ABSTRACT
Vienna’s reputation as a city suffused with illicit, venal sex at the turn of the twentieth century has been well established in the fin-de-siècle historiography.1
Contemporary critics such as Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger used the hypocrisy of Vienna’s sexual culture as a synecdoche for Imperial corruption and degeneration. Sexual critiques in this period publicized to citywide audiences the perils of regulated prostitution, venereal disease, and multiple political sexual scandals. In Austria’s First Republic (1918-34), however, ‘healthy’ sex became both a State concern and a popular reform movement. This shift was reflected in fervent calls for national regeneration, smaller but healthier families, and education in disease prevention. Current historical research in other European contexts suggests that it was
the disastrous effects of the Great War – weakened and hungry populations, an increase in infant mortality, and, most importantly, a generation of fallen young soldiers – that refocused State attention on sexual matters.2 This development was especially marked in Austria. Vienna in the early twentieth century was a capital of sexual research: the laboratory for both Sigmund Freud and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Whereas fin-de-siècle Viennese sexology had sought to classify and heal individuals as a medical science, sexual knowledge in the interwar years was employed to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly-created Republic of Austria. This shift refocused sexual knowledge away from sexological taxonomies of aberrant sexual behaviours and towards advising heterosexual, reproductive couples, whom numerous social reform movements targeted as central to the regeneration of society. Sex education for children was a central and contested sub-field of the project
of sexual sanitation. Since the turn of the century, German-speaking sexreformers had sought a more naturalistic and complete form of sexual Aufklärung (‘enlightenment’) for children.3 Many leading Austrian Social Democrats championed this reforming stance during the First Republic. However, they were unable to teach sex education in most Austrian schools during that period, due in large part to the fact that the bulk of the country was still culturally and politically very Catholic.4
