Karl Kraus had a thing for prostitutes—at least he identified in them the symbol of frankness and integrity in a world of hypocrites. He decried a world in which women were reproached for fulfilling men's deepest needs, and he considered himself to take them seriously. The place of the brothel in late Habsburg society is seared in our minds from the significant exchanges Musil's young cadet Törless has with the matriarchal Božena; they appear in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch (though the author avoided them), and the sex workers in them or on the streets are central in novellas by Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig; in graphic work by Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele; and in feminist work from a novel by Else Jerusalem to the reform work of Bertha Pappenheim—prostitutes veritably litter the late Habsburg world. Nancy M. Wingfield's new book reveals that world to us in a sweeping way. It adds to the library of work on European prostitution and its regulation and contributes something to Austrian history in particular that we simply have not had before.

The study emerges from and remains throughout closely bound to Wingfield's work in archival collections in state and city archives in Austria, several cities of the Czech Republic, Trieste, Lviv, Chernivtsi, to name some of the most prominent, but also smaller places like Koper and Pazin. This meticulous study of the archival trail of the Cisleithanian late imperial world of prostitution has great strengths, and one feels the emergence of the author's many insights and arguments from this source. It has the tendency, however, to lead necessarily to the regulation and surveillance of brothel and independent prostitutes by vice units, reform measures recorded by state administration, and court prosecutions. In addition to these unexpected pearls of the archive that emerge includes narratives by prostitutes in various regions and responses to a 1906 questionnaire on proposals for regulatory changes. Of course, many sources beyond the archive are key for the author, from published tracts and statistics to contemporary newspapers, to the expected array of historiography, but one has a sense of the voice of the archive driving the story.

As hypocritical as Kraus insisted it was, prostitution was not legal, but it was “tolerated” and managed on several levels. The chapters open with a detailed discussion of the sensational prosecution of the brothel keeper Regina Riehl, a landmark case in bringing a central and yet hidden aspect of late imperial society into public view and discussion. Riehl, a middle-aged madam of Jewish origin, was, along with at least nine associates, accused of manifold charges, chief among which were those pertaining to the abuse and restrictions on the freedom of prostitutes in her employ. Through the sometimes-muckraking journalism of Emil Bader and others, the whole system of surveillance and regulation was put on trial, leading to the reform efforts and changes in regulation and enforcement in light of the Riehl affair. The opening of the reform discussion hails the voices of a variety of actors proposing different models of management, from the dominant and ultimately victorious reform regulationism to a medical management by physicians (neoregulation), to outright abolition advocated by various sectors of civil society (ultimately ignored). These debates and these changes, as she outlines, have their reverberations throughout the empire, which is really the subject of the book. Chapter three, “Peripheries,” specifically examines the regulation of the institution in the Cisleithanian provinces, but the material from these archives so far afield from Vienna remain present in the chapters that follow, starting with one on brothels, showing that “tolerated prostitution was a multi-confessional, multi-generational, multi-national, trans-Austrian enterprise” (111). Ensuing chapters explore “clandestine” prostitution in the streets and public spaces, the scandal and panic over Mädchenhandel (or “sex trafficking”) and the great transformations of the institution and its perception during World War I. The discussion of the sex-trafficking panic stays as close to the sources as any part of the book, and Wingfield does not venture to make comparisons to more recent debates about “white slave trafficking,” but her discoveries and analysis (“the rhetoric of the white slaving panic facilitated the language of difference” [182]) are relevant to it. The archives reveal not only police registration and surveillance but also denunciations, some reflecting community self-control, some other motives, and some, especially during the war, coerced. An epilogue on the period after the war makes clear that this “world” did not perish with imperial rule—bureaucratic structures, Wingfield reminds us, outlive regimes, as do moral panics, both sexual (threatening sex workers) and “racial” (as mounting antisemitism foreshadows later history). Wingfield's book is not thesis driven; it is instead focused on elaborating the complex forces converging in the discourses and practices of sex work and its oversight in this particular place and period.

This is not to say that late Habsburg prostitution was fundamentally different from elsewhere in Europe, or even that it was organized and regulated in a centralized and consistent way. To the contrary, Wingfield shows a spectrum of practices and enforcements, and this unevenness runs through time as well as space. In spite of antisemitic associations of the institution with Jews, and the location of bordellos in old Jewish ghettos, prostitutes were generally drawn from surrounding populations and not concentrated in any one ethnicity or language. No common language of the world of Habsburg prostitution ever gelled. A certain amount of circulation within the empire and with nations outside of it did occur as a result of evading authorities or changing patterns of business. And yet, in the relations of state, civil society, sex workers, and clients, throughout these pages a very clear picture of a specifically Austrian world of prostitution emerges, a “monarchy-wide integrated sexual economy” (7) apart from the contest of nationalities seemingly prominent in so many other arenas. This economy is reproduced in various forms in the regional capitals and appears in different forms in the resort and garrison towns, or in the industrialized regions of Silesia and Moravia with their migrant labor; it mirrors the economic structure of the empire, and yet is flexible enough to absorb sometimes powerful local cultural differences (as in the case of a Dalmatian Orthodox practice of concubinage, or a ban on prostitution in Bregenz so near to Switzerland, for example). One is tempted to say that the unity within tremendous diversity modeled by this world of prostitution is a microcosm for the topography of the late Habsburg Empire at large, and for that reason alone it should be of special interest to readers of this Yearbook, including those that have not been engaged with the history of prostitution or sexuality before.