishment.). In some cases, the soldiers' descriptions were inadequate to identify the women with whom they claimed to have had sexual congress. There were no prostitutes at the address they supplied; no one at the address, or even in the neighborhood, had heard of the woman in question. In other cases, the address the soldiers supplied simply did not exist (“There is no Kreuzgasse here, but rather a Hl.-Kreuzplatz, but we could not find the alleged prostitute there either”) or the prostitutes fitting the soldiers' descriptions had been deemed healthy at their regular physical examinations.Footnote 68 Sometimes the accused was not a prostitute at all, but rather an employee at a cafe or a bar. Fairly often, vice police reported that the tolerated prostitute identified by a soldier—in a bordello or living privately—had already been examined, found to have a sexually transmitted infection, and sent to the venereal disease section of the local hospital for cure. The soldiers themselves might be proactive in tracking down those women, not all of them prostitutes, they considered responsible for their infections. One soldier contacted both the vice police and the woman he believed had infected him.Footnote 69
It is no surprise that soldiers could not necessarily accurately identify the prostitutes whom they considered responsible for infecting them. Soldiers were not always sober when they had sexual relations, and they sometimes frequented more than one prostitute; moreover, the streets of towns and cities were not necessarily well lit. A clandestine prostitute had no reason to identify herself to a client, and many brothel-based prostitutes used nicknames. In addition, the symptoms of gonorrhea and syphilis took several days to three months to form on genitals or other parts of the body. And, because the chancres that characterize syphilis were not painful, they might go unnoticed if they were not immediately visible.
In 1916, Imperial rules concerning regulation of prostitution were revised and expanded to include even more women. As the war dragged on, the military and local officials took increasingly proactive measures. They focused on local women, many of whom were unemployed or employed in badly paid sectors of the economy, and who lived near barracks. Authorities accused these women of lewd behavior nightly in alleys and taverns, seized them, and subjected them to forcible medical examination.Footnote 70 Thus in April 1916, women who worked in Ostrau's “suspect” pubs, wine bars, coffee houses, rooming houses, and the like, as well as those women suspected of practicing clandestine prostitution, were to be forcibly examined. Female employment in those places would be tolerated only under the condition that they voluntarily placed themselves under police medical control. At the same time, the local commander made some cafes and entertainment spots off limits to the soldiers. Other planned measures included didactic documentaries in the theater under the auspices of the Red Cross.Footnote 71 As in Olmütz, Ostrau, and elsewhere, the police also registered many of the young women who worked in Czernowitz's cafes and taverns, had them examined, and placed them under surveillance regimes similar to those of tolerated prostitutes.Footnote 72 Some of these women were found to be infected and hospitalized. Also as in Olmütz, women who lacked legal right of residence found to have venereal diseases—who was a prostitute was not clearly defined—were to be expelled from the district for the duration of the war.
Czernowitz vice police agents Anton Budziak and Alexander Olinik had great latitude in exercising their judgment concerning the treatment of those women and girls accused of being prostitutes. They appear to have employed the formula of extracting the promise to lead an “upright life in the future” and recognition of “severe” punishment for failure to do so—presumably prosecution as a clandestine prostitute followed by registration—from young women who were still living at home and their parents. They interviewed parents, some of whom claimed to have no idea what their daughters were doing, while others defended their daughters, asserting they were not prostitutes. Several of the fathers in question asserted they were not involved in their daughters' upbringings. At least one promised that if he could not ensure the proper raising of his daughter, who lived with her mother “with whom he was incompatible,” he would contact foster care.Footnote 73 While police registered and subjected many women they stopped to medical examinations, they let off some—often young, indeed, still living with one or both parents, literate, and from non-working-class families—with a warning about the dire consequences of leading an immoral life and the threat of registration as prostitutes if they failed to reform.
Sometimes, Czernowitz vice police appear to have prevailed upon women who were under suspicion to report on one another's sexual behavior. There is no indication in the records why vice police became interested in seventeen-year-old Leontine K., whose acquaintance Elisabeth K. asserted in an interview with the police from her bed in the Landeskrankenhaus (regional hospital) that Leontine K. had had sex with a lieutenant in her presence. (Although records do not indicate why Elisabeth K. had been hospitalized, this was the local hospital where women with venereal disease were treated.) Elisabeth K. did not know if the officer had given Leontine K. venereal disease, but he had later claimed that Leontine had infected him with gonorrhea. Elisabeth K. also reported that Leontine K. had had sexual relations with yet another lieutenant at Czernowitz's Hotel Imperial. Leontine K., she concluded, was practicing prostitution.
A third woman, Eugenia D., told police that both Elisabeth K. and Leontine K. “spent time” with officers. Eugenia D. asserted that Leontine K. had told her about ten days earlier that she—Leontine K.—had gonorrhea, whereupon Eugenia D. had urged her to go to the hospital for treatment. Fearing her mother's wrath, Leontine K. kept her illness secret. About the same time, according to Eugenia D., Elisabeth K. and Leontine K. came to her house because they wanted to have sexual intercourse with two officers. Eugenia D. claimed, however, to have “shown them the door,” whereupon the two girls went to an unnamed village for three days with the men. At the interview's conclusion, Eugenia D. asserted that Leontine K. (but not Elisabeth K.) was practicing prostitution.
Interviewed on July 12, 1918, Leontine K. admitted knowing Elisabeth K. and Eugenia D. She asserted that a few months earlier, she and Elisabeth K. had gone with a lieutenant to a village where “we drank wine and he took my virginity. We spent the night there.” The officer paid her 150 crowns, which she still had and which she kept secret from her mother. Leontine K. claimed, however, that she did not have venereal disease and was not a prostitute. She knew if she led an immoral life and practiced prostitution, she would be severely punished. The police also spoke to her mother, who promised to make sure her daughter, her only child, about whose sexual activities she had had no idea, led an “upright life” in the future. Later that same month, Leontine K. was confirmed to have venereal disease, but does not appear to have been registered as a prostitute.Footnote 74
Although women found to have venereal disease were sent to the local hospital for treatment and usually obliged to remain there until cured, there was some flexibility in the system of treatment, especially if those infected were neither tolerated prostitutes nor deemed by the authorities to be leading an “immoral life” (i.e., practicing prostitution). A police report from late April 1918 details the situation of a twenty-three-year-old soldier's wife who had had sexual relations with a soldier the previous winter and become infected with syphilis. She had begun hospital treatment three months earlier but left the hospital to care for her children. When the woman resumed treatment, it was on an ambulatory basis (she was obliged to appear at the hospital every morning at seven o'clock), thus permitting her to remain at home with her children.Footnote 75
Although the records indicate that many of the women who placed themselves under police medical control had regular medical examinations, registration did not guarantee their appearance for the required weekly, biweekly, or even triweekly medical examinations. The records are full of police-physician reports of registered prostitutes who missed their appointments for many reasons, most commonly because they were menstruating, but also because they were ill or simply arrived late. In some cases, failure to appear for a physician's appointment indicated that the woman in question had not only skipped her appointment, but that she had also skipped town, a criminal offense—one that often resulted in a flurry of correspondence among police stations in an attempt to track her down. This effort often failed.
How successful were the military's efforts? Despite the employment of creative methods and extensive police work, often aided by the military and civilians, the Habsburg government's efforts to track and limit venereal disease were ineffective. There were fewer physicians available to administer examinations to prostitutes and fewer police available to maintain public order among a more transient population. Moreover, the focus remained overwhelmingly on women as the source of sexually transmitted infections. Military-civilian didactic efforts vis-à-vis prostitutes and their prospective soldier-clients; the employment of informants, some of them perhaps unwilling; and even the mobilization of bordello owners and prostitutes themselves in some places were of limited use in an era of total war.
Prostitution in Occupied Cities: The Russians in Czernowitz
The fluidity of the Eastern Front posed a threat to the Habsburg army's attempts to control prostitution and staunch venereal disease. Moreover, the failure of its military strategy resulted in Russian occupation of Bukovina and much of Galicia at the war's outbreak. Military physicians warned of the threat the invading Russian military posed to Habsburg citizens and soldiers alike. They alleged that contagious diseases, including sexually transmitted infections, were rampant in the tsarist army owing to the Russian military's abject lack of medical services.Footnote 76 Bukovina's capital, Czernowitz, on the far southeastern edge of the monarchy, was declared an open city, then briefly occupied by Russian forces in late 1914. After changing hands several times, it was again occupied by Russian troops in June 1916 and remained under their control until August the following year. The Austrian military and greater public had long believed that venereal disease had became widespread in Galicia during earlier times of Russian occupation (syphilis had been endemic in the eastern Galician Carpathians since the Russians had marched through in the revolutionary year of 1848), and there were reports of the spread of venereal disease in the part of eastern Galicia under Russian wartime occupation.Footnote 77 Following the Russians into the capital city of Bukovina in June 1916, however, Czernowitz's prostitutes—and assumed prostitutes—were among the segments of the population that attracted the attention of the Russian military. The Russian treatment of prostitutes was remarkably similar to that of the Habsburgs before them, not least because prostitution had been regulated under the Romanovs since the 1840s.Footnote 78 The Russian occupiers compiled lists of registered prostitutes living in greater Czernowitz (including their ages, addresses, with whom they lived, and their property), because, like their Habsburg foes, the Russians were concerned with preventing the spread of venereal disease among the ranks.
The Russians had to contend with many of the same issues as the Austrians with prostitute compliance: they followed up anonymous accusations against alleged clandestine prostitutes, they arrested clandestine prostitutes, and they sought to enforce physician visits.Footnote 79 By early September 1916 the city's Russian governor informed the chief of police of the large numbers of prostitutes rumored to have appeared in the city. Because these women were not adequately regulated, the governor alleged, they were spreading venereal disease among the occupying Russian forces. Thus, the governor called on the police to apprehend the women and have them examined for venereal disease. Those who were infected were to be hospitalized, while those who were deemed healthy were to be returned to their place of legal residence, and the local authorities were to be informed so they could monitor them. If a prostitute's legal residence was in Habsburg-held territory, making it impossible for her to be returned, the woman was simply to be expelled, although it is unclear where she was to go.Footnote 80
Czernowitz's clandestine prostitutes also came to the attention of the Russian authorities for broader reasons of social control in occupied territory. Russian counterintelligence operatives believed clandestine prostitutes, already suspected sources of venereal disease, participated in undisclosed covert activities, further endangering the Russian military.Footnote 81 By July 1916 the head of counterintelligence for the occupying forces informed the local chief of police that according to his sources, there was a clandestine bordello on Mariangasse, where “suspicious figures” gathered daily. Counterintelligence suspected that disguised Austrian soldiers might be concealed there.Footnote 82 Russian authorities appear to have associated the Austrians with prostitution just as the Austrian authorities popularly associated the Russians with venereal disease. These attitudes confirm Mary Spongberg's observation that reaction to the spread of syphilis in early modern Europe was xenophobic: each newly affected group blamed its neighbor for the disease. Russians called it the Polish sickness and Poles the German sickness, while the French and Italians blamed one another for syphilis.Footnote 83
Counterintelligence for the 9th Army was also the source of the complaint the following month that the guests of the three prostitutes who lived at Mikuliczgasse no. 4, close to Austria-Platz in the center of town, made so much noise in their dwelling at night that they could be heard on the street. The author of the letter noted that the noise was “extremely inconvenient,” because the British military officer Colonel Knox occupied the house across the street. Thus, he pleaded for the relocation of the prostitutes or the “request” that they not let anyone into their apartment at night.
Despite the limitations of Russian public health measures, the army was concerned about the danger venereal disease posed to its soldiers owing to the unsanitary conditions in occupied territories.Footnote 84 Russian military efforts at social control in occupied territories, however, including enemy Others (prostitutes and women accused of prostitution), proved even less effective than those of the Habsburgs, who had benefited from their recent experience with regulating prostitution in occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina.Footnote 85 The autocratic Romanov dynasty was ill-equipped for total war not only on the fighting front, but also in occupied territories behind the lines.Footnote 86
Denunciation: Social Decay, Moral Turpitude, and Venereal Disease Late in the War
Denunciation was among the kinds of unsanctioned information that flowed freely within the wartime population. Letters to the police, and sometimes to the military, linked the population at large to the state's ongoing project of surveillance, which had been heightened under the conditions of total war. As Maureen Healy has observed, the letter writers could claim to be speaking out for the public good by aiding in the tracking down of “enemies of the state.”Footnote 87 Husbands denounced their wives, civilian and military men denounced women, women denounced other women, and groups of people denounced individual women. Some civilians claimed to be protecting soldiers from “infection and exploitation” when they reported as suspect women they saw in the company of soldiers, especially in “questionable” circumstances, such as hotels or night spots. On occasion their acquaintances and even their friends informed on these women. Both signed and anonymous denunciations could result in women being subjected to police medical examinations. If a woman was found to have venereal disease, she was often registered as a prostitute and hospitalized for treatment until she was cured. The men whose company these women kept, especially soldiers, appear by and large to have escaped denunciation, in part reflecting continuing tolerance of male sexual “needs.”
Habsburg authorities arrested ever larger numbers of women from ever broader social categories as complaints about female moral turpitude in Cisleithanian Austria persisted, in fact, increased, as the war dragged on. And complaints continued in the wake of the war. Especially in the last year of the war, civilians regularly participated in the Habsburg state's system of surveillance: they denounced particular women, sometimes helping police, who detained women caught in their nighttime and early morning raids (“revisions”) on hotels in cities throughout Austria. The women arrested included those caught in flagrante with men they did not know; women who had allegedly just had sexual intercourse with men they did not know, who had already left the premises; and women who were with men whom they had just met and with whom they were apparently planning to have sex. Especially in Vienna, these women were “vazierende” or traveling, young women, often unskilled laborers, many of whom had been drawn to the Imperial capital in the last days of the war.Footnote 88 Sometimes, the men—among them, military officers—with whom these young women were discovered sought to help them by pretending the women were not recent acquaintances, but rather, the men's betrothed. The arresting police, however, dismissed these efforts with the comment that they gave the impression of being “untruthful.” There were no legal consequences for the soldiers; in fact, their names do not even appear in the police records because only military police could search out soldiers.Footnote 89
When soldiers harassed “good” women on the street during the war, it was often other women—considered prostitutes—not the soldiers, whom the denouncers blamed. Property owners in one Olmütz neighborhood complained to the city council in March 1916 that a soldier had insulted a young female resident of the city, torn her coat, and, in fact, attacked her. They claimed that it was actually impossible to walk down the street in that neighborhood after six o'clock in the evening. These complainants, like the anonymous denouncers, blamed the local prostitutes for the indignities inflicted on “good women” in the quarter, rather than holding the soldiers for their own behavior.Footnote 90
Occasionally Habsburg residents who expressed concern about the deterioration of wartime society that clandestine prostitutes represented drew other conclusions: they held the state responsible for the situation. An anonymous official from Bielitz, near the Silesian-Galician border, who signed his letter “One who still has his heart in the right place,” wrote the Ministry of the Interior in October 1917 about women from the “better” classes whose husbands could no longer support them. He was distressed that the wives of state employees, even high-level employees, were resorting to clandestine prostitution because their husbands' salaries were no longer sufficient to support their families. The official's concern lay in the possibility that these women might be taken to court and exposed in public.Footnote 91 His letter, while implicitly blaming the state for these women's economic position, also provides a partial explanation for the behavior of some of the “grass widows” that concerned the military.
Denouncers cooperated with police, but they often had personal goals in mind. For example, one Egon B. denounced a Johanna S., known in some quarters of Vienna as “Nuschi,” in 1918. This “foreigner,” he wrote, reflecting the increased xenophobia of wartime, a Polish woman in her twenties, lived in central Vienna and led a “conspicuous” lifestyle. She was not employed, but practiced clandestine prostitution. Because “Nuschi” had her own lodgings and knew how to conceal herself, police permitted the situation to continue, although, according to Egon B., she was as dangerous to property as she was to health. Claiming that his friends had lost a great deal of money to “Nuschi,” the letter's author demanded that she be expelled from Vienna.Footnote 92 There is no record of police action.
While vice police believed that some hotel and other employees functioned as pimps for women they worked with, their coworkers also denounced women employed in cafes, hotels, and pensions for practicing clandestine prostitution. In July 1918, hotel porter Marer H. denounced a barmaid to the police who came to control Czernowitz's Hotel National where he had been employed for three months. During this time, he had noticed that she sometimes stayed “quite a long time” in the rooms of hotel guests. He thought she was practicing prostitution. Marer H. claimed that hotel guests had told him they had had sexual relations with the woman. This woman, he asserted, remained employed at the hotel.Footnote 93
Some cases of denunciation produced unexpected results. In mid-June 1918, a Lieutenant Trojan R. denounced eighteen-year-old stenography and typing student, Eugenia S. of Czernowitz, for having venereal disease. The vice police took his complaint seriously and subjected Eugenia S. to an examination. She was found both virgo intacta and healthy. Eugenia S. responded on June 20 that she spent time in the company of officers, but did not cross “certain boundaries.” Her thirty-eight-year-old mother, Marie S., supported Eugenia's claims, but admitted she knew little of her daughter's daytime activities because she worked. By June 29, Marie S. demanded compensation for the damage the false accusations had caused both her daughter and the family name. No compensation was forthcoming, although the police had already decided not to follow up the original accusations.Footnote 94
Some soldier-husbands denounced their own wives. Viennese resident and military veteran Samuel V. wrote to the police in Prague that while he was serving in the military, his wife, together with her lover, had left the family home in the Imperial capital for Prague, where he alleged the couple was staying, perhaps under an assumed name. The aggrieved spouse requested that his estranged wife be expelled from Prague, not least because he, her legal husband, had not given her permission to travel there. Equating adultery with prostitution, he demanded that if his wife had taken up “an immoral lifestyle,” a police physician give her a physical examination. He further called for her to be severely punished if she were found to have been practicing clandestine prostitution. War, Samuel V. concluded, was no excuse for adulterous behavior.Footnote 95 In another case, Nikolaj P., who had just returned to Czernowitz from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote on May 8, 1918, that his wife, Dominika, was leading an “immoral life.” Rather than taking care of their children with the money he, her husband, gave her, she allegedly “drank it up,” while their children went hungry. Indeed, Dominika P. kept company with soldiers. The last straw had been on Monday, May 6, when she and her friend, Maria B. from nearby Radautz (who, according to the husband, also led a very immoral life), brought home two Hungarian soldiers although he, Nikolaj P., was resident in the family home. The police physicians who examined Dominika P. found she did not have venereal disease. Dominika P.'s wartime sexual activities did, however, adumbrate her future as a prostitute in interwar Romania.Footnote 96
These denunciations reflected concern about the social upheaval that accompanied the war. They also incorporated long-held class, gender, and ethnic-racial prejudices against women who appeared outside social control. While letter writers exhibited concern for bourgeois wives and daughters whom the wartime economy might have forced into prostitution, there was no such sympathy for working-class women. Moreover, when cuckold Samuel V. accused his unfaithful wife of leading an “immoral” life, he also proposed a solution: he demanded that her out-of-control body be turned over to the police for examination. The denunciations all demonstrated understanding of and participation in the Habsburg model of wartime social control, sometimes incorporating personal ends.
The War's End
In contrast to other aspects of social control in post-Habsburg central Europe, the regulation of prostitution in the new nation-states created from the now-defunct multinational monarchy changed relatively little in the immediate postwar years.Footnote 97 Successor-state governments drew upon Austria-Hungary's wartime experiences in the connections they made among public hygiene, prostitution, sexually transmitted infections, and military strength. It was commonly accepted that the experience of the war had demonstrated that venereal disease was spread primarily through extramarital relations—“from the rendezvous of sexual irregularity to the home”—and prostitutes were still popularly condemned as the main culprits.Footnote 98 The rates of sexually transmitted infections with which prostitutes remained so intimately associated had increased during wartime but did not drop immediately with the resumption of peace. Syphilis and gonorrhea both continued to pose challenges to public health: the former was blamed for stillbirths and the latter for causing blindness and sterility, and were thus a threat to future generations. Police continued to employ methods such as those the Habsburg police and military had used during wartime. They raided city hotels, arresting the women—many of them young and unemployed; some of them without the right of residence—they caught practicing clandestine prostitution, having them examined for venereal disease, and obliging those with sexually transmitted infections to report to the hospital immediately for treatment.Footnote 99 Successor-state governments and their vice police evinced similar concerns about prostitutes as a source of venereal disease as their Habsburg predecessors. This owed in part to continuity in the attitudes toward class, gender, and sexuality, and to increasingly national-racial rhetoric that set prostitutes apart as Other in Austria-Hungary. In some cases, there was ongoing cooperation between civilians and the military, while in others, women who claimed they were not prostitutes were placed under vice police medical supervision.Footnote 100 Moreover, military intervention into regulated prostitution, which persisted into the early interwar era in some successor states, represents an important historical continuity with the monarchy. Civilian-military collaboration on the surveillance of prostitutes and women suspected of being prostitutes continued in some states because their governments were concerned about the restoration and maintenance of social order.Footnote 101 This involved regaining control of those women who had stepped outside assigned gender roles, irrespective of how the new states regulated prostitution or if they later abolished it altogether.
The language about the consequences of diseased, foreign, women's bodies for the state that had been used in the Habsburg Monarchy's medical community, the military, government officials, and the public during World War I continued in the successor states after 1918, in part owing to the large number of soldiers who had contracted sexually transmitted infections during the war and the continued focus on prostitution as the sole cause. Their governments enacted stringent measures against the deliberate spreading of venereal disease. Reflecting the presumed connection between prostitution and venereal disease, new measures on prostitution were often subsumed under laws on venereal disease, which was becoming ever more closely connected with concerns about the health of the nation or race. The connections among public hygiene, sometimes analyzed in terms of “racial health,” prostitution, sexually transmitted infections, and military strength continued to be made. This was the case when the dermatologist and University of Vienna Professor Hofrat (Councilor) Ernst Finger, spoke of the social significance of venereal disease in early 1919, with which the prostitute remained intimately associated. He described its serious consequences not only for the individual but also for society in terms of “the reduction and deterioration of the race.”Footnote 102 The emphasis on race became more pronounced in some of the multinational successor states, which were, by and large, governed as nation-states between the wars. In these states, the prostitute could be both a sexual and a racial outlier.Footnote 103 Indeed, those who carried sexually transmitted infections were increasingly potential enemies of the state in the racially saturated sexual politics of the interwar era.
