Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906)

Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself (German: Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt) is an erotic novel first published anonymously in Vienna, Austria, in 1906. The novel is famous in the German-speaking world, having been in print in both German and English for over 100 years and sold over 3 million copies, becoming an erotic bestseller.

Although no author claimed responsibility for the work, it was originally attributed to either Felix Salten or Arthur Schnitzler by the librarians at the University of Vienna. Today, critics, scholars, academics and the Austrian Government designate Salten as the sole author of the "pornographic classic". In 2022, a stylometric analysis showed that Felix Salten is the most probable author of the novel, the final pages excluded.

The original novel uses the specific local dialect of Vienna of that time in dialogues and is therefore used as a rare source of this dialect for linguists. It also describes, to some extent, the social and economic conditions of the lower class of that time. The novel has been translated into English, Swedish, Finnish, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and Japanese among others, and been the subject of numerous films, theater productions, parodies, and university courses, as well as two sequels.

A critical, annotated edition of the German-language text was only published in 2021.

Contents

Plot

The publisher's preface – formatted as an obituary and excluded from all English translations until 2018 – tells that Josefine left the manuscript to her physician before her death from complications after a surgery. Josefine Mutzenbacher was not her real name. The protagonist is said to have been born on 20 February 1852 in Vienna and died on 17 December 1904 at a sanatorium.

The plot device employed in Josephine Mutzenbacher is that of first-person narrative, structured in the format of a memoir. The story is told from the point of view of an accomplished aging 50-year-old Viennese courtesan who is looking back upon the sexual escapades she enjoyed during her unbridled youth in Vienna. Contrary to the title, almost the entirety of the book takes place when Josephine is between the ages of 5–13 years old, before she actually becomes a licensed prostitute in the brothels of Vienna. The book begins when she is five years old and ends when she is thirteen years old and starts her career as an unlicensed prostitute with a friend, to support her unemployed father.

Although the German-language text makes use of witty nicknames – for instance, the curate's genital is called "a hammer of mercy" – for human anatomy and sexual behavior, its content is entirely pornographic. The actual progression of events amounts to little more than a graphic, unapologetic description of the reckless sexuality exhibited by the heroine, all before reaching her 14th year. The style bears more than a passing resemblance to the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in its unabashed "laundry list" cataloging of all manner of taboo sexual antics from children's sexual play, incest and rape to child prostitution, group sex, sado-masochism, lesbianism, and fellatio. In some constellations, Josefine appears as the active seducer, and sex is usually depicted as an uncomplicated, satisfactory experience.

Illustrations

The original Austrian publication was unillustrated, but a later pirated edition from 1922 contained black-and-white drawings, entirely pornographic as the text. These illustrations were bound in the archival copy of the first edition at the Austrian National Library, and have been reproduced at least in the hardcover edition of the 2018 English translation and in a 2019 Finnish translation, erroneously dated to 1906. Another illustrated German-language edition was published in the late 1960s in Liechtenstein with images by Jean Veenenbos (1932–2005).

Other illustrations have been created as well. The first English translation of 1931 was quickly pirated in New York and illustrated by Mahlon Blaine (1894–1969). The 1973 translation, Oh! Oh! Josephine, is illustrated with photographic stills from "the continental movie" of 1970, Josephine Mutzenbacher a.k.a. Naughty Knickers by Kurt Nachmann.

Also a Danish translation of 1967 contains illustrations. An incomplete Swedish translation from 1983 contains random photographs of prostitutes with scathing comments.

Interpretations

The novel Josefine Mutzenbacher has given rise to a multitude of interpretations. It has been listed both as child pornography and labeled as an apposite depiction of the milieu and manners of its time in Vienna, a travesty or a parody or a persiflage of a coming-of-age story or a novel of development, and mentioned as a rare case of a picaresque novel with a female protagonist. It has also been praised for its criticism of the bourgeois society.

The relation of the novel to the Freudian theory of sexuality has been subject to debate. The Swedish translator C.-M. Edenborg sees Josefine Mutzenbacher as an indictment of Freud's bourgeois psychology, whereas the Austrian psychoanalyst Désirée Prosquill thinks that not only are there marked thematic correspondences between Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) but Mutzenbacher also anticipates some issues concerning infantile sexuality that Freud added to his theory only later.

Legal processes in German-speaking countries

Banned in Austria, 1913–1971

The distribution of the novel Josefine Mutzenbacher was forbidden in Austria from 1913 on when it was taken into the list Catalogus Librorum in Austria Prohibitorum because of its obscenity.