In 1921, deeply affected by the collapse of the Habsburg empire, the thirty-year-old Viennese teacher Anna Bertha Leitich left her privileged background and her impoverished native city behind to embark on a quest for independence and new ideas in the United States. However, as Rob McFarland demonstrates throughout this study, she never abandoned the ideals of the Viennese Bildungsbürgertum of her youth. Instead, her fresh start—first as domestic help and then as office girl—inspired her to develop a nuanced synthesis between European Kultur and American Zivilisation that informed her later work in perhaps surprising ways, especially as regards mass culture. During a period in which female foreign correspondents were still few and far between and left largely to their own devices, she supplemented her income by reporting on America in a series of feuilletons for influential newspapers such as the Neue Freie Presse and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Although many better-known contemporaries also published on the significance of American culture for Europe, Leitich was unusual in her firsthand experience of everyday life and public opinion in the United States. In his introduction, McFarland poses the justified question of why one should dedicate a book-length study to a woman whose 1920s and 1930s journalism has been largely forgotten and whose works of popular history from the 1940s onward are at best outdated and at worst ideologically suspect. However, his account of Leitich's life and works thoroughly convinces the reader of the validity and interest of his project.

Writing with great verve, McFarland explores Leitich's early journalism in satisfying detail. Eschewing nationalistic and pessimistic models of culture à la Spengler, she understood Americanism, not as a sign of the decline of the West, but as a potential invigoration. Although by no means uncritical of her adopted country, she applied what McFarland refers to as pragmatic cosmopolitanism to investigate the various phenomena that might offer new impulses to war-weary, cynical Europe: cinema, jazz, blues, Broadway musicals, skyscrapers, mass car ownership, department stores, and mechanization of the home and workplace. Before analyzing individual texts, each chapter discusses the broader context, not only within Austrian but also European cultural history. McFarland sets out reference points that range from Stefan Zweig on uniformity to Kracauer on urbanism, Cassirer on myth to Henry Ford on mechanization (and, derived from the latter, the “White Socialism” of the study's catchy yet entirely appropriate title). The sheer diversity of Leitich's feuilletons perhaps inevitably gives rise to a little unevenness in this extensive cultural and historical framework. For example, generalizations dog the account of Red Vienna, alongside some confusion of names (49, 88). McFarland seeks to show how Leitich's interest in cultural education for the masses resonated with that of her Austro-Marxist contemporaries, although she intriguingly chose to ignore their activities almost completely, even as they introduced innovations in keeping with many of her own observations on America. It would have been helpful to tackle the ambivalence of 1920s Austrian Social Democracy itself more directly here, both as regards cultural education and its own middle-class origins as a movement.

Quotations from Leitich are given in the original and in McFarland's fine translations throughout, showcasing the polished, spirited style that makes her a worthy addition to existing research on Viennese women's journalism. As McFarland points out, Leitich herself took an unreconstructed view of gender and gender relations; however, she was able to use her concept of the feminine for insightful critiques of mechanized, materialistic culture in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of fin-de-siècle women's activists she may have encountered in Vienna in her earlier youth. This aspect remains to be explored in the further research that will hopefully be conducted on the transnationalism of Leitich's cultural analysis.

In the late 1920s, Leitich married and returned to Vienna, remaining in Austria with her Jewish husband for the duration of the Anschluss and beyond. McFarland gives tantalizing glimpses of an unusual life story, setting the biographical record straight with new data on several occasions. The “Epilogue” (151) considers Leitich's implication in the myth of Austrian victimhood post-1945; McFarland sheds new light on her postwar cultural histories by connecting their aim of educating while entertaining to her experiences of American mass culture. As well as providing us with an annotated bibliography, McFarland has enhanced his study further by uploading the full text of Leitich's feuilletons to the Sophie digital library of women's writing in German.