Far from an afterthought or mere somatic foundation underpinning the lofty intellectual and aesthetic reaches of Viennese modernism, the body, this book demonstrates, was front and center of Austrian culture in the decades surrounding the fin-de-siècle. While many cultural historians of this period have followed Carl Schorske in prioritizing the psyche and interiority—Freud's theories of the unconscious being only the tip of the iceberg—Alys George brings together an array of sources to convincingly situate corporeality as the “golden thread” (5) of the Wiener Moderne. Situating “high” literature and art alongside sources such as social hygiene films, ethnological exhibitions, working-class poetry, dance, and photojournalism, George's smoothly interdisciplinary method also promotes a long-view approach. Centering attention on the body reveals new historical continuities that defy conventional caesura: George's “genealogy” stretches from the anatomical preoccupations of nineteenth-century Viennese medicine through to the progressive physical cultures of the First Republic. In this, The Naked Truth contributes to larger historiographical efforts to rethink the parameters of Viennese modernism, including an epilogue that connects the public health policies of “Red Vienna” to the rationalized bodies of the Nazi era.

The book evocatively draws the reader's attention to the body as the source of fundamental truths with an opening photograph of writer-director Hermann Bahr. Standing in his villa, custom-made to house its larger-than-life centerpiece, Gustav Klimt's Nuda Veritas (1899), the image showcases the “corporeal turn” (9) of Viennese modernism, which George views as intimately linked to the prominence of the city's prestigious medical school, with its fixation on pathology and corpses, as well as the fleshly orientation of Austrian Catholicism. In this context, the medically trained Freud's vivid metaphors of self-analysis as self-dissection sit easily alongside doctor-writer Arthur Schnitzler's self-assessment as an anatomist of the soul or Robert Musil's as monsieur le vivisecteur. Feminist and critical body studies approaches provide a theoretical framework for conceiving of corporeality as always malleable and mediated. They also work to draw out diverse forms of embodiment: pregnant, female, Jewish, injured, and working-class bodies feature prominently in this study (though less emphasis is placed on queer, intersex, or trans embodiments). Reaching across conventional distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, George deliberately situates lesser-known artists, writers, doctors, and dancers such as Marie Pappenheim, Ilka Ungar, and Gertrud Bodenwieser alongside canonical figures such as Schnitzler or Hugo von Hofmannsthal, deftly expanding our picture of Viennese modernism.

A thematic chapter structure, divided into short, readable sections, enables a rich layering and juxtaposition of source types and perspectives. The first section, “The Body on Display,” contrasts the racialized staging of cultural “others” in the imperial-era Völkerschauen (ethnographic human displays) with scientific displays of the “self” via interwar life reform and hygiene exhibitions. Karl Kraus was a rare critic of “shameless and scandalous” (32) exhibits such as the 1890s Ashanti village in Vienna's Prater Park, while George concludes that Peter Altenberg's satirical attempt to turn the gaze back on the “gawking Viennese” (38) ultimately replicates the problematic objectification of the displays themselves. Such shows may seem a world away from the blockbuster hygiene exhibitions promoting “new men,” “new women,” and a healthy, classless national community, yet viewing them in tandem reveals how each looked to the body as the source of authenticity, seeking legitimacy from both “science” and pedagogy.

The book's second section, “The Body in Pieces,” homes in on anatomy and cadavers, moving from the vivisection metaphors of authorship deployed by Schnitzler, Musil, and Freud to amplify voices such as that of poet-doctor Pappenheim, one of the first Austrian female physicians, who smoothly penned a libretto for Arnold Schönberg while finishing her doctoral thesis. The pervasive “leitmotif” (69) of corpses, captured in the Viennese idiom “he took a ride on the 71,” the tram ferrying coffins out to the Central Cemetery, continues through to post-World War I journalism and graphic art. Here the war's violent fragmentation of bodies and the widespread poverty that has fostered an economy of human remains feed cultural reflections on a society that, like the bodies within it, seems “shattered beyond repair” (101).

The focus returns to the living in the third section, “The Patient's Body,” centering on mothers-to-be. While new forms of clinical and aesthetic gazing at times dehumanized and displaced female subjectivities, poems by working-class women such as Ungar or the aforementioned Pappenheim develop a style of “radical modernity” (122) that demythologizes pregnancy and abortion. George also offers a more sympathetic reading than previous scholars of a series of drawings by Egon Schiele of patients in the university Women's Clinic—images not reducible to his complicity in the clinical gaze exposing these women's raw physical presence, she argues, but also empathetically attuned to the “broken, suffering bodies of the working classes” (137).

Finally, the fourth section, “The Body in Motion,” turns to interwar cultures of bodily performance—dance, pantomime, and silent film—to demonstrate the expressive potential modernist actors and writers saw in body language and gesture at a time when intellectuals across the spectrum deemed language to be in “crisis.” Free dance and Ausdruckstanz developed into distinctly Viennese physical culture forms with a social-pedagogical bent, as figures such as Bodenwieser—the first State Professor of Dance—experimented with ideas of organic embodiment, authenticity, and human machines. Vicki Baum's literary reflections, meanwhile, situate dance as a unique space for exploring marginalized identities. In a nuanced reading of passing and othering that begs consideration alongside Kerry Wallach's Passing Illusions (2017), George traces Baum's subversive depictions of Jewish masculinity as both “a paragon of physical beauty” and “the object of an exoticizing, objectifying gaze” (190–191).

Throughout, the human body is shown as “a kind of somatic and semiotic utopia” (13), a source of answers in the face of a pervasive sense of upheaval, whether of identity, politics, or language. In this, The Naked Truth resonates with other recent studies situating the organic as central to modernist culture (e.g., Carl Gelderloos’ Biological Modernism, [2020]), even as it places more emphasis on distinctly human embodiments. In drawing our attention so concertedly to the corporeal, at all stages of life and health, this book will undoubtedly prove generative not only for scholarship on Vienna and modernism, but as a model of body-centered scholarship that might help us reimagine the history of other times and places as well.