Nancy M. Arthur Schnitzler's famous play Reigen Round Dance consists of ten interlocking scenes, each involving a chance sexual encounter between a man and a woman in s Vienna. The opening scene comprises a prostitute and a male customer and ends with the same prostitute propositioning a count.
The prostitute thus provides the dramatic and thematic nexus linking the scenes and brings the drama to a circular close.
The message is clear: this is a medieval danse macabre transposed to end-of-the-century Austria in which sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, become collusively intertwined dancers. Wingfield's impressive new study of prostitution in late imperial Cisleithanian Austria demonstrates that Schnitzler's drama was not a fiction but a truthful reflection of the complexity of male-female sexual relations in the Habsburg Monarchy - which was why the play could not be staged until and, even then, was greeted with shock and moral outrage.
Wingfield's carefully argued and deeply researched book shows that female sex workers in the Monarchy were not simply victims of an oppressive patriarchal system but enjoyed a degree of autonomy and agency as they navigated dexterously between the poles of Catholic conservatism embodied by the Emperor himself and the forces of liberalism that made the late Monarchy so workable and flexible. Reflecting that tension between religious conservatism and liberal pragmatism, prostitutes were neither banned nor encouraged but tolerated as a "necessary evil".
In the words of the liberal German mayor of Brno in Moravia, "so long as instinct acts more strongly than the demands of propriety, morals and legal precepts, prostitution must be treated as a necessary evil and strictly regulated instead of repressed" The "repressive hypothesis", inaugurated by Sigmund Freud around this time, was gaining increasing currency among the liberal political elites in the Monarchy - to such an extent in fact that prostitution was regarded as a valuable safety-valve for the sexual urges of the male population, ten percent of which was infected by syphilis.
