Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914 9781800739949

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SERVANTS OF CULTURE

AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES

General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics, and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, and social and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Volume 34 Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700–1914 Ambika Natarajan Volume 33 The Vienna Gestapo 1938–1945 Elisabeth Boeckl-Klamper, Thomas Mang, and Wolfgang Neugebauer Translated by John Nicholson and Nick Somers Volume 32 Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges Edited by František Šístek Volume 31 More than Mere Spectacle: Coronations and Inaugurations in the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Edited by Klaas Van Gelder Volume 30 Estates and Constitution: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary István M. Szijártó

Volume 29 Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy Tim Buchen Volume 28 Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present Gundolf Graml Volume 27 Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in Dualist Hungary Ágoston Berecz Volume 26 Men under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 Jiří Hutečka Volume 25 Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age Christian Karner

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/ austrian-habsburg-studies

SERVANTS OF CULTURE Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700–1914

d Ambika Natarajan

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Ambika Natarajan All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2023005371 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-993-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-994-9 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739932

CONTENTS

d List of Figures List of Abbreviations

vi viii

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. The Itinerant Maidservant

25

Chapter 2. Cultural Feminization

43

Chapter 3. Demographic Feminization

74

Chapter 4. The Number Game

112

Chapter 5. The Servant Question

155

Chapter 6. Victims and Perpetrators

214

Conclusion

250

Bibliography

260

Index

285

FIGURES

d 3.1. Absolute Numbers of Servants in Four Economic Sectors in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 113. Graph made by author.

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3.2. Sex Ratio among Servants in Five Economic Sectors in Three Regional Categories in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 119. Graph made by author.

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3.3. Comparison of Sex Ratios of Urban and Rural Servants in Five Economic Sectors, Only Rural Servants, Both Urban and Rural Servants [Per 1,000]. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 129, 131, 184. Graph made by author.

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3.4. Sex Ratio per 1,000 Property Ownership among Rural Servants in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 156. Graph made by author.

82

4.1. Occupations of Women Arrested on Suspicion of Prostitution. Source: Josef Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien in historischer, administrativer und hygienischer Beziehung II. Band: Die Administration und Hygiene der Prostitution in Wien (Vienna, 1886), 244. Graph made by author.

124

Figures

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4.2. Absolute Numbers of Deported Women in 1897. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 168. Graph made by author.

134

5.1. Occupational Distribution of Rescued Women. Source: Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 13; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 18; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 18; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 14; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 22; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913,11–12. Graph made by author.

191

5.2. Rescues Conducted by Various Organizations by Year. Source: Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 12; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 6; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 15; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 11; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 16–17; Bericht des Vereines: über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 9. Graph made by author.

192

ABBREVIATIONS

d ALPDW

Amtsbibliothek der Landespolizeidirektion Wien

ANNO

Austrian Newspapers Online

BGÄW

Bibliothek der Gesellschaft der Ärzte in Wien

DOKU

Dokumentation Lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen, Institut für Wirtschaft und Sozialgeschichte, Wien Universität

FA

Filmarchiv Austria

JBW

Josephinische Bibliothek Wien

JS

Josephinische Sammlungen

KMW

Kriminal Museum, Wien

LPDW

Landespolizeidirektion Wien Archiv

LABW

Lesesaal Altes Buch, Universitäts-Bibliothek Wien

ÖNB

Österreichisches National Bibliothek

OeStA

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv

AVA

Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv

AdR

Archiv der Republik

MdI

Ministerium des Innern

MdI Präs

Ministerium des Innern Präsidiale

SFN

Sammlung Frauennachlässe, Wien Universität.

VGA-Wien

Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, Wien

Abbreviations

WStLA

Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv

WStLB

Wiener Stadt- und Landes- Bibliothek, Rathaus

WMK

Wien Museum Karlsplatz

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

d I

first thank the four who have looked after my well-being throughout this project: my mother Saradha, my father Natarajan, my sister Bala, and my constant companion Hanuman. I would like to thank the Oregon State University School of History, Philosophy, and Religion for their tremendous support during the early days of the project. I thank the Austrian Cultural Forum at New York for funding my conference travel. I am also grateful for the scholarship from the Office of International Services at Oregon State University, and the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion travel grants that have helped fund my trips for research and for conference presentations. I am grateful to the Austrian History Yearbook for allowing me to publish revised versions of research that appeared first in the journal. Parts of chapter 4 first appeared as a standalone article in the Austrian History Yearbook (“Vagrant Servants as Disease Vectors: Regulation of Migrant Maidservants in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 51 [2020]: 152–72). I wish to thank the University of Mumbai–Department of Atomic Energy Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences for their support. My time as a research associate there was tremendously helpful during the later stages of the project. I am grateful to the University of Minnesota Center for Austrian Studies for their kindness. I thank them for the 2022 Dissertation Prize which encouraged me greatly. In the United States, I thank Professor Howard Louthan for his valuable mentorship through the various stages of this project. I thank Professor Britta McEwen for her support. I thank Professor Gary Cohen for reading drafts of my manuscript. His comments and suggestions helped me clarify my thoughts and articulate my ideas. I wish to thank my incredibly supportive dissertation committee members, Professors Nicole von Germeten, Maureen Healy, Robert A. Nye, Kara L. Ritzheimer, and Elizabeth Sheehan, for their unwavering support through the thick and thin since my first year as a doctoral student. Their steady support and guidance throughout this project and their insightful comments on my various drafts have helped me progress in my research. I thank Professors

Acknowledgments

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William B. Husband and Christopher M. Nichols for their support in my teaching and research. I thank Professors Benita Blessing and Bradley Boovy for their advice. I thank Professors Marisa Chappell, Katherine Hubler, Paul Kopperman, and Ben Mutschler for their empathy during the rough times. I thank David Bishop, Natalia Bueno, and Suzanne Giftai for all their help in administrative matters. I thank the advisors and staff at the Office of International Services and the Graduate School for their timely help. I thank the librarians and staff at the Valley Library. I thank Professors Winson W. Chu, Scott Spector, Daniel Unowsky, and Nancy M. Wingfield for their scholarly advice. At Berghahn Books, I thank Mark Stanton, Sulaiman Ahmad, and the entire publication team for their support through the many stages of editing the manuscript for publication. I also wish to thank the two reviewers whose thoughtful comments enhanced my work. In India, I wish to thank Professor Vimal K. Jain for giving me the opportunity to work as a research associate at the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. I thank Professors Ameeya Bhagwat and Swapan Ghosh for their kind support. I thank all the administrative and academic staff at the Centre for their help. There are many people who helped me with my research in Vienna. I thank the officials at the Austrian Embassy in Los Angeles for their support. I thank the police officials and archivists at the Vienna police archives, especially Peter Bertha who tirelessly guided me through every box and file in the archive. I thank Hermann Zeitlhofer at the Viennese Society of Physicians for his incredible insights on the medical system in Vienna and providing me access to a rich array of nineteenth-century medical journals. I thank the librarians at the Josephinische Bibliothek for help with rare medical manuscripts. I thank the librarians at the Austrian National Library, the Wien Bibliothek at Rathaus, and the Vienna University Library for helping me track down rare manuscripts, magazines, and newspapers. At the Wien Museum Karlsplatz, I thank Martina Nußbaumer, Elke Wikidal, Regina Karner, and Hertha Schuller-Hamdi for recreating the world of maidservants with copious beautiful pictures and articles. I thank the staff at the Kriminal Museum for their help with tracking down old newspaper reports. I thank Kristina Höch at the Filmarchiv Austria for her help with early twentieth-century Austrian films. I thank Schwab Alexander at the Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, who provided me with a goldmine of rare newspapers. I thank the archivists and staff at the Austrian State Archives (the Verwaltungsarchiv and the Haus- und Hofarchiv) and the Vienna City Archives. Without their guidance through the various archival documents, I could not have found the necessary sources for this project. At the Vienna University, I thank Günter Müller at the Documentation Lebensgeschichte, and Li Gerhalter at the Sammlung Frauennachlässe for guiding me through the documents. I thank Professor Franz X. Eder for his valuable guidance on sources. I thank Jessica Richter and Tim Rütten for the many lively discussions.

xii

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Acknowledgments

I thank Shivraj, Leena, and Anika. The input of all these wonderful individuals and institutions made this book. While I credit the successes in this work to them, the mistakes are my own.

INTRODUCTION

d I am very incompletely dressed, and I go from a dwelling on the ground floor up a flight of stairs to an upper story. In doing this, I jump over three steps at a time, and I am glad to find I can mount the steps so quickly. Suddenly I see that a servant girl is coming down the stairs, that is towards me. I am ashamed and try to hurry away, and now there appears a sensation of being impeded; I am glued to the steps and cannot move from the spot. —Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 19001

T

his is a moment of reckoning for the man in the scene. He, alighting quickly and deftly in a half-dressed state, is suddenly confronted by the prospect of his maidservant’s gaze. Now, he stands ashamed and frozen, unable to escape, unable to disappear. The scene demands an explanation for his shame, for his inability to disappear, and of the events that made him the object of his maidservant’s gaze. One is promptly provided. His elderly housekeeper has refused him her customary respect after discovering his disregard for cleanliness. To compound the situation, the night before the dream, the maidservant had rebuked him for soiling the carpet, further reinforcing the housekeeper’s position. He delves deeper into his childhood, a time when maidservants often saw children in scanty clothing. Add to this the information that his mother was often harsh with him “for insufficient aptitude for education in cleanliness,” and the maidservant’s position of authority in the dream is easily explained by her “attempting to continue this educational work.”2 The dreamer in the scene is the neurologist Sigmund Freud, whose name is enshrined in our vocabulary and whose work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) detailed many such insights about the human mind. Freud offered several generations of scholars a compass to guide understanding of the impulses of the mind and the moorings of the unconscious. For the cultural historian Carl Schorske, contextualizing Freud’s formulation was central to his pathbreaking analysis of the crisis of Viennese liberalism. Schorske

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pinpointed the crisis to be one of elite intellectual isolation from other sectors of social and political processes due to intense skepticism.3 But what of the moment of reckoning between the man and the maidservant in Freud’s dream? What of the lack of authority that Freud’s dream expresses— the employer’s shame and inability to disappear when confronted by his maidservant’s gaze? Maureen Healy has demonstrated that the collapse of the Habsburg Empire was as much an internal phenomenon as an external one, with civilians waging a devastating war on each other.4 But what was this internal threat—what was this reckoning yet to take place? Some quarter decade before the publication of The Interpretation, the German historian and National Liberal writer Heinrich von Treitschke had fervently asserted, “There can be no culture without its servants. It is self-evident that if there were no men to perform the menial tasks of life, it would be impossible for higher culture to exist.”5 The liberal bourgeoisie of fin de siècle Vienna experienced the silent tremor of this sentiment—a sentiment that Viennese liberals never stated outright. However, the political, social, and cultural discourses of the fin de siècle, I posit, were haunted by the question of what it would mean for Viennese culture when the paternalism (predicated on the cameralist principles of the eighteenth century) that sustained the masterservant relationship was sacrificed for the individual autonomy of servants. While freedom as an abstract concept sounded like a desirable goal, the manifestation of that freedom in the form of the autonomy of a ubiquitous class of people—about one hundred thousand in strength in 1900 in Vienna alone—was formidable. My main concern in this book is not rupture but persistence. The lens of this study is not power relationships alone but how cultural constructs inherited from the past persist and perpetuate through individuals as well as sociopolitical institutions. I am reminded of James Baldwin, who tried to convince us that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”6 But, if the past is literally present, historical actors cannot break from it; they may only attempt to reckon with it or fail to do so. The protagonists of modernist high culture may well hide behind the “new” to escape the past that haunts them, but those who write about this escapism need not be as evasive. The servant girl in Freud’s dream might not have uttered anything, but her persistent presence cannot be disputed. Neither can the dreamer’s shame when confronted with her presence. The servant girl then is not merely subversive but exerts deep psychological and moral power over the dreamer. Is it not the task of the cultural historian then to place the servant girl at the center of the discussion as Freud does in this instance, even if he is and perhaps can only be interested in the dreamer’s psychological torment? Must we not, as Nitin Sinha argues, “shake up our own fields of history writing—urban, labor, gender, and social—to discover servants’ traces wherever they are found?”7 My exploration of modernism and its faithful attendant modernity in this book accepts Steven Shapin’s argument that

Introduction

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3

science is a social activity that should be understood contextually; however, my thesis does not lead to Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern.”8 Instead, my work attends to the call of the historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson to treat cultural persistence and its related processes of diffusion and transmission seriously as opposed to treating culture as a “postmodern epistemological jungle.” Patterson points out that “the cultural half-turn,” a term he uses to describe the effect of culture studies on sociology, has replaced the “language of norms, values, attitudes, and ideologies with those of scripts, toolkits, boundaries, narratives, repertoires, and frames.” In Patterson’s view, the cultural half-turn ignores the persistence of cultural constructs across time and populations both diachronically and synchronically, neglects the collective, downplays shared aspects of culture, and pays exclusive attention to cultural pragmatics.9 In this study, I start with the notion that culture is certainly susceptible to change, and dramatic change at that, and so the pragmatics of culture are important. Yet, the study of culture demands more. I contest that culture is also remarkably persistent and neglecting culture’s past in favor of the idea that it can spontaneously rupture from the past without leaving a trace departs from an analysis grounded in reality. From this perspective, then, this book tells a story about mass movements of people within an empire that posed a challenge to an extremely persistent model of social organization. These migrants, many—but not all—of whom were descendants of serfs and slaves, now became servants to the bourgeoisie in the empire’s urban centers. These people were not only the Other in the bourgeois master’s household and public spaces but also intimately involved in the service and care of their bourgeois masters and the space in which the latter lived. Indeed, they created the space in which their masters lived. Servants, in other words, as Theresa McBride argues, were deeply involved not only in the modernization of the domestic sphere; but not just the private sphere—also the public sphere of modern life.10 They were also deeply involved in—and, if Treitschke’s words are to be believed, even responsible for—the creation of the culture of modernism and modernity itself. So, they posed a challenge to the bourgeoisie. The inability of liberal intellectuals, social movements, and populist parties to successfully reckon with this reality meant that even though urbanization and scientific advances led to dramatic changes in cultural production on the one hand, old cultural configurations, on the other, persisted in the garb of new jargons. The modernism in the Vienna contained in the following pages is not the modernism of the avant-garde, the new, and the decadent. It is the modernism that perpetuated the past—the modernism of old, habituated, and unattainable ideals. Servants of Culture, thus, argues that the collapse of the Habsburg Empire was characterized by the inability to reckon with the past in the face of changing reality. The central thesis of this book then is that modernism, thought to span from approximately 1870 and well into the interwar years, was not a break away

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from the past but an obsession with the past. It was the persistence of questions about freedom and self-determination that servant-class women raised in the age of enlightened absolutism. From this perspective, modernism was not a cultural movement initiated by the liberal bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, and it was not characterized by a turn away from history. Instead, it was involved with tackling questions raised by preexisting servant-class women and was characterized by the persistence of history. What was “new” about fin de siècle modernism and its interwar manifestations in the form of movements such as the “New Woman,” for instance, was the permeation and appropriation of the cultural and social concerns of the servant class by the bourgeoisie. In other words, the paradox of cultural life in the fin de siècle was that while old laws perpetuated outdated stereotypes, they also opened up avenues for servant-class people to exert social, cultural, and political power not only through their ubiquitous presence but also by living, working, moving, and sometimes exploiting the mass cultural neuroses of the age. What is crucial here, I posit, is that this exercise of power should not be interpreted solely as individual subversive acts or individual expressions of agency and autonomy against systems of control. This interpretation assumes that the exercise of power is a set of simple oppositions—master-servant, bourgeoisie-servants, parent-child, perpetrator-victim, liberals-conservatives, and so on—with one group wielding all the power and the other group being oppressed. Indeed, some scholars argue that since its inception during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, liberalism’s history has been one of opposition by the underdogs against established power, while conservatism’s history has been about opposing that opposition.11 As we shall see in this book, this is a highly disputable claim. But the root of this argument of binary oppositions, James Baldwin would point out, requires the underdog’s tacit compliance with the enlightenment liberal. Yet, it would be fallacious to interpret that the ubiquitous and diverse mass of people constituting the fin de siècle servant class were all universally ignorant of the history that put them in the circumstances of terrible choices. While many sociopolitical players may have appropriated contemporary images of criminality and victimhood about servant-class people and indeed may have fooled themselves into thinking these images represented reality, I posit that the members of the servant class were not so easily fooled by the carnage of neurotic images that was the fin de siècle. Instead, I argue that the exercise of power by servant-class people at the turn of the century was a collective phenomenon that signaled the state’s failure to understand the plights and demands of an increasingly autonomous population. Of course, this is not to say that servant-class men and women were not subject to conditions that restrained their choices. The choice between menial domestic labor and abusive sex work was indeed equivalent to no choice at all in many cases. I argue that the servant class sought actively to forward their interests, assert their

Introduction

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dignity, and exert power in every way they could. These activities did not manifest in a polarized fashion with masters at one end of the sociopolitical spectrum and servants at the other. Furthermore, the increasing autonomy of the servant class did not necessarily manifest in the form of something akin to labor unions, although oftentimes they did. It also manifested as the mass movement of female job seekers, the proliferation of placement agencies, the retreat of men from the servant occupation, the interaction between the servant class and sex work, and also through the performance of crimes. Stated differently, the servant class could not be rendered into “harmless” pieces of background furniture, although many fin de siècle sociopolitical players including the ones who claimed to represent them tried to do just that. It would not be possible for populist movements to rise without support from many segments of this ubiquitous population. The servant girl could and oftentimes did cause substantial “harm” to the society in which she lived while rendering her employers infatuated with their own neuroses. The servant girl in Freud’s dream could be vengeful. This is not to cast blame on the servant girl or doubt her suffering in the face of sexist discourses, but this is to argue that she was not only a victim and that any power she exercised was not only subversive. This book fills a lacuna in Habsburg scholarship on servants, certainly, but my contribution departs from the general trend in the field of domestic service. My interest in this book is to interrogate the nature of the crisis that Vienna as the imperial capital of the far-flung Habsburg Empire faced at the turn of the century. Servants are the prism through which I examine cultural persistence. Vienna then is the epicenter of this book. However, the Vienna I interrogate is not one that is detached from the rest of the Habsburg Empire but one that is integrated spatially, temporally, and discursively with the rest of the empire. The Vienna in my book is the receptor of people and discourses from the peripheries and also the radiator of people and discourses to the peripheries. Modernist life in this Vienna has a social, legal, and experiential past from which it inherits its cultural configurations. The ubiquity of servants makes this group of people a particularly apt lens to study the cultural persistence in multiple aspects of fin de siècle Vienna. Vienna thus being a multiethnic, polyglot crossroads of people serves as a medium to understand not only the city itself but also the Habsburg Empire on the whole. The Schorskean paradigm—the argument that the Viennese fascination for and retreat into the world of the psyche resulted from the failure of Austrian liberalism—has stimulated much research on the crisis of liberalism. Several scholars have located the crisis in elite politics and culture. Jacques Le Rider argues that Viennese intellectuals faced a crisis of gender and ethnic identities.12 John Boyer shows the crisis to be one that involved the rise of radical politics in the form of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist party.13 Forwarding Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s14 foray into questions about Viennese scientific theories, Deb-

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orah Coen locates the crisis in the challenge that Austrian liberal scientists faced when defining scientific rationality.15 Steven Beller has pointed out that Coen’s argument is a counterpart to James Schedel’s work that resisted the Schorskean notion of withdrawal of the liberal bourgeoisie from politics. Schedel contended that the bourgeoisie was very much involved, perhaps overconfident and content about their connections in the bureaucracy.16 Many scholars have also expanded our perspective on fin de siècle Vienna, directing our lenses to the experience and contributions of specific communities. Steven Beller, George E. Berkley, Robert S. Wistrich, William O. McCagg Jr., and many others have incorporated different aspects of the Jewish experience into the Viennese fin de siècle. Similarly, Harriet Anderson, Alison Rose, Agatha Schwartz, and many others have written women into the story of the fin de siècle.17 More recently, scholars have reformulated the Schorskean thesis to open up new avenues of understanding the fin de siècle. David S. Luft, for instance, has highlighted that the infusion of philosophical irrationalism was an important aspect of fin de siècle intellectual life. He posits that Viennese discourses about sexuality and gender involved “understanding of the body as a biological reality . . . and a new understanding of the soul as feelings grounded in the body.”18 Chandak Sengoopta similarly argues that the notion of sex hormones allowed fin de siècle scientists to remap the human body, and consequently they embarked on a project to “correct” deviances through medical intervention.19 Applying the concept of body as a discursive and social construction—a formulation articulated by Foucauldian feminists Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, among others—Alys X. George has emphasized the centrality of the body in the long era of Viennese modernism. Indeed, both Luft and George incorporate the interwar period into the story of Viennese modernism.20 Such research displaces the psyche and instead places the body at the center of Viennese modernism. Similarly, Heidi Hakkarainen has highlighted the centrality of humor in the construction of modern Viennese space of the fin de siècle.21 Scholars have also sought to rethink the Schorskean paradigm by approaching the Habsburg Empire “from below,” from the streets, the decay, and the crime, as well as the political and sensational involvement of the populace at large. Sexual and criminal subjects at the border of “normal” society take center stage in Scott Spector’s examination of fin de siècle urban Central Europe, while Habsburg subjects of various linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds and their participation in the political and social process are the focus of Pieter Judson’s work.22 Daniel Vyleta explores the conceptualizations of Jews as criminals in fin de siècle Vienna, arguing that popular depictions of Jewish criminality were not yet influenced by biological models in the interwar period.23 For Nancy M. Wingfield, people involved in the empire’s commercial sex trade—prostitutes, pimps, and brothel madams—take the limelight.24 All these studies center on the idea of historical rupture. My task in this book is to interrogate this notion of rupture that underlines so much of the scholarship

Introduction

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on modernism and modernity. To do this, one must first engage with what modernism has meant. The historical study of modernism and modernity can roughly be categorized into three stages. The first stage involved the work of scholars who found the foundational source of modernism in late nineteenth-century France. The movement, these scholars argue, stressed a break with the past, particularly traditional church doctrines. The second stage consisted of the inclusion of literary works from Italy, Spain, and Continental Europe. Continental Europe particularly received attention as the center of the crisis of modernity in the fin de siècle. But Britain and America were the focus when it came to the interwar period. The third stage consisted of exploring the discursiveness of modernism, an interpretation from cultural studies known as the linguistic turn. Discursive analysis immediately evokes Michel Foucault, whose studies on sexuality, mental illness, and forms of control have inspired a flurry of scholarship examining power relationships in social, political, cultural, economic, and linguistic contexts. A more recent avatar of this discursive turn is the emphasis on the body and embodiment. All these phases in the study of modernism focus on the rupture in time—a distinct break away from the past apparently inherent in modernism— to understand the cultural moment of the late nineteenth century extending into the interwar period.25 The lacuna in the reckoning between masters and servants has extended to Habsburg scholarship when compared with other regions in the world. A flurry of historical, sociological, economic, literary, and interdisciplinary research on European as well as non-European servants dot the scholarly landscape.26 Since the 1970s, scholarship has focused on specific members within the diverse category of servants. In this context, the feminization of domestic work has been the subject of inquiry for a preponderance of scholarship. Theresa McBride’s seminal work The Domestic Revolution (1976) established female household servants to be central to the urbanization and industrialization processes in nineteenthcentury England and France. She concludes that domestic service has a marginal place in modern developed societies. Following on the heels of McBride, feminist scholars and labor historians, Leonore Davidoff, Mary Romero, Karin Walser, Sarah Maza, Cissie Fairchilds, Dorothee Wierling, Barbara Kosta, and many others have furnished a continuous stream of scholarship on female domestics in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Furthermore, Anne McClintock, Rhacel Parreñas, Jacqueline Andall, Saskia Sassen, and many others have incorporated race, postcolonialism, migration, and globalism into the discussion. McBride’s conclusion that domestic service would dwindle in modern developed societies has been contested since the publication of Niki Gregson and Michelle Lowe’s influential book Servicing the Middle Classes in 1994 that revealed the “resurgence” of domestic service.27 Although Karen Hansen, Majella Kilkey, Maria Rita Bartolomei, and others have studied male domestic workers, female household servants are still the primary lens of this field.28

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Moreover, much of the scholarship, even the historical and literary work, is generated with the implicit aim to promote the rights and improve the state of domestic workers. This is a noble endeavor, but because of this lens, scholarship on domestic service underscores the exploitative nature of the work, often referring to sexual exploitation, low wages, and deplorable living and working conditions.29 Susan Yates, for example, in exploring maidservants in literature, argues that “the maidservant, as a woman of the working classes, is particularly alien to the imagination of the bourgeois male writer. Even when she is the subject of discourse, she is still represented as different, in some way less than fully human, along with other ‘inferior’ groups such as women, children and colonized natives.”30 Recently, some scholars have underscored the importance of presenting a more nuanced view of the female servant. Anne McClintock’s research draws upon the works of Arthur Munby,31 Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin to contradict the idea that “fetishistic iconographies” of master-servant, dirt-cleanliness, paid and unpaid domestic labor are male-centric. Instead she suggests that for countless women “fetishism was an attempt—ambiguous, contradictory and not always successful—to negotiate the boundaries of power in ways that do not yield simple lessons about dominance and submission.”32 Along the same lines, Judy Giles argues that it is “inaccurate to see mistress-servant relationships as simply the exploitation of one group of people by another.”33 Furthermore, Helma Lutz’s research demonstrates that the relationships between masters and servants were “continually renegotiated.”34 In an effort to draw upon both microhistory and global history approaches to domestic service, Amy Stanley has viewed “exercise of individual agency” in a specific space and time as a “variation of a common theme, one in which work in domestic service inspired a wider array of women to tell new kinds of stories about themselves, to imagine the possibility of disappearance and reinvention, even if these stories remained dreams, or threats, or outright lies.”35 In the Habsburg context, the few works that have emerged in the field continue the aim to highlight the exploitative nature of the occupation.36 The earliest work focusing on Vienna was Marina Tichy’s book, Alltag und Traum (1984). Tichy uses servant newspapers, low-brow, sensationalist, and commercial literature published for servants to reconstruct their living and working environment in Vienna, as well as the master-servant relationship. Her book argues that reading materials for a maidservant primarily focused on grooming, entertaining, and controlling her so that she did not disturb the bourgeois hierarchy.37 Since then, Karin Pauleweit, Eva Eßlinger, Christine Rinne, and a few others have furnished similar works about maidservants in Viennese literature. Further, a steady stream of dissertations from the University of Vienna authored by Ursula Sander, Michaela Maria Hintermayr, Jessica Richter, and others again focus on the evolution of servant rights.38 In highlighting cultural persistence, this work departs from other scholarly work on modernism and modernity. A project of this nature then must make a

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judgment of where one looks when one speaks of culture and its productions. What is to be considered a cultural production and what is not? Accepting Patterson’s argument that culture is not a single entity but a matrix of cultural configurations that interact temporally and spatially, this book peers at the realities of servant-class people’s lives through a matrix of cultural constructs inherited and perpetuated by several historical actors. The servant girl, not the dreamer, is at the center of the study. This presents a unique problem as the servant girl is often—but not always—the silent background of the dream, while the dreamer is not. So, what can be known of the servant girl is only the dreamer’s reaction to her presence, and subsequently Freud’s interpretation of that reaction. Yet, we know what reactions the servant girl invoked in the dreamer and what interpretation Freud provides. We know something of the dreamer’s neurosis from what or whom he is provoked by and what or whom he is rendering harmless through his interpretation of the dream. The act of the servant girl descending the stairs and invoking shame in the dreamer is not subversive—she is simply being human. It is the dreamer then who is neurotic. If enough of these reactions and interpretations were gathered then, something of the culture in which the servant girl lives, acts, and belongs can be known. The cultural productions that define modernism in this book then are not ones that have traditionally been identified as the canon of modernist high culture. If, as Treitschke argues, no high culture was possible without menial servants, then the canon is but one symptom of that culture and not its “source.” The “source” must be the servants. Stated differently, productions considered to be part of high culture did not create new values, they merely reflected the ones that society held to be true at the time. Freud’s Interpretation and Musil’s The Man without Qualities, in other words, are located at the tip of the iceberg. The canon is but one grid in the cultural matrix. Therefore, the sources in this book comprise the cultural productions of various social and political actors spanning a large period. They range from brochure literature, police records, medical data, judicial cases, and populist writings to newspaper articles that form the cultural matrix of a servant girl’s life in the fin de siècle. In other words, my approach in this work is not restrained by the grid of high culture. Rather, my approach is to push this grid aside so that the underlying cultural lattices upon which it rests become apparent. Vienna is a particularly suited locale to examine cultural persistence since it was at the center of the European imperial collapse. Despite intense artistic and scientific attempts, liberalism failed to grapple with the paradox of fin de siècle life. By the time The Interpretation appeared in 1900, the double bind in which Viennese liberals found themselves was that of promoting the liberal value of individual autonomy on the one hand and the cultural implications of receding paternalistic authority on the other. This anxiety found expression in the works of several fin de siècle writers who tried variously to make harmless the specter of the autonomous servant. In Freud’s interpretation of his dream, of course, the

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maidservant gains authority only due to his own psychological neuroses stemming from his mother’s chastisement about his lack of cleanliness. “Only in our childhood was there a time,” he asserts in his interpretation of the source of embarrassment in “typical” dreams, “when we were seen by our relatives as well as by strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors, in scanty clothing, and at that time we were not ashamed of our nakedness.”39 His mother’s chastisements in his childhood combined with the shame over nakedness typically built in childhood resulted in a dream wherein “the servant girl develops a claim to be treated by me, in the dream as an incarnation of the prehistoric old woman.”40 Freud provided new jargons to understand the inner workings of the psyche; however, his interpretation in this instance was certainly not new. His interpretation was the banal inheritance of a persistent cultural construct that sought to render the servant girl harmless. If the so-called servant girl interpreted both the dream as well as Freud’s interpretation of it, she might argue that the dreamer was horrified by the possibility that she, the servant girl, had a judgment of her own—a glimmer of which he saw when she chastised him for his lack of cleanliness. That would imply that the servant girl was not the “thing” he thought she was. She was just like him—another human being and not simply background furniture. In that case, he was guilty of treating and thinking of her as a furniture. So, Freud rendered this shocking possibility of his guilt harmless by interpreting the servant girl as an embodiment of his mother. Although scarcely examined in the historiography, the servant girl’s interpretation that I have put forth was also not new. Servant-class people, especially servant women, had started resisting the image foisted upon them by the upper classes at least from the time of Joseph II, if not earlier. As a means of resisting this image, some servants blamed their employers for their poor condition, while others took responsibility for their actions even in extremely difficult circumstances. Whatever the means of their resistance, it was clear that starting from the Josephine era, the servant class did not fit the image of harmless background furniture. Increasingly, they were in the foreground, and they had a judgment of their own. This counterimage, put forth mostly by servant women—rather aggressively in some instances—did not come about due to some legislation on the part of the Habsburg regime but through the fact that a large contingent of protestors who had marched on Versailles during the French Revolution were lower-class women. This meant that masters had to deal with their servants, especially female servants, in a way they never had before. Like Freud, the incomplete masterpiece of the great Viennese writer Robert Musil The Man without Qualities assures the reader that the girl who accosted the sex murderer Moosbrugger was completely harmless, almost invisible, and readily available for the service of men’s desires: “She was the kind of girl that hires herself out to men down there by the meadows, an out-of-work, runaway servant-girl, a little thing of whom there was nothing to be seen but two invei-

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11

gling mouse-eyes gazing out from under her kerchief.”41 Nevertheless, Musil was less evasive than Freud in pointing out the underlying rumblings of discontent in a society too habituated to paternalism to respond the growing discontent of the masses. The millionaire Arnheim’s paternalistic intentions towards his “negro” servant boy Soliman might have been noble “for seeing that Soliman, the little servant turned out a decent citizen,”42 however, for the servant “that hour, when he had been promoted from the uncertain status of a pet kept in luxury to being a servant with free board and lodging and a small wage, had caused a devastation in Soliman’s heart of which Arnheim had not the faintest notion.”43 Musil, however, had the benefit of hindsight on Kakanien, the term he uses for Austria-Hungary in the period that the novel addresses, i.e., 1913. He had started work on the novel in 1924 and continued to write until his death in 1942.44 By the time he started the novel, the Habsburg Empire had collapsed into smaller republics, and by the end of his life, Central Europe once again was at the center of a world war. If we glance at the commentary from outside observers of the situation in Austria-Hungary, who did not have the benefit of hindsight, the problem is put to us straightforwardly. A 1913 article published in the influential English magazine Fortnightly Review titled “Austria, Disturber of the Peace” proclaimed: Austria Hungary suffers from very dangerous social fissures. In the Dual Monarchy, the aristocracy and gentry still exercise medieval rights. Whilst the body politic of the country is ruled by race privilege, the body social is dominated by social privilege. . . . In the social, and especially in the economic, relations the characteristics are arrogance and brutality from above and humility and servility from below. The agricultural laborers, small farmers, and factory workers are treated almost like serfs. The servants, especially in the country are treated worse. They kiss the hands of their masters and the hem of their mistresses’ garments, and bodily chastisement is common. In Austria-Hungary beggars may be seen kneeling by the roadside before well-dressed passers-by. The women of the poorer classes are treated as chattels.45

In 1913, this was the insight from a member of a society that had already grappled with the indelible question of whether culture without subservient servants could indeed be sustained. One might suggest that this grappling was largely unsuccessful in tearing down paternalistic instincts that kept servants in the shadows, especially in Europe’s imperial colonies.46 Yet, as Theresa McBride, Sarah Maza, and others show, there is no denying that at least a partial reckoning had taken place in the Western Europe of the nineteenth century.47 Within the Habsburg realm, the specter of this question grew ever starker since the liberal revolutions of 1848. The failure of Viennese liberal elites to address this question was the underlying neurosis of the fin de siècle. I am reminded of Suzi Gablik’s words, “for better or worse, modern consciousness is solitary, consequent to the disestablishing of communal reality . . . if the great modern enterprise has been freedom, the modern hubris is, finally, the refusal to accept

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any limits.”48 The anxiety that freedom had limits expressed itself in the form of deranged obsessions with statistics, mobile populations, diseased bodies, sexuality, aesthetics, crime, and working-class lifestyles in fin de siècle Vienna—an obsession that spread to the peripheries of the empire through a complex network of medico-policing surveillance and sociopolitical movements. If the body, as Alys George argues, was central to the medical landscape of fin de siècle Vienna, numbers offered sustenance for this obsession with the body. One body was not enough—many bodies were needed, especially migrant, especially female, especially servant. The source of the neuroses manifested in the form of the many migrants who relentlessly flocked to urban centers, especially Vienna, from the peripheries and took up menial jobs. The female servant on whom all these obsessions could be projected was the symptom of unaddressed questions—a reckoning that had not taken place. Indeed, the unifying object about which dialogue could be had between sociopolitical groups with little else in common was the female servant. The story of the maidservant in Vienna, therefore, is the story of the Habsburg Empire and its subsequent collapse. The servant question in Vienna thus falls at the crux of the empire’s collapse. Even though these intense sociopolitical dialogues variously called the Servant Question, the Dienstbotenfrage, crise de la domesticité, and crisi delle domestiche swept through fin de siècle Europe, the nature of the dialogue in fin de siècle Austria-Hungary was remarkably indifferent and evasive. By the late nineteenth century, the intellectual and political traditions in other regions of Europe had a formulated framework to address the Servant Question. In Western Europe and North America liberalism took a distinctive form—one that stressed individualism, rationalism, and freedom. In protestant German-speaking Central Europe, the Kantian formulation of individual freedom regulated by rational laws was the enshrined liberal principle. However, post-1848 Austrian liberalism was about “the liberation of the unbound man from the interference of the state” and the Catholic Church.49 The primary focus of Austrian liberal culture was the participation of “men of property and education” in the political process. From the 1860s onward, the strain of philosophical irrationalism stemming from the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche also became predominant in liberal Vienna.50 Liberal Western Europe and protestant German-speaking Central Europe addressed throughout the nineteenth century, intellectually, socially, and legally, the questions inherent in the Servant Problem—questions of paternalism, selfdetermination, and autonomy. Nineteenth-century American intellectuals during the Civil War era addressed these questions as well. The result of intellectually, socially, and legally grappling with the Servant Question was the disintegration of eighteenth-century paternalistic relationships in these regions. Particularly in Western Europe, the intellectual engagement with the problems of the oppressed classes had produced specialized professions and careers within these classes that

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13

no longer operated on the paternalistic master-servant model. Raffaella Sarti has argued that “these changes were affected by the crisis of the aristocratic way expressing and representing prestige and power and by the policies introduced to fight luxury, which convinced several masters to reduce the number of servants hired for display.”51 The aristocratic crisis in Western Europe and the Civil War in the United States enabled these regions to “put off” the reckoning with history for another century. This aristocratic crisis was delayed if not entirely denied in the instance of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. The questions underlining the Servant Question were addressed during Joseph II’s reign. Joseph II took the laissez-faire approach to master-servant relationships. While his policies prompted a more enlightened approach to servants, he also created a legal structure (on these issues) that could, with little effort, be used to break the enlightenment tide. Subsequently, Francis I in 1810 broke the Josephine tide of the previous century with the 1810 Codes. After 1850, the unevenness of industrialization and urbanization within the empire spurred large-scale internal migrations.52 As a result, Vienna drew many men and women of the Catholic faith from Bohemia and Moravia to avail opportunities in the many economic initiatives in the city.53 In the 1860s, the Habsburg Empire experienced intense political changes. The early 1860s was a period of constitutional experiments. The February Patent of 1861, for instance, created a Lower Austrian Assembly. Vienna remained under the jurisdiction of the Lower Austrian government until 1918. Furthermore, in 1862, Franz Josef issued a Gemeindegesetz (Municipality Law) that granted increased autonomy to local municipal governments in Cisleithanian Austria, including independent administration of the local police. Franz Josef ’s constitutional experiments in the period between 1860 and 1867 culminated in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The compromise created a Dual Monarchy, following which the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian half (Cisleithanian) of the empire functioned as two autonomous units. The 1860s was also time of intense economic expansion (Gründerzeit) and industrialization within the empire. Although the economic growth between the panic of 1873 and 1896 remained slow, the tide of internal migration did not recede.54 The urban liberal bourgeoisie, who had emerged as the principal employers of servants both in households as well as in businesses by 1848, attempted to address the problems with the 1810 Codes during the Vormärz. After 1848, they were intellectually paralyzed by the rising strength of an increasingly feminized servant class. While the disenfranchisement of peasants in the distant peripheries of Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia could not have stirred their response, the increasing number of migrants from the far stretches of the empire manifesting in their houses, cafés, and public spaces impinged upon the vision and vocabulary of the liberal bourgeoisie. One of the things that the bourgeoisie did not seem to know was that the servants whom they wished to treat as some kind of mechani-

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cal objects working in the background were just like themselves. They could also lie, cheat, murder, and use the law in perverse ways. This posed a challenge to the bourgeoisie. In this context, the liberal intellectuals failed to free themselves from a vocabulary that could not, in Baldwin’s words, “bear the weight of reality” and chose instead to perpetuate age-old stereotypes.55 Thus, instead of creating a dialogue with their servants, the liberal bourgeoisie became deeply implicated in the “Other”-ing of vast swaths of the empire’s population. But the liberal ideals of science and reason that many intellectuals espoused were not themselves implicated in this process of “Other”-ing. They were just one of the many faculties deployed by an increasingly neurotic liberal intelligentsia to prove stereotypes about the servant girl true: that she was indeed one to be rendered subservient and one to be subjected to paternalistic supervision. After 1879, liberals lost their political lead in Vienna and began to gradually retreat. By the mid-1880s, the serious engagement with underlying servant-class questions were left to emerging populist parties at both ends of the political spectrum, particularly the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats. Debates on the Servant Question started in the Lower Austrian Assembly in 1883 and continued till 1911, when a new Service Order finally came into effect. The Social Democrats who aligned with the emerging feminist and workers’ movements attempted to continue the emancipatory precepts of liberalism by seeking to professionalize the servant occupation while calling for universal suffrage. However, they were confronted with a servant class that was extraordinarily diverse, from the serf-like state of many laborers to pedagogically advanced governesses and financially (and culturally) sound butlers and caretakers. Population census data were difficult to interpret and compare since the category of “servant” often reflected the image of a servant held by the people who collected the data and further changed depending upon the changing social position of the groups.56 The arcane 1810 Codes were the overarching governing framework for this extraordinarily diverse population that essentially saw no specialization under the law throughout the nineteenth century. In other words, the common feature of the Habsburg working classes was that, except for the people engaged in some specialized work that came under guild laws, most were “servants” under the law. The members of the diverse servant class, thus, had no unifying occupational, racial, gender-based, or many times even class-based identity. Furthermore, the groups that were on the better end of the spectrum had built their entire lives often successfully around the paternalistic precepts of the 1810 Codes and indeed the prestige, privileges, and protections it granted them. The left-wing Social Democrats, rather, imposed an identity on this diverse group—one that epitomized poor, unskilled, and feminized work. The identity was manufactured from a preexisting cultural construct, some strains of French anti-Romanticism, and some trends in other regions of Europe. In nineteenthcentury Florence, for example, the feminization of servants occurred due to the

Introduction

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15

aristocracy’s increased demand for female servants, and therefore more women entered the occupation. In Germany, the servant was clearly distinguished from day-wage laborers, the latter of which was predominated by males.57 In any case, this concocted identity aligned with the sociopolitical agendas of women’s and workers’ rights that the left-wing Social Democratic Worker’s Party espoused and provided them a base to call for unionization of servants against the paternalism of the 1810 Codes. However, what was on offer in place of the paternalism was more aggressive paternalism. The imposition of a homogenous identity upon them stirred deep discontent among certain members of the servant class, indifference to these movements among some others, and social and economic marginalization for still others. On the other hand, the right-wing Christian Socials who represented the interests of the Catholic lower middle class were in many ways as apathetic toward the plight of the working classes as higher middle-class liberals.58 But, unlike liberals, Christian Socials did not retreat from grappling with the Servant Question. Like the Social Democrats, they conceptualized servants as victims. But they offered up antisemitism as a solution. Indeed, antiliberal antisemitism appealed to some groups within the servant class who resented the identity imposed upon them by the Social Democrats. Other groups embraced nationalistic identities, such as that of the Czech identity that was also on offer due to the rise of regional nationalisms elsewhere within the empire.59 As Gary B. Cohen argues, in the Bohemian capital of Prague, “a long series of political contests over both the tokens and the reality of group existence in the city . . . actually forced many individuals to define and articulate loyalties to one side or the other.”60 To forward their peculiar projects, political parties as well as intellectuals appropriated the police, who through extensive networks furnished the requisite information. The gathering of this information was grounded in inherited cultural constructs often passed off as “experience” or “reasonable assumptions.” Servants are ubiquitous in nineteenth-century written records.61 My book does not focus on reconstructing the life and work of actual individual servants but the rhetoric attached to servanthood and instances of choice. The written materials that I use reveal not only the voices of the maidservants themselves but also the voices of police officials, medical professionals, hospitality industry employees, anti-Mädchenhandel campaigners, populists, and feminists who participated in imprinting maidservants with labels of immorality, sexual aggressiveness, vagrancy, disease, and victimhood. The women’s voices appear in the sources for specific reasons. These were women who came in contact with the police and the judiciary on account of their choices: the choice to enter sex work, the choice to murder their employer, or the choice to be a murderer’s accomplice and/or lover. While these instances do not reveal the complete life stories of the women in question, they focus on the context of the specific choice. One could argue that these voices do not repre-

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sent the life of a “typical” maidservant in fin de siècle Vienna. But these instances, in Amy Stanley’s words, “show us that the global economy was made up . . . of individuals and their choices.”62 These instances also reveal which stories specific sociopolitical players chose to incorporate in the narratives they deployed, which ones they excluded, and for what reasons. The interpretation of some archival records used in this study requires additional caution as they contain only fragmented segments. This is especially true for archival records on prostitution. Many scholars refer to this problem in their work.63 For archives in Cisleithanian Austria, specifically, Nancy M. Wingfield points out, “we do not know why some records were saved and some were not.”64 Furthermore, the records on “prostitution” and Mädchenhandel are combined in the police archives of Vienna. My interest in these records is limited to cases that involved servants who chose “prostitution” or were “victims” of alleged Mädchenhandel operations or were “rescued” from Mädchenhändler and procurers. I also examine cases pertaining to another group of women who appear in these records, that is, waitresses and female cashiers, since they were considered servants until 1885. The interpretations I provide for the case studies in this book do not make any assumptions on what information was available to the “victims” in question or what they were thinking when they made the decisions they did. Indeed, it is unlikely that these “victims” knew clearly and accurately about the offers made to them. Even if these offers were suspicious, these “victims” may have been in extreme financial circumstances, and the weight of hope and expectations with few clear options may have been powerful. Indeed, these “victims” may simply have ended up in their circumstances through duplicity, misapprehension, and/or inflated expectations. The “experience” and paternalism upon which the system of medico-policing in fin de siècle Vienna was based make it extraordinarily difficult to approach the “truth” about these cases. While the “victims” in question may certainly have been misinformed or duped, it would be fallacious to assume that it is the only possible interpretation for every case in the genre. Such an interpretation assumes that the “victims” were devoid of reason and agency and could not possibly negotiate the system of paternalism to which they were subject. The interpretations I provide then argue for a multidimensional view of the cases in question. All cases were not the same, and the “victims” involved were also not the same. It is conceivable, I argue, that the “victims” preferred the sex industry over the “respectable” life of menial work and servitude to bourgeois employers, and police brutality. Perhaps, they were aware of, resented, and did not wish to cater to or abide by the assumptions upon which the categories of “respectability” and “disrepute” were based given that these categories only constrained their options in already strained financial circumstances. The voices of panderers or procurers, both male and female, frequently appear in vice police records. Section §512 of the Austrian Penal Code of 1889 included

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Mädchenhandel (trading in girls) and Kuppelei (procuring or pandering) under the same legal category and often meted out similar punishments. Although there were differences in the functions of various types of procurers and panderers involved in the empire’s sex trade, I do not elaborate on these gradations in this book, and I use the terms “procurer” and “panderer” interchangeably to refer to persons who arranged the transport, supply, and distribution of women in the commercial sex industry. The term Mädchenhandel literally translates as “trading in girls” or “commerce in girls.” The more politically charged translations are “trafficking in girls,” “female trafficking,” and “sex trafficking.”65 Sex worker activists around the world have long battled these terms, arguing that they forward negative stereotypes about sex work. While many of these stereotypes were prevalent in the nineteenth century, some connotations are much more recent.66 With a view to resist introducing present-day stereotypes that the word “trafficking” bears in the context of the nineteenth century, I avoid using translations and retain the word Mädchenhandel throughout this work. Furthermore, I also resist translating the term Mädchenhändler as “trafficker” and retain the German word. When the context demands, I use the phrase “trading” or “transporting” rather than “trafficking,” and anti-Mädchenhandel campaigners rather than antitrafficking campaigners. I use the term “white slave trade” when referring to the Europe-wide rhetorical phenomenon, which, in German-speaking parts of the continent, is again captured by the term Mädchenhandel. While I am sensitive to the negative connotations associated with the term “prostitute,” for the sake of authenticity I translate prostituierte as “prostitute” and use this term throughout the book as opposed to “sex worker,” since the time period under consideration was the era of regulation. The term Dirne, which is more prevalent in records prior to 1850, appears occasionally in my sources. The term originally referred to servants, but the secondary meaning of a young, single woman became more popular in the eighteenth century.67 In the nineteenth century, the term was applied to young, attractive, and unattached working-class women. The term also had moral overtones, indicating a young woman who was promiscuous and entertained extramarital relations. In some contexts, it could be translated as “whore” or “prostitute.” I leave the term Dirne untranslated throughout this book as it does not bear the same connotations as the corresponding words in English. Other terms such as Lohnhuren, Freudenmädchen, and öffentlichen Frauenspersonen I translate as “wage whores,” “girls of pleasure,” and “public women,” respectively. Moreover, I use the morally charged terms “prostitution,” “debauchery,” “promiscuity,” “immorality,” and “whoring” only when context requires. Otherwise, I use phrases such as “commercial sex” and “sex trading” to denote actions that involved engaging in sex in exchange for money and gifts as well as actions that enabled these exchanges such as procurement and pandering. Terms used to refer to servants are various.68 In records prior to 1850, the term Gesinde is common and, in fact, represents a larger group of people of both gen-

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ders such as agricultural workers and servants working in shops, pubs, inns, and so on. After 1850, the terms Dienstmädchen and Dienstboten are more prevalent. The former translates as “maidservant” and the latter is just “servant.” However, both terms usually indicate a female servant, unless mentioned otherwise. Dienstmagd, Dienstmäd’l, Dienstmädel, all translating as maidservant, are less frequently used in the Austrian context, and such usages usually indicate the source is from Germany. Hausmagd and Hausmädchen translated as “housemaid” is also uncommon, and, when used, they refer specifically to servants who work in a bourgeois household or in lower positions in an aristocratic household as opposed to more general terms like Dienstboten that also include servants working in pubs, inns, and hotels. The term Stubenmädchen, which translates as “chambermaid,” is a term used for parlor maids or a lady’s handmaid in aristocratic households. But, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the term also referred to maidservants who cleaned hotel rooms and Gasthaus rooms. The terms Hausgehilfen and Hauspersonal translated as “domestic help” and “domestic personnel” were terms employed by servant rights movements who sought to professionalize domestic service. Throughout this book, I resist the use of the term “domestic worker,” a relatively recent phrase, to maintain temporal authenticity. When I use the term “maidservant” it includes female cooks, nannies, maidservants, chambermaids, maids-of-all-work, governesses, and occasionally wet nurses. Furthermore, the term is not limited to women working in bourgeois households. Although bourgeois households were the principal employers, the aristocracy, the hospitality industry, and small businesses also employed and provided lodging to servants. To be as authentic as possible, when the sources specify the type of servant, I translate with specific terms such as “chambermaid” or “maid of all work.” Knecht and Diener refer to a male servant and are translated as “male servant” or “manservant” and, according to context, more specifically, as “footman” or “hotel manservant.” Throughout this book, I do not translate place names. Instead, I use the name specified in the records under consideration. For example, Mährisch, Ostrava, and Ostrawa refer to the same place in German, Czech, and Polish languages, respectively. However, if “Mährisch” is the term used in one written record and “Ostrava” in the other, I use the terms exactly as is when referring to each source. Chapter 1 examines the cultural construct of the “itinerant maidservant.” I argue that the itinerant maidservant was the most persistent cultural construct in the Habsburg realm. It emerged from a legacy of suspicion that the Habsburg state, from the time of its inception, bore toward “free” people—that is, those people who were mobile, neither owning property nor owned as property themselves. The chapter traces the transmission of this cultural construct to the nineteenth century via judicial and social discourses. Chapter 2 illuminates how the 1810 Franciscan Codes served as the crucible for sustaining the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant well into the nineteenth century. I argue that the

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vagueness of the 1810 Codes permitted the tightening of the cultural definition of the term “servant” as the century progressed. “Servant,” by the end of the nineteenth century, meant a poor, lower-class, migrant woman with questionable morals performing menial tasks in a bourgeois household. Chapter 3 argues that the increased encroachment of physicians caused male servants to distance themselves from the servant occupation. By the fin de siècle, servanthood was transformed from an occupation comprising a diverse set of people to an identity that encompassed a very specific subsection of the population. In chapter 4, I argue that the exaltation of statistics as an impartial instrument of measurement legitimized policing biases and enabled the police to increase surveillance and targeting of servant-class women. This obsession with numbers masked several underlying changes triggered by urbanization in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 5 highlights the role played by fin de siècle feminist and populist movements in perpetuating the age-old cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant. The victim narrative masked varying levels of maternalism, ignorance, and downright hypocrisy exhibited by these movements. Through the examination of police records from the perspective that women were adults capable of intelligence and self-determination even in the context of shrinking economic opportunities, I argue that paternalistic discourses exaggerated the idea that servants were passive victims and negated any possibility of women’s willing participation. Furthermore, I highlight that the identity politics promoted by these movements caused the diverse servant occupation to fragment into smaller groups of people who sought to distance themselves from the occupation. Chapter 6 analyzes the discourse of the maidservant victim from the perspective of criminal acts. This chapter argues that an incessant blind spot existed in Habsburg society when it came to viewing women as capable of perpetrating or colluding with crimes. When confronted with a female perpetrator, the most frequent excuse was that she was a victim of improper upbringing, abuse, debilitating poverty, and/or abandonment following seduction. The conclusion illuminates the persistence of the cultural construct in the debates about domestic service in interwar Red Vienna. Thus, in tracing the persistence of these cultural constructs, this book offers a fresh look at what went wrong with the Habsburg Empire. Instead of older narratives of inept bureaucrats and military leadership, the pages that follow show an entire society crumbling atop an outdated and untenable paternalistic system of control. Could these constructs have been discarded in favor of a reckoning? This question saturates the pages that follow.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1913), 201–2. Ibid., 202–3, 206–9. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 2012). Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004). Henry William Carless Davis, The Political Thought of Heinrich von Treitschke (London, 1914), 137. James Baldwin, “Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes,” in The White Problem in America (Chicago, 1966). Nitin Sinha, “Who Is (Not) a Servant Anyway? Domestic Servants and Service in Early Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 1 (2021): 152–206. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, 1991); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996). Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse, eds., The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Cambridge MA, 2015), 7–8. See also, Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. 1 (New York, 1991). Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France 1820–1920 (New York, 1976). See, for instance, Randall Collins, “The Rise and Fall of Modernism in Politics and Religion,” Acta Sociologica 35, no. 3 (1992): 171–86. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York, 1993). John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897– 1918 (Chicago, 1995). Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973). Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago, 2008), 12. Steven Beller, review of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life, by Deborah R. Coen, Habsburg H-Net Reviews (January 2010). See also, Andrew Barker, “Rethinking Vienna 1900,” Austrian History, Culture and Society 3 (2003): 226–28. Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938 (Cambridge, 1989); George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880s–1980s (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Liverpool, 2006); William O. McCagg Jr., A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington, 1989); Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, 1992); Alison Rose, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Austin, 2008); Agatha Schwartz, Shifting Voices: Feminist Thought and Women’s Writing in Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary (Montreal and Kingston, 2008). David S. Luft, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna (Chicago, 2003), 2. Chandak Sengoopta, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950 (Chicago, 2006). Alys X. George, The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body (Chicago, 2020), 9–10.

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21. Heidi Hakkarainen, Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna, vol. 23 (New York, 2019), 8. 22. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA, 2016); Scott Spector, Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 (Chicago, 2016). 23. Daniel M. Vyleta, Crime, Jews, and News: Vienna, 1895–1914 (New York, 2007). 24. Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Chicago, 2017). 25. See Vincent Sherry, ed., The Cambridge History of Modernism (Cambridge, 2017). 26. For a historiography of domestic service, see Raffaella Sarti, “Historians, Social Scientists, Servants and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work,” in International Review of Social History 59, no. 2 (2014): 279–314. 27. Sarti, “Historians,” 298. 28. Ibid., 296, 308. 29. Karin Walser, “Prostitutionsverdacht und Geschlechterforschung: Das Beispiel der Dienstmädchen um 1900,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (1985): 99–111. 30. Susan Yates, Maid and Mistress: Feminine Solidarity and Class Difference in Five Nineteenth-Century French Texts (New York, 1992), 21. 31. On the relationship between Arthur Munby and the maidservant Hannah Cullwick, see Liz Stanley, ed., The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984). 32. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995), 138. 33. Judy Giles, “Authority, Dependence and Power in Accounts of Twentieth-Century Domestic Service,” in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, ed. L. Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (London, 2009), 218. 34. Helma Lutz, The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy, trans. Deborah Shannon (New York, 2011), 2, 47. 35. Amy Stanley, “Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History of Eurasia, 1600–1900,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 460. 36. I have elaborated on a few theses, but there are many more on maidservants from Vienna University in the past three decades, such as Marcus Casutt, “Häusliches Dienstpersonal (insbesondere Dienstmädchen) im Wien des 19. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 1995); Gabriele Czachay, “Die soziale Situation der Hausgehilfinnen Wiens in der Zwischenkriegszeit” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 1985); Rafaela Eichinger, “Frau und Mutter Kirche: Probleme der beruflichen Sozialisation katholischer Pfarrhaushälterinnen; Eine empirische Studie (ab 1950)” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 2011); Barbara Grandl, “Dienstbotenlektüre: Vom Leben und Lesen weiblicher Hausbediensterer in Wien um 1900” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 2013); Maria Holzer, “Dienstmädchen um 1900 im I. Wiener Bezirk” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 1985); Luise Kobau, “Zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Lage der weiblichen Dienstboten in Wien, 1914–1938” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 1985); Maria Samhaber, “Häusliches Personal in Wien von 1890 bis 1920: Arbeits- und Lebensbedingungen von Dienstmädchen; ‘Dienstbotennot’ oder die Not der Dienstboten” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 1980); Hedwig Fohringer, “Männliche und weibliche Dienstboten vor Gericht in der landesfürstlichen Stadt Eggenburg im Zeitraum von 1700 bis 1750” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 2014); Wolfgang Gasser, “Jüdische DienstbotInnen in Wien—von den na-

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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poleonischen Kriegen, dem Biedermeier bis zur 1848-Revolution” (master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 2001). There is also Claudia Harrasser’s bibliographical work, Von Dienstboten und Landarbeitern: Eine Bibliographie zu (fast) vergessenen Berufen (Innsbruck/Wien, 1996); Roman Sandgruber, “Dienstmädchen um 1900 im I. Wiener Bezirk” (master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 1985); Beate Wirthensohn, “Hausgehilfinnen und Hausfrauen: Aspekte einer konfliktreichen Beziehung; Wien 1893–1934; Im Spiegel bürgerlicher und sozialdemokratischer Frauenpresse” (master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 1987). Further, there is Sabine Smolik’s thesis on maidservants in Salzburg, “Zur Situation der Dienstmädchen in der Stadt Salzburg von 1880 bis 1914” (master’s thesis, Universität Salzburg, 1989). Karin Pauleweit’s work draws upon literary sources and autobiographical writings of maidservants from fin de siècle Berlin and Vienna to provide a comprehensive account of how maidservants perceived themselves. See Karin Pauleweit, Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende: Im Selbstbildnis um im Spiegel der zeitgenössichen Literatur (Berlin, 1993). Marina Tichy, Alltag und Traum: Leben und Lektüre der Dienstmädchen im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna, Köln, Graz, 1984). Eva Eßlinger, Das Dienstmädchen, die Familie und der Sex: Zur Geschichte einer irregulären Beziehung in der europäischen Literatur (München, 2013); Michaela Maria Hintermayr, “Diskurs über Suizide und Suizidversuche von Hausgehilfinnen in Wien zwischen 1925 und 1933/34,” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 2010); Jessica Richter, “Die Produktion besonderer Arbeitskräfte: Auseinandersetzungen um den häuslichen Dienst in Österreich (Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1938),” (PhD diss., Wien Universität, 2017); Christine Rinne, “Mastering the Maidservant: Dienstmädchen Fantasies in Germany and Austria, 1794-1918,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005); Ursula Maria Sander, “Häusliches Dienstpersonal im späten 19. Jahrhundert,” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 2008). Domestic service in non-European contexts and female labor migrations from developing countries to more developed countries has received much scholarly attention. For instance, see Michele Ruth Gamburd, The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley, 2003). Since the resurgence of the domestic service occupation in Western countries, recent scholarly research in the area is devoted to incorporating women’s work in the household into mainstream labor history. An important scholarly work in this context is the edited volume by Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini. This volume approaches the question of what is work from the perspective of the historical and sociological importance of home-based productive labors that includes unpaid, paid, hybrid, and intermediate work. Domestic servants are an important category of people who perform these forms of labor. See, Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini, eds., What Is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present (New York, 2018). Freud, The Interpretation, 203–4. Ibid., 209. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York, 1965), 81. Ibid., 262. Ibid. Luft, Eros and Inwardness, 92.

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45. Arthur Preuss, The Fortnightly Review 1913, vol. 20 (London, 2018), 251–52. 46. See, for example, McClintock, Imperial Leather. 47. McBride, The Domestic Revolution; Sara Maza, Servants and Masters in 18th-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (New Jersey, 1983). 48. Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London, 2004), 9. 49. Luft, Eros and Inwardness, 7. 50. Ibid., 7–9. 51. Raffaella Sarti, “Who Are Servants? Defining Domestic Service in Western Europe (16th– 21st Centuries),” in S. Pasleau and I. Schopp (eds.), with R. Sarti, Proceedings of the “Servant Project,” 5 vols., vol. 2, Liege, Éditions de l’Univérsité de Liège, 2005 (but 2006): pp. 3–59. [Cited in the format requested by the author.] 52. Annemarie Steidl, “Migration Patterns in the late Habsburg Empire,” in Migration in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof and Dirk Rupnow (New Orleans, 2017), 69–86. 53. Monika Glettler, Böhmisches Wien (Vienna, 1985), 65. In addition to late industrialization and urbanization, the large-scale influx of migrants to Vienna is also related to some changes that took place in the Bohemian and Moravian agriculture. See Petra Grešlová, Simone Gingrich, Fridolin Krausmann, Pavel Chromý, and Vít Jančák, “Social Metabolism of Czech Agriculture in the Period 1830–2010,” AUC Geographica 50, no. 1 (2015): 23–35. 54. Luft, Eros and Inwardness, 18. 55. See, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York, 2020). 56. Sarti, “Who Are Servants?” 23–25. 57. Ibid., 19–20. 58. Luft, Eros and Inwardness, 20. 59. Jakub S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918 (New York, 2017); Monika Glettler, Sokol und Arbeiterverein (D.T.J.) der Wiener Tschechen bis 1914: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der nationalen Bewegung in beiden Organisationen (München und Vienna, 1970). 60. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (West Lafayette, 2006), 17. 61. The life stories and autobiographies of some nineteenth-century servants are contained in special collections, and some accounts such as that of Helene Gasser are published. See DOKU, Helene Gasser, Memoiren einer Köchin, 1834. Her life story is transcribed, written, and published by Althaus and is key source material for Althaus’s book on the daily lives of maidservants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See, Andrea Althaus, ed., Mit Kochlöffel und Staubwedel: Erzählungen aus dem Diesntmädchenalltag (Vienna, 2010). 62. Amy Stanley, “Maidservants’ Tales,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 460. 63. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 15; Nicole von Germeten, Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (Oakland, 2018), 3; Timothy Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in the Archives: Problems and Possibilities in Documenting the History of Sexuality,” American Archivist 57, no. 3 (1994): 514–27; Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, 2002); Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ, 2009). 64. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 15. 65. There is lot of literature on the political implications of the word “trafficking.” For instance, see Adanna Chi Mgbako, To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker Activism in

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Africa (New York, 2016); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York, 1995); Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk (Boston, 2014). For a broader survey on prostitution scholarship, see, Elizabeth Clement, “Prostitution,” in Palgrave Advances in Modern History of Sexuality, ed. H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (New York, 2006), 206–30. 66. See, for instance, Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik, eds., Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (New York, 2016). 67. Michael Mitterauer, “Servants and Youth,” Community and Change 5, no. 1 (1990): 11–12. 68. For details on terms used for servants in the German-speaking world, see, Mitterauer, “Servants and Youth,” 11–38.

Chapter 1

THE ITINERANT MAIDSERVANT

d T

he cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant with a dissolute lifestyle emerged from an antagonistic relationship that an evolving Habsburg state developed toward “free” people. A glance through the laws governing servants in the various Central European estates that came under the Habsburg rule in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries reveals that these laws were as vague as the category of peoples to whom they applied. A servant was simply a person who relied on a “stranger’s bread” (Fremden Brod). Evidently, this could be anyone from a knight or a student to an agricultural worker. In other words, any person who did household and/or field work for a contractually specified time in exchange for money, food, clothes, and boarding, often provided in the house of the employer, was a servant.1 What is pertinent here is that there was an awareness in the medieval world that the people who worked as servants were not entirely subservient and had interests of their own. Already the laws that began to appear in medieval Europe, especially the ones pertaining to servant “escape,” indicate intense preoccupation with this issue. People who moved were “free” and not accountable to authority. Free people presented a threat to ruling-class interests. The Habsburg rulers developed several regional as well as empire-wide strategies to deal with “vagrancy” within their realm. They forced many itinerant persons to serve propertied people as servants. Strategies against “vagrancy” often aligned with the political agendas of the ruler in question. The crackdowns on itinerant persons summed up the Habsburg legal relationship with servants until 1688. A comprehensive set of regulations—the so-called Servant Orders—was absent in Habsburg Central Europe before 1688.2 The Servant Order of 1688 came in the wake of the changes that Emperor Leopold I had instigated in the Habsburg countryside in keeping with his cameralist leanings.3 The overall effect of Leopold’s efforts was that those

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people who did not own a house transformed from “free” subjects to dependent residents in the households of propertied persons. The campaign against “vagrancy” was particularly acute during Empress Maria Theresa’s reign. The Theresian government targeted several types of mobile and homeless populations.4 Between 1751 and 1769, she organized a Chastity Commission that policed the activities of noblemen. Key among those who were punished under the Theresian regime were “vagrant maidservants.” Many suffered repeated arrests under suspicion of entertaining “nightly activity with a man” and still more were deported to the penal colony of Banat in Temeswar.5 The Theresian Servant Codes were unprecedented in their extensive attempt to regulate the master-servant relationship. The mediation by local churches and servant courts all but vanished under Maria Theresa. The Theresian Codes transferred arbitration of servant matters from local churches, landowners, and servant courts to the hands of the regional police offices. The execution of servant laws thus came under the purview of the police.

The Josephine Codes The distinctive aspect of the Josephine Servant Codes is that a standardized set of regulations governed all of the empire’s urban servants with the exception of Hungary. Unlike the previous codes, the master-servant relationship in urban centers could not be subject to the regulations of manorial landlords. These codes especially granted considerable contractual freedom to servants, allowing them to set the terms of their work, wages, and duration and the period of notification before terminating service. There were also provisions to protect the servant.6 The Rural Servant Codes, on the other hand, differed greatly from region to region and were not as effective in incorporating these enlightened reforms. The landlords in the countryside agitated against the various reforms, including the abolition of serfdom and the Robot Patents. The Servant Codes issued in various rural regions of the empire reflect the success of their resistance. The freedoms and protections granted to servants in the Urban Servant Orders were considerably reduced in the Rural Servant Orders.7 The Josephine Servant Codes granted only a limited number of freedoms and protections for urban servants and even less for rural servants. Nevertheless, several officials would later place blame on these codes for the degeneration of servant conditions in the empire in the nineteenth century. Their justifications relied on the assumption that too much freedom and a plethora of choices “ruined” servants. Ruined servants allegedly preferred unemployment and other lifestyle choices such as selling sex and pandering. The bourgeoisie’s negative attitudes and subsequent harsh laws in the form of the 1810 Servant Codes,

The Itinerant Maidservant

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such officials suggested, resulted from granting too much freedom and choice to servants in the Josephine era. It is true that the Josephine Servant Codes removed some legal checks and the arbitrary police interference in matters concerning urban servants. The Urban Servant Codes, for instance, removed court interference in many matters concerning how urban employers managed their servants. According to the prescriptions of the codes, legislative authorities handled servant matters passively as opposed to the active interference encouraged by the Theresian Codes. Despite their attempts to undercut the network of middlemen, the Theresian Codes were largely unsuccessful as they tried to abolish rather than regulate well-established contact points between servants and their potential masters. Consequently, under Joseph II’s passive stance, the responsibility to place servants in suitable service positions easily reverted to private individuals and organizations. This, without the regulatory measure of a special servant court that had existed at the time of Leopold I. Both in cities and in the countryside, the magistrates and local judges arbitrated in disputes pertaining to servants only when they could not be settled by private organizations. These arbitrations were free of cost. Due to such provisions, matters pertaining to servants first went to private organizations, then to the courts. Police offices could not mete out punishments without due judicial process.8 Nevertheless, it was not the lax policies and the “excessive” freedoms granted by Joseph II’s servant laws that paved the way for the draconian Servant Codes of 1810. Rather, the Josephine Servant Codes introduced changes in the definitional and structural framework of Habsburg servant laws. This allowed future administrators to easily incorporate existing paternalistic tendencies toward servants into the subsequent Servant Codes. These changes included the altered and, in many ways, tighter definition of “servant” in the Josephine Codes, as well as the separation of urban and rural servants. Both these unprecedented changes were predicated on the models adopted by other enlightened European monarchs like Joseph II in their rapidly industrializing and urbanizing realms.9 The enlightenment model completely disregarded the cameralist Leopoldine model of propertyless people being subsumed into the household of propertied people. But the Leopoldine model was still very much the social tendency in many regions of the unevenly industrializing Habsburg Empire. The dissonance is evident from the non-cooperation of several regional landowners that made it impossible to enforce the protections and freedoms granted by the Josephine Servant Codes. Moreover, some regional decrees completely nullified these liberties.10 Even in the industrial and urban centers, the overwhelming cultural configuration was predicated not on the enlightened model, where the master-servant relationship involved financial exchange of service for wage, but upon the Leopoldine social model. In other words, the idea that all kinds of “free” property-less people—ro-

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bot peasants, children, mobile populations, migrants, itinerants—must be absorbed into the family structure of the propertied prevailed. At the same time, Joseph II’s vacillations about illicit sexual relations introduced a change in the cultural configuration of the “vagrant” servant. Although he abolished the Theresian deportations of “immoral” women to Temeswar, trading in sex remained a criminal offense throughout Joseph II’s reign. Sexual relationships outside the context of marriage were illegal. In 1784, the emperor renewed prohibitions on houses of pleasure. The Viennese police, which had become lax and had let these places exist without harassment, were spurred into action and rounded up about five hundred women. But soon afterward, the emperor changed his mind, and most women were released. Again in 1785, he issued decrees to shut down houses where trading in sex took place. The police were much less enthusiastic in this instance. They arrested about twenty-eight women. The emperor’s ambivalent attitude toward sexual commerce continued throughout his reign.11 In this context, the servant occupation provided a convenient label for women who were engaged in unsanctioned sexual relationships. The swelling urban bourgeoisie in the last decades of the eighteenth century began to describe the servant occupation as one that was replete with “wanton” and frivolous women who likely engaged in trading sex. A certain “species” of female servant, one who was basically a “whore” in disguise, haunted the bourgeois imagination.12 This shift is evident from some words that became popular in the Josephine era. For instance, in the Theresian period, the commonly used German word for a woman engaging in sex outside the context of marriage was hureren, translated as “harlot” or “whore.” Article 81 of the Theresian Penal Code, for instance, uses the word hureren to refer to “unmarried persons of either sex who had committed carnal acts at one time or another; or two single persons living together immorally, or some single female person who follows an immoral life for everyone’s sake.”13 The term Dirne, on the other hand, referred to female servants. But, by 1780, this term had acquired a more popular cultural meaning, that is, a young, attractive, and unattached woman.14 The term also took on moral overtones indicating a young woman who was promiscuous and entertained extramarital relations. By the late 1780s, the term plainly meant “whore.” Therefore, the harsh Theresian crackdown on infidelity followed by Josephine vacillations on the subject precipitated the formation of a cultural construct—the itinerant maidservant.

Johann Rautenstrauch and his Discontents The well-known satirist Johann Rautenstrauch was the first to articulate the construct that had seeped into Viennese cultural vocabulary in the middle of the eighteenth century. Rautenstrauch’s 1781 pamphlet, titled Ueber die Stubenmäd-

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chen in Wien (On chambermaids in Vienna), was particularly scathing in its criticism of female servants in Vienna. He claimed that the city’s chambermaids, “. . . creatures intended to do nothing more than dispose contents of vessels used for secret body functions, to dust walls, to cleanse floors of rooms, to wax tables and boxes, etc.,” had become harmful influences on many young and old husbands and young women.15 Rautenstrauch addresses two questions in the pamphlet: one, what makes these maids so charming and dangerous, and two, where does the notion that all these maids will be adulteresses (Buhlerinnen) come from? The answer to the first question, he argues, is that the maidservant’s charm stems from her appearance, which is extremely coquettish. Compared with the women for whom she works, her dress is costlier and more stylish, and so are her hairdos. His answer to the second question is related to the first: since her wages are not enough to allow for such expensive things, she fishes for young men, sons of the house, and old widowers who can provide a lavish lifestyle. In falling for her, these men begin to treat their women badly. Furthermore, the maid also acted as a matchmaker or procuress for the daughters of the employer’s household. Many prospective suitors, apparently, first approach the maid, who is in reality a “whore” in the disguise of a faithful and honest chambermaid. Allegedly, many wives and mistresses of respectable men are, in fact, ex-chambermaids, and many women in chambermaids’ dresses are apprentices in training to trap men. Rautenstrauch recommended that strict dress codes should be enforced on chambermaids, they should be punished for seducing sons and daughters in the household, and they should also be banned from socializing with the husbands of the household. The employer, he argued, should be able to seek appropriate police intervention when necessary.16 Rautenstrauch’s pamphlet appeared three years before the institution of the 1784 Code in Vienna and, indeed, before the demographic feminization of the occupation that occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. The pamphlet belonged to a genre of brochure literature that was fashionable in the Josephine era. As the writer Gustav Gugitz would describe in his 1902 commentary on this genre, the easing of censorship in 1781 “excited a literary craze, which was expressed above all in a severe writing frenzy that infected an army of amateurs. They knew how to write something about everything, but with the feverish hurry and excitement, they usually did not get beyond the form of a short brochure.”17 The subject of many of these brochures was maidservants. In fact, a traveler named Nicolai reported that he had encountered about fifty brochures on this subject near Vienna. While Gugitz claims this account may have been an exaggeration, Rautenstrauch’s brochure was by no means a rare publication even though the exact scale of its circulation is uncertain. Indeed, the brochure stirred a hornet’s nest of writings about maidservants. Moreover, the brochure also circulated outside Vienna, that is, in other parts of the Habsburg realm as well as in Germany and Switzerland.

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Although some had guessed Rautenstrauch to be the author of the pamphlet, Rautenstrauch had published this work anonymously. So, his already-built reputation as a writer of theatrical satires and critiques of the clergy was not what made this brochure particularly important.18 Rather, the flurry of nearly twenty distinct responses and rebuttals that the brochure provoked contributed a great deal to its popularity.19 In an indignant response to Rautenstrauch’s brochure, for instance, a chambermaid named Viktoria turned the tables and blamed the employer, especially the mistress of the household, for the “immoral” behavior of maidservants.20 Everything—good and evil is your work. You can have it as you want it, but if you want it as it should be, educate yourself first, stop solely seeking to satisfy your foolish passions, treat us as creatures at least equal to you, and when that is not preferable, teach through your own sincerity—righteous conducts know the essence of pure love and responsibility!—and we chambermaids—will diligently follow the examples of our mistresses—then you will be spared the trouble of seducing poor innocents into a thousand base vices and endowing them with the conceited charms of some reckless Dirnen (whores), who were likely, at one time, innocent chambermaids seduced by your diabolical wickedness, and made into real coquettes.21

Viktoria’s rebuttal contains the following elements: she underscores maidservants’ respectability by distancing them from terms like “creatures” and “parlor-witches.” These pejorative expressions she claims are allegedly “borrowed from shabby women.” She insists that servants are respectable because “many . . . have a good upbringing from decent, but unfortunate parents.” She rejects Rautenstrauch’s notion that servants were destined to be nothing with the claim that “many, if it were not for unjust judges, or avaricious guardians or through another misfortune that resulted in poverty and misery, would not be in a position of a servant.”22 She blames bourgeois women for any frivolity or sexually aggressive behavior on the part of maidservants. Through their foolish behavior, she argues, bourgeois women “seduce” “poor” and “innocent” maidservants into a life of depravity. In her narrative, thus, Viktoria painted servants as passive victims of their circumstances and their employers’ behavior. Among others, the outraged criticisms from another chambermaid in Vienna, Theresia M., and an anonymous chambermaid from Prague were two rebuttals that found wide circulation. Both Theresia M. and the maid from Prague recited a pity-provoking personal tale of how each became a maidservant and the humiliation each had to face from her employers despite her honest and steadfast nature.23 Most rebuttals launched into a strong personal invective against Rautenstrauch. The maid from Prague, for instance, argued that the writer’s eyes should be scratched out while the maidservant author of Ein Wiener Stubenmädchen an ihren Gesetzgeber vormaligen Herrn mocked the various ordinances Rautenstrauch sets out for maidservants, including the one stipulat-

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ing that chambermaids should wear scarves, subsequently launching into a personal attack against Rautenstrauch.24 In all instances, the maidservant responder blamed the employers for the “immorality” or poor condition of maidservants. Indeed, they accepted that maidservants could be “immoral,” “promiscuous,” and “frivolous.” However, since innocent, impressionable maidservants looked to their employers for cues, the argument went, it was the frivolous nature of bourgeois employers, especially women, that “seduced” maidservants into such behaviors. Some chambermaids offered up literary criticisms. For instance, in a critique of the pamphlet by a certain chambermaid, published in 1781, the author states, “I think it is impossible that Rautenstrauch could be the author of this, everything reads so shallow and dry.”25 What a shock this was! The maidservant had a standard of judgment of her own. And she was using it to judge her masters. If the master-servant relationship was modeled on the parent-child relationship, they, the masters, were responsible for being good role models for the servant, for teaching her, and for setting appropriate limits for her. The servant was not to blame—the master was. Notwithstanding the severe rebuttals to Rautenstrauch’s brochure or perhaps because of it, many bourgeois contemporaries borrowed and expanded on his description of the chambermaid. But his supporters performed some backpedaling. Most of his contemporaries pegged the work to be lighthearted reading that lacked any factual merit or, as the Viennese satirist and poet Alois Blumauer would call it, “one of the happiest author speculations.” Another publisher, Anton H. von Geissau, also labeled the brochure a speculation.26 The authors of a two-volume book Beytrag zur Schilderung Wiens (Contribution to the description of Vienna), J. Neuberger and M. Riggler, argued that maidservants were naïve and lively, and because they were so pleasant, men with dishonest intentions crowded around them and seduced them. As a result, they continued, these girls fell prey to false beliefs that eventually led to their misery.27 Rautenstrauch’s detractors did not emerge in a vacuum. Just a few years prior to the release of this work—between 1775 and 1776—Johann Christian Brand published a series of over forty drawings. Titled Zeichnungen nach dem gemeinen Volke Besonders der Kaufruf in Wien (Drawings of common people especially sellers), these drawings circulated widely in Vienna. They portrayed in minute detail the costumes and physiognomies of various people seen in Vienna, including The Cheese Seller, The Seller of Spectacles, The Carpet Seller, The Milkmaid, The Chambermaid, and many others involved in trading goods and services. This novel genre of art symbolized the elevation of Vienna as a vibrant European metropolis comparable to London and Paris.28 It also foregrounded common people. The servant girl was an important theme in this foregrounding of the common people. Servants as the main subject was unprecedented in art. In the previous centuries, elites were the principal subject of most paintings, and servants when

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painted were part of the background. But with the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artists foregrounded servants usually as a means to portray an elite, properly managed household.29 Johann Jacobé’s print of August Friedrich Oelenhainz’s 1785 portrait titled Stubenmädchen von Wien (Chambermaids of Vienna) depicted a chambermaid wearing a bonnet and holding a letter in one hand and a dog under her other arm, with the backdrop of teapot, cups, and croissants. Another painting from 1743/44 by Jean-Étienne Liotard titled Das Schokoladenmädchen (The chocolate girl),30 lithographed by an artist named Noël around the same time, was also much appreciated among the upper classes in Vienna. Johann Hieronymus Löschenkohl’s 1787 illustration Ein Stubenmädchen portrayed a stylishly dressed chambermaid with a coquettish smile replete with a fancy hat and a handheld fan.31 Vinzenz Georg Kininger supplied another addition to Johann Christian Brand’s Zeichnungen in 1798. This painting resembled Liotard’s chocolate girl, except that Kininger’s chambermaid’s hair was uncovered and she wore jewelry.32 What these beautiful depictions achieved was humanizing the servant girl and portraying her as an important member of society. She, the servant girl, had taste, style, and judgment. She was desirable. She had a will of her own. She was not simply a faithful attendant and background furniture. The exquisite attire of the maidservant in Oelenhainz’s, Liotard’s, and Löschenkohl’s portraits sparked the imagination of many bourgeois writers who penned speculative descriptions about the Viennese chambermaid. The inordinate amount of focus on fashion and attire in these commentaries stemmed from the booming fashion industry in eighteenth-century Habsburg urban centers that centered not only on female clientele but also on female workers. The hat industry, for example, was composed of several private workshops with inbuilt hierarchies of seamstresses and workers. The centrality of female enterprise in this industry attracted considerable cynicism and gender bias from social commentators.33 It was also no coincidence that this cynicism emerged in full in the 1780s. In 1784, Joseph II enacted his enlightened Servant Orders. And, in 1786, the nobleman Franz de Paula von Zahlheim had been brutally executed in full view of the public for murdering his supposed lover Ambrok—a “vagrant maidservant.” Many authors suggested that chambermaids were in fact “whores” in disguise and indeed argued that they had to have illicit sources of income to be able to afford such fashionable attire. Johann Friedl, in his 1784 work Das galante Wien (Gallant Vienna), commented, “At times, one sees the chambermaid disguised as a gracious girl, and at other times, a natural chambermaid.”34 A comical song composed by a Johann Ernst titled “Der Liebeskuß, oder: Der Schusterbube, als Köchinn” tells an anecdote about a master who plans on enjoying a kiss from his pretty cook and comes to an agreement with her to pay five guldens per kiss.35 In 1787, the writer renowned as the “Voltaire of Austria” Johann Pezzl published a work titled Skizze von Wien (Sketches of Vienna). Pezzl’s description circulated at

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the heels of the publication of paintings foregrounding maidservants. Under the title “The Chambermaid,” he provides the following description: The legion of chambermaids is numerous. I think that at least four thousand heads come under this category. They are young, pretty, round, lively things, full of coquetry, wantonness, teasing, and flirting. They bounce through life without really knowing how it happens to them or for what reason they exist. Making coffee and chocolate, warming the shirts, wiping the table, making the bed, flattening the neckerchief: these are the arts of the Viennese Chambermaids. They keep themselves very clean in their costumes, know how to choose (their attire) with taste, and mostly stay in their traditional costume, which is the Bohemian hood and a tight corset that is extremely attractive.36

Pezzl further remarked, “Their annual salaries are between 25 and 40 Guldens, enough to pay for their shoes and hair powder. Yet, on Sundays, they go all dressed in silk, golden earrings, and large silver buckles to the church, the Prater, and to the comedies. Guess where they get their capital.”37 Thus, the speculative literature along with the exquisite artwork that circulated widely in late eighteenth-century Vienna lay disproportional focus on a small subsection of the servant population—the female urban housemaid. At this stage, the French Revolution broke out. Servants working in domestic households did not constitute significant numbers of the women protesters who marched upon Versailles in October 1789. These protestors were mostly market women and their allies. But servants were also less than 3 percent of the revolution’s victims.38 Whatever the relative numbers of women and servants who took part in the revolution, 1789 toppled the power structure in France. The autonomous servant from the Josephine era was a frightening specter. The “frivolous” and “promiscuous” maidservant living and working in their houses who was in reality a “seasoned whore or one in the making” concerned bourgeois families much more than gardeners, waiters, and other types of servants. By the start of the nineteenth century, the concepts of “vagrancy” and servanthood were perpetual travel partners, exemplified by the phrase vazirende/ vacirende Dienstboten or “vagrant servants.” This phrase replaced the older term Gesindel, used interchangeably in the pre-Josephine period to mean “vagrants,” “rabble,” as well as “servants” and often traveled with such terms as herrenloß or “unemployed,” bettler or “beggar,” vacirende or vagrant, and rauber or “robber,” among other morally censorious terms.39 The new phrase vacirende Dienstboten reinforced the utter ignorance of population mobility and social integration that had characterized the reigns of Maria Theresa and her successors. Furthermore, reminiscent of the legacy of witch hunts, the phrase encouraged fear, suspicion, and moral censure toward poor migrants who lacked social integration in a new place. This phrase appeared with increasing frequency in texts and reports pub-

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lished in the early 1800s. For instance, in 1804, authorities launched the Imperial Work and Reform Institution, a forced labor institution in Vienna’s Laimgrube district to “put layabouts, beggars, work-shy people, wanton vagrant servants, and people who cannot prove to have honorable work, to work and become useful members of society.”40 The quote reveals that it was not merely homelessness or unemployment that underscored the condition of urban servants but the morally censorious concept of wantonness, vagrancy, and idleness. Meanwhile, the well-known artist Georg Emanuel Opitz published a series of prints thematizing daily life on the streets. Maidservants of various types, including the female cook and the waitress, were invariably depicted either in the arms of a male admirer or clustered around an aged female middleman.41 In contrast, the bourgeois employer was depicted as a wise father figure not once casting a lecherous eye on maidservants.42 Contemporary literature reveals that the urban bourgeoisie had a definite idea of what constituted a “good” servant.43 These ideals, based upon the qualities of loyalty and subservience, were directly drawn by the bourgeoisie from the cameralist Leopoldine model still the predominant social organization in the Habsburg countryside. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, Josephine reforms coupled with urbanization had made this social model obsolete in urban centers. Yet, the urban bourgeoisie clung to the cultural configurations that had emerged from it when situating themselves vis-à-vis their servants. A set of nostalgic couplets by a Carl Schmitter composed sometime in the 1800s encapsulates the bourgeois desire to reinvigorate the values of modesty and quiet forbearance that servants of aristocratic families were supposed to possess: Look at the maidservant, today, in Vienna Each very elegant, journal-modern! A hat in Parisian fashion—ah, beautiful, And with the gloves, they go for a walk. They were all worse off in the past, They got for a full year 12 Gulden-bill as wages, A piece of fustian from a new cloth, With them, they found joy, They were quiet as a mouse, And yet it is all because Not very many people Who miss the good old days!44

The idea that a devious and frivolous maidservant could potentially topple the order and hierarchy of the household created considerable anxiety for the bourgeoisie.45 The more insidious form of this anxiety was the notion of a sexually aggressive maidservant who ruthlessly used her sexuality to win favors from the male members of the household, replace the mistress of the household, and gain

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middle-class rights. A plethora of advice books that counseled housewives on how to handle their maidservants reflect these anxieties. For instance, an advice manual from 1802 titled An die Frauen der Dienstmägde in Wien (To the mistresses of maidservants in Vienna) advised housewives to guard their husbands and to avoid engaging in love intrigues in front of their servants. The book claimed that maidservants had a natural desire to climb the social ladder and obtain middleclass rights by dishonest means. They were disloyal and untrustworthy, so they would create considerable disharmony in the household if the mistress of the household did not take care of her husband and household finances. The manual urged housewives not to hire servants without proper recommendation from a good source since servants often lied to attain a good placement and unscrupulously cheated and stole valuables from their employers’ household. Dancing and frequenting balls allegedly corrupted servant girls; therefore, the family was to impose strict restrictions on the servant’s movement outside the household. The book also advised housewives not to leave children unsupervised with a servant because young children could suffer anything from gross negligence to picking up unsavory words and habits. Further, it advised housewives to exercise strict control of household finances, cooking provisions, and other amenities to keep servants in check. On the other hand, a “good” maidservant, the book argued, could be of considerable assistance to the members of the household. The manual recommended religious education to overcome the “natural vices” of maidservants. Housewives were counseled to enroll their servants in religious courses and make religion mandatory in the household.46 But there was a difference. Whereas in the Josephine era the alleged targets of the autonomous maidservant were the male members of the household, by the turn of the century men were not the only targets. There was growing anxiety about the influence of “free” servants on bourgeois women. In 1806, the famous theater actor and playwright Johann Gottlieb Schildbach composed and published a morality play called Die Dienstboten in Wien (The servants in Vienna) with the following plot: A rich, married couple, Schindler and Terese, have a maidservant named Nanette, who causes considerable tension between the couple. Nanette has multiple preoccupations: she owes money to the agent who placed her in her current position, she is keen on attending a party at the Prater, and she enjoys the attention of a bourgeois suitor Binse. Binse needs a servant to take care of his ailing father, and he intends to steal Nanette away from the Schindler household. Nanette pressures her mistress Terese for money as well as time off from her duties so that she may attend the Prater ball. Schindler, a high-ranking government official, scolds his wife for her frivolous spending and forbids his wife from attending the Prater ball. Nanette tells her mistress that she wishes to leave service. Terese, who adores Nanette and is devoted to her, decides to disobey her husband. Terese takes her children—two girls, Lottchen and Marie, of seven and four years and a boy of six months named Karl—to the

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Prater ball along with Nanette. At the ball, she trusts the baby boy in the care of Nanette. However, Nanette is preoccupied with Binse and neglects to watch the baby. As a result, the baby meets with an accident and falls into a coma. A doctor saves the baby. Nanette is arrested. Terese and Schindler make up.47 The play ascribed to the maidservant several negative traits: dishonesty, frivolity, excessive spending, disloyalty, aggressive sexuality, and negligence. But the most significant aspect of this play was that the maidservant had instigated the wife in the household to challenge the authority of the husband. The wife of the household had adopted, albeit briefly, the lifestyle of the autonomous maidservant. Nanette, the maidservant, had choices in jobs, suitors, and lifestyles. She could choose to leave if she could not sustain her lifestyle with her current job. The housewife Therese, on the other hand, was bound—socially, financially, and intellectually—to her husband. The “free” maidservant was no longer a sport for upper-class men. She increasingly made a sport of not only upper-class men but also women.

Conclusion The most persistent cultural construct of the nineteenth century was that of the “itinerant maidservant.” This cultural construct emerged in full during the Josephine era. But it did not emerge in a vacuum. It represents a legacy of deep suspicion by the Habsburg rulers toward “free” people. This antipathy toward the “free” appeared most dramatically in the Leopoldine social model. Under this model, Leopold I attempted to force all property-less people to become servants to propertied people. Despite Joseph II’s attempts to introduce a new model of arranging social relationships, the cultural configurations that emerged from the Leopoldine model of social organization persisted well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the “enlightened” nobility and bourgeoisie who were recovering from the grip of the moral crusade under Maria Theresa produced the circumstances that would keep the Leopoldine model alive. The Viennese chambermaid in the Josephine era held the possibility of sexual adventure and illicit liaisons: she might be a “whore” in disguise. In other words, she was an object of male fantasies. These descriptions were based upon gossip, rumors, complaints, or merely imaginative fancies about female servants that circulated in upper- and middle-class Viennese social circles. Instead of remaining confined to the arena of lightweight, these descriptions provoked a response from servant-class women. They denounced their masters. The maidservant seemed increasingly to possess a standard of judgment that was distinct from her masters. This, then, the maidservant could be using to judge her masters. The maidservant with her “free” lifestyle could make a sport of not only bourgeois men but also bourgeois women. Compounded by the Zahlheim case and the French Revolution, the autonomous

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servant thus emerged as a frightening specter for the bourgeoisie as they entered the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 6–7, 9. 2. Ursula Maria Sander, “Häusliches Dienstpersonal im späten 19. Jahrhundert: Dienstmädchen aus der Sicht einer bürgerlichen Zeitung (1874–1899)” (master’s thesis, Vienna, 2008), 17–25. The fight against “vagrancy” was not a phenomenon limited to the Habsburg realm. Throughout the early modern and modern periods, European monarchs sought to control mobile populations within their realm. See, for instance, A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (New York, 1985); Govind P. Sreenivasan, “Prosecuting Injuries in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1550–1650),” Central European History 47, no. 3 (2014): 544–84; Nicole von Germeten, Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (Oakland, 2018), 104–8. Within the Habsburg realm, the rulers developed extensive administrative and legal systems of persecuting homeless and mobile populations. See, for instance, Hermann Rebel, “‘Heimat’ and ‘Schubsystem’: Walking the Homeless to Death in Early Modern Austria,” Central European History 48, no. 4 (2015): 461–79; Sigrid Wadauer, “Establishing Distinctions: Unemployment versus Vagrancy in Austria from the Late Nineteenth Century to 1938,” International Review of Social History 56, no. 1 (2011): 31–70. 3. With the exception of the several orders passed in Silesia in the preceding periods, the 1688 Servant Order mandated for the region of Lower Austria was the first uniform set of laws within the Habsburg realm intended specifically for servants. This order, which would later serve as the template for servant ordinances effected in Styria and Carinthia in 1734 and 1747 respectively, borrowed on some previous mandates issued between 1550 and 1590 and in 1655. See Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 13. 4. One such population was the Roma peoples and associated itinerants for whom the government introduced a “settlement program” that included granting them land and inducting their children into the education system. In the Bohemian lands, this program paved the way for forced settlement, arrests, expulsion, and compilation of lists in the nineteenth century. See Martin Wein, History of Jews in the Bohemian Lands (Leiden, 2015), 105; The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, vol. 12: Gichtel to Harmonium, 11th ed. (New York, 1910), 40. 5. Moriz Bermann, Maria Theresia und Kaiser Josef II in ihrem Leben und Wirken (Vienna, 1881), 788. 6. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 61–67. See also, Ignaz de Luca, Politischer Codex oder wesentliche Darstellung sämmtlicher, die k.k. Staaten betreffenden Gesetze, und Anordnungen im politischen Fache: Dreizehter Band Josephinische Gesetze von 1789 bis 20 Febr. 1790 (Vienna, 1794), 49–50, 242, 302. Joseph II also reformed the Civil Code, starting with the marriage law that redefined marriage as a civil contract. This opened up the possibility for wage-earning members of the poorer classes, including servants, to marry without interference from the Catholic Church. See, Miriam J. Levy, “The Rights of the Individual in Habsburg Civil Law: Joseph II and the Illegitimate,” Man and Nature 10 (1991): 105–12. However, authorities in various rural areas of the empire continued to enjoy

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

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the legal rights to restrict marriage rights of the poorer classes well into the nineteenth century. See Elisabeth Mantl, “Legal Restrictions on Marriage: Marriage and Inequality in the Austrian Tyrol during the Nineteenth Century,” History of the Family 4, no. 2 (1999): 185–207. For instance, the Servant Code of 1782 mandated that in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the service duration was compulsorily one year, the notice period prior to leaving service was three months, the wages were determined by the “arbitrary understanding” between the employer and the servant. The 1782 Code would serve as a template for the Rural Servant Orders that came into effect in rural regions of Lower Austria in 1787. See, Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 68–70; Ladislav Nekvapil, “The Legal Position of Servants in the Early Modern Bohemia,” Academia Letters, Article 3230 (2021): 1-5. Statistischen Department im K.K. Handelsministerium, ed., Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich (Vienna, 1898), 35; Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 72–73. The separation of servants into rural servants and urban servants occurred in many parts of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Gertraud Zull, Das Bild vom Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende: Eine Untersuchung der stereotypen Vorstellungen über den Charakter und die soziale Lage des städtischen weiblichen Hauspersonals (Munich, 1984), 31. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 74. Paul P. Bernard, The Limits of Enlightenment: Joseph II and the Law (Urbana, 1979), 45, 54. B. Tarnowsky, Prostitution und Abolitionismus (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890), 25. Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana oder der Römisch-Kaiserl. zu Hungarn und Böheim k.k. Konigl. Apost. Majestät Mariä Theresiä Erzherzogin zu Oesterreich, k.k. peinliche Gerichtsordnung (Vienna, 1769), 222; “. . . ledige Personen beiderlei Geschlechts sich ein-oder andermal mit einander fleischlich vergehen; oder anderten: zwei ledige Personen stäter unehrlicher Beiwhohnung leben, oder drittens: da einige ledige Weibsperson dem unzuchtigen Leben nachhanget, um Jedermann zu Willen stehet.” Mitterauer, “Servants and Youth,” 11–38. Johann Rautenstrauch, Ueber die Stubenmädchen in Wien (Vienna, 1781), 3; “. . . daß Geschöpfe, bestimmt, gewisse Gefäße die heimlichen Verrichtungen gebraucht werden, ihres Innhaltes zu entledigen, Wände abzustauben, Zimmerböden zu säubern, Tische und Kästen zu wixen u.u. mit einem Worte Dienstboten, zu seyn.” Rautenstrauch, Ueber die Stubenmädchen; Gustav Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur von 1781: Ein Beitrag zur Josephinischen Broschüren- und zur Dienstbotenlitteratur,” in Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde: Monatshefte für Bibliophilie und verwandte Interessen, Sechster Jahrgang Erster Band, ed. Fedor von Zobeltitz (Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1902/1903), 137–50; Eugen Schlesinger, Johann Rautenstrauch: Biographischer Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1897), 122–25. See also Rinne’s discussion of Rautenstrauch’s criticism of maidservants, “one of Vienna’s greater problems”: Rinne, “Mastering the Maidservant,” 23–26. In the context of the Victorian period, Erin D. Chamberlain argues that the literary and cultural representations of servants convey complicated tensions between two simultaneous conflicting desires confronting employers: the first being that they wished to establish visible social superiority over their servants by distinguishing themselves from their servants in dress and style, and the second being that since servants were representatives of their households, they wished for them to be well dressed. See Erin D. Chamberlain, “Servants’ Bright Reflections: Advertising the Body in Victorian Literature and Culture,” Dickens Studies Annual 45 (2014): 293–309.

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17. Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 137. “Die gewaltsam plötzliche Befreiung aus dem Geisterzaum erregte nur einen Litteraturtaumel, der sich vor allem in einer argen Schreibwut äusserte, die ein Heer von Dilettanten ansteckte. Diese wussten über alles etwas zu schreiben, aber bei der fieberhaften Hast und Aufregung kamen sie meist nicht über die Form einer schleuderhaften Broschüre hinaus, wie ja die Broschüren überhaupt immer zu aufgeregten Zeiten ihre meist kurze Blüte erleben.” 18. Rautenstrauch wrote on a wide range of subjects. While he was probably the author of the pamphlet, some commentators, such as the author of the brochure titled Schreiben eines Stubenmädchens an Rautenstrauch, have speculated that Rautenstrauch was not its author. See, Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 147; Schreiben eines Stubenmädchens an Rautenstrauch, Verfasser des Werkchens über die Stubenmädchen in Wien (Vienna, 1781). 19. Named here are a non-exhaustive list of brochures published in Vienna in 1781 in response to Rautenstrauch’s pamphlet: Schutzschrift der gekankten Stubenmädchen in Wien; Ein Stubenmädchen als Strafpredigerin des Autors über die Stubenmädchen in Wien; Schreiben des schönsten Stubenmädchens in Wien be idem Herrn von ***; Rede eines Stubenmädchens an ihre Mitschwestern, gehalten in einer am zweyten Sonntage nach Pfingsten im Pratter angeordneten allgemeinen Stubenmädchenversammlung; Der Spenndelstich eines Stubenmädchens an den Verfasser der Schrift über die Stubenmädchen in Wien; Ein Wiener Stubenmädchen an ihren Gesetzgeber vormaligen Herrn; Verabredung mit dem Verfasser der neuen Gestalt der Narrenversorgung in St. Marx: Wo ist der Stubenmädl Autor; Die wienerischen Stubenmädchen wider die erschienene satyrische Biographie über die Stubenmädchen in Wien; Schreiben eines Stubenmädchens an Rautenstrauch, Verfasser des Werkchens über die Stubenmädchen in Wien; Wider den Stubenmädchenfeind; Dem Verfasser des Büchls über die Stubenmädchen: Etwas auf die Nase; Der Besuch; Ein paar Worte gratis; Ermahnungsschreiben an die Herren Stubenmädchenvertheidiger. See Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 137–50. 20. Viktoria, Ein Stubenmädchen als Strafpredigerin des Autors über die Stubenmädchen in Wien (Vienna, 1781). Viktoria is the chambermaid of a certain Countess Frageselber. Ironically, the countess’s name means “question oneself,” and it is uncertain whether Viktoria claimed to work for a countess with this name to emphasize the argument in her tract or if it is just coincidence. Furthermore, there is considerable doubt that the author was in fact a chambermaid named Viktoria but rather a clerical opponent of Rautenstrauch. Chambermaids in this period were not so literate. Moreover, it is unusual for a chambermaid to find a sponsor who would finance the publication of her writings. Nonetheless, it is possible that Viktoria was an educated woman who had to take up domestic work due to financial difficulties and she found a patron to sponsor her work. 21. Viktoria, Ein Stubenmädchen als Strafpredigerin, 6, 11. “Alles, alles—Guts und Böses ist Euer Werk, ihr könnt sie haben, wie ihr sie wollt, die empfindsamsten Geschöpfe, wollt Ihr Sie aber haben, wie Sie seyn sollen,—so bildet Euch zuvor selbst, höret einmal auf, durch Sie blos allein Eure thörichten Leidenschaften befriedigen zu wollen, schätzt Sie als Kreaturen, die Euch wenigstens gleich, wo nicht vorzuziehen sind, lehret Sie durch Euer eigen aufrichtig—rechtschaffenes Betragen die wahre reine Liebe und Befändigkeit in ihrer Wesenheit kennen!—und wir Stubenmädchen—werden dem Beyspiele unserer Gebieterinnen fleissig, fleissig nachnahmen,—dann werdet ihr der Mühe überhoben seyn, mit tausend niedrigen Räncken die arme Unschuld zu verführen, und Eure Niederträchtigkeiten mit den eingebildeten Reizen einiger leichtsinnigen Dirnen zu beschönigen, welche ehmals vieleicht unschuldige Stubenmädchen gewesen, durch Eure teuflische Bosheit aber verführt, und zu wirklichen Koketten gemacht worden sind.”

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22. Viktoria, Ein Stubenmädchen als Strafpredigerin, 6, 11. “Kreaturen, Stubenheren—Ausdrücke, von Tretlerweibern entlehnt! Schämen Sie sich nicht, so allgemein verächtlich von einer Gattung Menschen zu reden, unter denen Viele, nebst Ihren Leben auch eine gute Erziehung zwar unglücklichen, aber Standesmässigen Aeltern zu danken haben?”; “wissen Sie nicht, daß sich viele, wären Sie nicht von ungerechten Richtern, oder von habsichtigen Vormündern um das Ihrige gebracht, oder durch ein anders Unglück arm und elend gemacht worden, vielleicht selbst solche Autormässige Bediente zu halten im Stande wären?” 23. Theresia M., Dem Verfasser des Büchels über die Stubenmädchen: Etwas auf die Nase (Vienna, 1781); Der Spennadelstich eines Stubenmädchens an den Verfasser der Schrift über die Stubenmädchen in Wien (Prague, 1781). 24. Der Spennadelstich eines Stubenmädchens; Ein Wiener Stubenmädchen an ihren Gesetzgeber vormaligen Herrn (Vienna, 1781). See also, Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 146–47. See also the rebuttal of the chambermaid author of the pamphlet Schreiben des schönsten Stubenmädchens in Wien be idem Herrn von *** (Vienna, 1781). 25. Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 147. “Ich denke mir immer, es ist unmöglich, dass Rautenstrauch der Verfasser davon seyn solle, so seicht und trochen sieht alles aus.” 26. Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 139–40, 142. 27. J. Neuberger and M. Riggler, eds., Beyträge zur Schilderung Wiens: Zweites Bändchen (Vienna, 1781), 125–27; See also, Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 143. 28. Johann Christian Brand, Zeichnungen nach dem gemeinen Volke besonders Der Kaufruf in Wien (Vienna, 1775); Wolfgang Kos, ed., Wiener Typen: Klischees und Wirklichkeit (Vienna, 2013), 47–56. The original illustration of The Chambermaid, for instance, can be found at Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number HMW 95836/16. 29. Diane Wolfthal has examined the depiction of household servants in Dutch and Flemish art of the Early Modern period. See Diane Wolfthal, “Foregrounding the Background: Images of Dutch and Flemish Household Servants,” in Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin (Leiden, 2019), 229–65. 30. Servants were instrumental in the spread of chocolate in the Habsburg realm. See Benita Maria Ines Wister, “Kakao: Vom habsburgischen Hofgetränk zur niederländischen Kolonialware; Der Diffusionsprozesses der Schokolade in Mitteleuropa vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert vor dem Hintergrund eines konsumspezifischen Kulturtransfers am Beispiel der Steiermark und Westfalens” (PhD diss, Graz, 2012), 55–57. See also, Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 141–43. 31. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number: HMW 62124/1. 32. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number: HMW 97225/8. 33. On the role of a seamstress in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, see Kurt Dröge, Die Putzmacherin: Rollenbilder einer historischen Medienfigur (Norderstedt, 2017). 34. Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 144. “Man sieht zu Zeiten das gnädige Fräulein als Stubenmädchen en masque, andern Tages als Stubenmädchen en nature.” See also Friedel’s other comments on chambermaids: Johann Friedel, Briefe aus Wien verschiedenen Inhalts an einen Freund in Berlin (Leipzig and Berlin, 1784), 458–60. 35. Johann Ernst, “Der Liebeskuß, oder: Der Schusterbube, als Köchinn” (Vienna, n.d.). See also the following folk songs based on the theme of wily female cooks: Johann Ernst, “Das Gans mit einem Fuß” (Vienna, n.d.); “Der Tischlergesell: Aus dem Zauberspiel von Ferd Raimund: Die gefeßelte Fantasie” (Vienna, n.d.).

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36. Johann Pezzl, Skizze von Wien (Vienna, 1787), 510; See also, Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 142. “Die Legion der Stubenmädchen ist zahlreich, ich glaube, dass sie wenigst aus viertausend Köpfen besteht. Es sind junge, hübsche, runde, muntere Dinger, voll Koketterie, Mutwillen, Neckerey und Buhlerey. Sie hüpfen durch das Leben hindurch, ohne selbst recht zu wissen, wie ihnen dabei geschieht, oder wozu sie eigentlich da sind. Caffeh und Chocolade zu machen, ein Hemd zu wärmen, einen Tisch zu wischen, das Bett zu machen, ein Halstuch zu platen: dies sind die Künste der Wienerischen Stubenmädchen. Sie halten sich in ihrem Anzug sehr reinlich, wissen ihn mit Geschmack zu wählen und bleiben meist bei der schon unter ihnen eingeführen Tracht, welche die böhmische Haube und das knappe Corsettchen vorzüglich niedlich machen.” 37. Pezzl, Skizze von Wien, 511. “Ihre Jahresbesoldungen sind zwischen 25 und 40 Gulden; diese reichen gerade hin, ihre Schuhe und ihren Haarpuder zu bezahlen. Nichtsdestoweniger gehen sie Sonntags ganz in Seide gekleidet, mit goldenen Ohrgehängen und grossen silbernen Schnallen in die Kirche, in den Prater und in die Komödie.—Rathet‚ wo sie ihre Capitalien liegen haben!” 38. Maza, Masters and Servants, 309 39. See, for instance, the usage of the term Gesindel in the various law codes of the pre-Josephine times. See, Codicis Austriaci, 21; Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, 38, 40. 40. Carl August Schimmer, Neuestes Gemälde von Wien in topographischer, statischer, commerzielle, industriöser und artificieller Beziehung (Vienna, 1837), 83. “Müssiggänger, Bettler, arbeitsscheue Menschen, muthwillig vazirende Dienstboten und Leute, die keinen ehrlichen Erwerb ausweisen können, zur Arbeit anzuhalten, und zu nützlichen Mitgliedern der Gesellschaft zu bilden.” 41. See, for instance, the illustrations titled Der Kellner, der Fasszieher, und ein Dienstmädchen; Ein herrschaftlicher Jäger, mit einem Regensburger Dienstmädchen, und ein Tyroler Teppichhandler, in Wien; Ein Läufer mit einem Stubenmädchen, und einer Wäscherinn in Wien; Die Stadt Öbstlerin, ein Schnekenweib, nebst einem Hausknecht und einer Diesntmagd in Wien; and Das Milchweib, ein Linzer-Dienstmädchen und der Kaffee-sieder; Die Köchinn, der Kellnermeister, und der Croatische Leinwandhändler in Wien; Ein Kaiserlicher Kanonier, eine Bierhauskellnerinn, und der Bretzen-Bek. In all these illustrations, the maidservant is either holding hands with or is in the arms of a male admirer. However, the illustration titled Die Dienstmädchen, und eine Zubringer depicts maidservants in conversation with an old woman—a female middleman—as her male assistant waits in the background. Georg Emanuel Opitz, Wiener Szenen und Volksbeschäftigungen (1804–1812), Blatt 4, 7, 20, 25, 33, 34, 41. See, Wien Museum Inventory Numbers HMW 167938/5, HMW 167938/32, HMW 167938/38, HMW 167938/40, HMW 167938/49, HMW 167938/63, HMW 167938/2, 167938/26. 42. See, for instance, his 1820 illustration titled Wien: Der Lichte Steg; Fleischerladen, Frauen, Dienstmädchen, die guten Hausväter aus der Mittelklasse, ein Lichtzieherknecht, wherein the bourgeois man is buying commodities from a meat vendor, his attention solely focused on the transaction despite pretty maidservants and women standing nearby. Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Inventory Number HMW 37098. 43. Many scholars have examined the bourgeois concept of an ideal servant. For an analysis of this concept in a Viennese context, see, for instance, Barbara Grandl, “‘Dienstbotenlektüre’ Vom Leben und Lesen weiblicher Hausbediensteter in Wien um 1900” (master’s thesis, Vienna, 2013). 11–16; Rinne, “Mastering the Maidservant”; Tichy, Alltag und Traum.

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44. Carl Schmitter, die liebe, gute, alte Zeit! (Vienna, n.d.). “Schaut man die Dienstmad’ln heut’ an in Wean, Jede sehr elegant, journal-modern! Ein’ Hut, Pariser Mod’—no, wunderschön, Und mit die Hanschuh’ thun’s einkaufen geh’n. Da war’ns doch früher Alle schlechter d’ran, Das ganze Jahr zwölf Gulden-Schein als Lohn, A Stückl Barchent auf a neues Klad, Mit dem find’s z’frieden g’west, war’n mäuserlstad. Und doch gibt’s allerweil no sehr viel’ Leut’, Die loben die liebe, gute, alte Zeit!” 45. Several scholars have discussed the stereotype of the devious and the frivolous maidservant. See, for instance, Eßlinger, Das Dienstmädchen, 118–22; Rinne, “Mastering the Maidservant.” 46. An die Frauen der Dienstmägde in Wien (Vienna, 1802). 47. Johann Gottlieb Schildbach, Die Dienstboten in Wien: Ein Sittengemählde in vier Akten (Vienna, 1806).

Chapter 2

CULTURAL FEMINIZATION

d T

he various enlightened reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II had achieved little by way of emancipation, but they achieved a lot in terms of the transfer of people from one form of servitude, that is, serfdom and robot labor, to another. The Servant Orders brought larger and larger numbers of people, “freed” or otherwise, under state regulation by granting masters support of the imperial police offices and the criminal courts in enforcing their will upon their servants. Even the Josephine Codes that supposedly granted servants more freedoms and lessened criminal punishments for such things as breach of contract were in effect for less than thirty years, and the alleged freedoms were not enforceable in most parts of the empire. Moreover, the structural framework of dividing urban and rural servants introduced increased unevenness and disparity that the future servant orders would inherit. The Habsburg state and police officials blamed the few freedoms provided in the Josephine Servant Codes for the alleged dissipated state of servants in the empire. This critique of the all too “liberal” Josephine Servant Codes functioned as a battering ram to demand much more severe servant codes. The Franciscan Codes of 1810 enforced a system of police surveillance on servants within the empire. Unlike the increased narrowing of the legal definition of “servant” in other regions of Europe, the term “servant” in the Habsburg realm remained so vague for most of the nineteenth century that the scope of the Servant Codes was extremely broad. This chapter posits that the vagueness of the 1810 Servant Codes provided the legal crucible for the cultural construct of the “itinerant maidservant” that had emerged in the Josephine era to crystallize. So, while the codes themselves were vague, the cultural definition of the term “servant” tightened as the century progressed. “Servant,” by the end of the nineteenth century, meant a poor, lowerclass, migrant woman with questionable morals performing menial tasks in a

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bourgeois household. I term this process of definitional narrowing that relied heavily on a specific cultural construct inherited from the Josephine era as cultural feminization.

The Plague of Big Cities By the start of the nineteenth century, complaints against the servant class and the system of private individuals and organizations who placed and arbitrated matters concerning servants had accrued to such an extent that, in the words of a Vienna police headquarters report from 1803, it had become a “plague of small and even more so of big cities.”1 Emperor Francis I was eager to implement a reform of the Josephine Servant Codes during his reign.2 Between 1792 and 1810, regional and state administrators in the empire undertook a series of projects to address these complaints. They put forth a series of recommendations that, as the grand cameralist jurist of the era Joseph von Sonnenfels would describe, “differed in external form, but the main ideas were identical, mostly utopian.”3 One Viennese municipal officer named Fauner proposed a system that applied solely to female servants. According to this system, the maidservant would obtain a document—called a Pollete—from a local municipal or police office or from a local court that would contain information about her character, her relatives, age, and birthplace. This document would be valid for one year and would require annual renewal. Unemployed maidservants would be housed in a hostel erected at the expense of the state and paid an unspecified income in addition to being enrolled in training classes. Employers in search of servants would register at the hostel, and they would be matched. In this manner, approaching middlemen could be entirely avoided. Furthermore, the employer would record the date of entry into service as well as the date of exit from service in the maidservant’s Pollete. If a maidservant changed positions more than four times annually, her case would be investigated, and she would be reprimanded, punished, and finally stopped from seeking service positions in Vienna. Fauner also proposed that every employer should divide their maidservants into three classes depending on their wages. Most other proposals followed a similar template.4 In 1801, after a thorough analysis of these proposals, the Lower Austrian government decided that the suggestions were sloppy. Government magistrates involved in the inspection of these proposals especially criticized Fauner’s idea to erect maidservant hostels. They argued that hostels would ruin the morality of maidservants, further spoiling the situation. They also opposed the building of special offices that handled matters pertaining to servants. They contended that the main problem was the laws concerning servant unemployment in the existing Servant Orders and proposed the writing and execution of an entirely new Servant Order. In terms of handling unemployed servants, they argued that

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district and regional police offices were much more suitable than special servant offices since the police handled matters pertaining to unemployed persons anyway. Moreover, the police would be more effective at supervising unemployed servants, preventing them from “straying,” and bringing them back as soon as possible into service. The magistrate report also remarked that matters pertaining to middlemen (Dienstzubringerleute) ought to be handled like they were handled in the 1688 Servant Order. In order to ensure that middlemen brought in good servants, all people involved in the business had to register with the police, and those who neglected to do so should not be allowed to continue in the business. Furthermore, a high tax would be imposed, half on the employer and the other half on the servant, to pay these middlemen. Anyone overriding these taxes or bringing in a servant without the appropriate registrations with the police were liable to severe punishments. These prescriptions sought to curb the activity of procurers, many of whom, the authors of the magistrate’s report believed, were in the guise of middlemen arranging positions for servants. The report emphasized that, while middlemen should be tolerated, employers ought to be able to contact police offices for necessary servants if they wished instead of relying on middlemen. The report also proposed that the police should limit as much as possible the number of days a servant remained unemployed between jobs. The magistrates recommended that this matter be transferred to Vienna police headquarters for deliberation. In 1803, the police headquarters issued a proposal to “bring servants in order” that suggested erecting a separate office or wing within the police that handled servant matters. Connected with a workhouse, the office should fulfill the following conditions: it should serve as a medium for the meeting of a servant and a potential employer, it should itself function as a justice office responsible for resolving disputes pertaining to servants, and finally it should monitor the servant class and have the powers to investigate and punish in various matters pertaining to servants. The proposal indicated that there was a difference between persons whom the Habsburg law included under the category of “servant” and persons whom the police wished to include in this category. While the law included diverse groups of people under the category of servant, the police wished to bring increasing numbers of unskilled labor under their surveillance while excluding more skilled forms of labor. For instance, the proposal suggested that the activities of the servant office would extend to all male and female servants, including house officials, sales officials, and other staff employed in businesses. But servants employed by the royal family, staff of administrative officials, house secretaries, solicitors, officials employed by landowners who were in Vienna, court attendants who were priests or graduates or could prove that they had completed their studies, journeymen involved in handicrafts, and artists’ assistants would be excluded from the office’s coverage. On the other hand, the proposal suggested that female factory workers should come under the subordination of the servant office.

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The Habsburg government disagreed with the police on whom to exclude and whom to include under the category of “servant.” In 1804, the Lower Austrian Government released a report that argued that the police proposal needed amendment on some fundamental points. The report claimed that the government did not understand the suggestion that female factory workers be brought under the servant office since, by law, female factory workers were not included under the category of “servant.” Moreover, there were many factories in towns that were adjacent to residential areas, and if the workers in these factories were brought under the purview of the servant office, it would lead to unequal treatment. Similarly, apprentices and journeymen of craftsmen, the report contended, were governed by guild regulations. What ought to be done in the case of these people, the report contended, was to revise factory regulations and provide provisions for offices for these categories of workers that performed the same function as servant offices. On the other hand, the report argued that it was impossible to remove the staff of administrative officials from the category of servant, since this would remove from supervision servants working for higher- as well as lower-ranked officials. Furthermore, the staff of sales businesses should instead be excluded from the category of servant. The police’s provisions for the servant class resembled a system of conscription that was altogether an incorrect and a laborious manner of dealing with this population. Rather, the government believed that the discretion in most matters should be left to employers. Ironically, the report also noted that the discretion to categorize a specific individual as belonging to one class or the other had to be left to the police. The United Chancellery, like the Lower Austrian Government, supported the system of registration that the police had proposed, albeit with a few changes in classification. The system of registration would not only improve the state of servant occupation by limiting such things as runaway, disloyal, and immoral servants but also aid in abolishing the tradition of middlemen, which, they believed, was ridden with procurers. In 1804, Francis I entrusted these suggestions to the Commission of Social Reform and asked the commission to specify “if and to what extent the suggestions of the Police Headquarters can be implemented and how they can be linked to the new charitable organizations.”5 In 1805, the commission accepted all the recommendations by the police headquarters alongside some improvements specified by the Lower Austrian Government and the United Chancellery. The commission specifically argued that the “bad” activities of middlemen should be stopped as specified by the report from the police headquarters, and therefore the erection of a special servant office was of utmost importance. The commission also remarked that these measures could not be implemented per the provisions of the existing Josephine Codes, and therefore a new Servant Order was needed.6 In response to these prescriptions, Francis I organized an official commission of magistrates headed by Sonnenfels to draft a new servant code. The Sonnen-

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fels commission carried the idea, inherent in the Josephine Servant Codes, of instituting two different sets of laws—one set for urban servants and one set for rural servants—a step further. The commission concluded that the Habsburg government should institute different servant codes for different regions under the crown. The Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien und den Umkreis innerhalb den Linien (Servant order for the city of Vienna and its surroundings) effected in May 1810 served as the model for the approximately ten different servant codes that came into effect in other regions of the Habsburg Empire around the same time.7 The 1810 Codes of Vienna went a step further in tightening the definition of a servant. It differed from previous definitions, not by who was included but by who was excluded. According to paragraph 4 of the code: The designation servant, service-peoples, servants, who are subject to the binding force of these laws includes those persons who, individually or collectively, earn, through private service, specific wages, without, or with additional conditions, such as food, clothes, etc., with exception of stewards, clerical staff, cashier officials, as well as of all employments, wherein a scientific preparation is required. Under this is not included, merchant apprentices, workers of the art industry and factories, journeymen craftsmen who are governed by the special statutes and regulations of guilds and guilders.8

The Sonnenfels commission considered the stipulations of the Josephine Codes to be too permissive. This allegedly resulted in indiscipline, disloyalty, immorality, and disobedience among household servants. The 1810 Codes expressed the specific objective of preempting “the carelessness of service peoples.” The intention of the document was to prevent the influx of “evils” or disadvantages the family would incur at the hands of “immoral” servants.9 In his manuscript published in the same year, Bemerkungen über die für die Hauptstadt Wien und den Umkreis derselben innerhalb der Linien erlassene Neue Gesindeordnung (Remarks on the servant order enacted in the capital city of Vienna and its surroundings), Sonnenfels argued that the 1810 Viennese Code would protect private morality against the decay of the servant class. The purpose of the code was to give the master of the household—that is, the employer—the authority and the means to enforce order and peace in the household.10 The code announced that the master-servant relationship was modeled “like parents over their children . . . employers over their servants.”11 Therefore, employers could exercise the same parental authority on their servants as they could on their children. To ensure this paternalistic control, the code granted employers considerable authority over the private lives of their servants. Employers could dictate the manners and behavior of their servants inside as well as outside the house. Similarly, employers could monitor the monetary habits of their servants. Moreover, the code granted employers authority to punish their servants for “immoral acts” and deduct from their wages for “neglect or carelessness.” What constituted neglect and carelessness, however, was missing in the language of the code.

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The code also offered employers increased control over a servant’s desire to stay in a position. A fourteen-day notice had to be given when either employer or servant wished to terminate the service agreement. Under certain circumstances, however, employers could shorten the termination period to forty-eight hours or even immediately. Pregnancy of a female servant, illness, dishonesty, gambling for male and fornication for female servants, and staying outdoors for a long time or without permission were among the scenarios that could lead to immediate termination. Employers had to pay wages of about fourteen days up to a month in case they terminated a servant’s employment without sufficient notice or cause. There was no written consequence in the code for employers who violated these laws. A servant could file charges in case of a termination conflict. But per paragraph 99 of the code, the burden of proof fell upon the servant. Further, most terminations were oral, and the employer was not obliged to provide a written document detailing the conditions of the termination. As a result, terminations could jeopardize the future employment prospects of a servant.12 Police regulation of matters pertaining to servants was the single most important outcome of the Franciscan Codes. Police headquarters and regional offices handled all servant-related matters. In Vienna, every person who entered the city in search of a position as a servant had to have a registration certificate that they could obtain at the police headquarters. The servant had to submit the registration certificate to the employer at the time of entry into service. Upon exit from a service position, the servant had to obtain a termination letter from his/ her employer in addition to a character certificate. S/he had to submit these documents to the subsequent employer. The code forbade employers to accept any person into service without either a termination letter (Spannzettel) or a registration certificate and a character reference (Dienstboten-Zeugniss) from their previous employer.13 However, there was no consequence to the previous employer if he did not provide these documents to the servant. The burden to obtain these documents was on the servant. In other words, from the moment of one’s entry to Vienna in search of a position, the code enabled the police to monitor a person through a series of document exchanges that detailed his/her biographical details, employment history, and character traits. This kind of surveillance allowed police officials to ensure the application of the language of the code to everyday bourgeois life. According to Sonnenfels, such police surveillance would protect the employer from the potential pitfalls of disciplining, supervising, and caring for the servants in his employ. In this regard, the code granted police officials the right to intervene on behalf of the family to ensure obedience, loyalty, attention, and carefulness of servants in their performance of their duties.14 The service contract (Dienstvertrag) was not the focus when it came to ensuring the aforementioned standards. The service contract was an agreement between employer and servant that came into force upon a servant’s entry into service. The service contract was different from other types of wage contracts in the

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empire. While wage contracts were usually written documents, the Dienstvertrag was an oral agreement.15 The only written components of the contract comprised a form that the servant had to submit at the local police bureau. It specified the name of the servant, place of origin, duration of employment, employer’s name and occupation, and the duties of the servant. The specifications of duties in this form were vague, and there was no mention of wages. The goal of police intervention was to bolster the old Leopoldine structure governing the master-servant relationship rather than to enforce a service contract that specified a job description. So, any lapses on the part of the servant that inconvenienced or embarrassed employers in any way were subject to police intervention and punishment. An employer could invoke police assistance if a servant refused to perform his/her duties, whatever the reason. Police officials could arrest a servant and subject her to corporal punishment if she spent the night with someone without informing her employer or if she left a service position without informing her employer and returning her deposit. Employers were obligated to report runaway servants, but they were not obliged to reappoint runaways into service. A runaway servant who was caught was responsible for remunerating her employer through longer hours of service if requested by the employer, and she was also subject to arrest and corporal punishment. Servants guilty of any form of disloyalty such as theft, embezzlement, misinformation, or fraud could be subject to police arrest. Moreover, while an employer was not allowed to fire a servant based upon a suspicion of a character flaw or theft or fraud, he could always appeal to the police to investigate the matter. The 1810 Codes assumed that servants were prone to wantonness and vagrancy. Rather than addressing the causes of servant unemployment, the 1810 Codes created a legal system that associated the state of being unemployed with “immorality,” “debauchery,” and “fornication.” The code expressed the intent of protecting middle-class employers from potential harm that could result from the actions of “immoral” servants. “Fornication” and “earning through dishonest means” following unemployment were two such harms. Not only did the code mandate strict police supervision of unemployed servants but it also explicitly punished “debauchery” and “fornication.” Furthermore, it sought to undercut the role and influence of middlemen. For instance, the code stipulated that servant hostels often working hand in hand with middlemen were sites of “immorality,” and it punished anyone who encouraged “fornication,” “seduction to fornication,” and procurement in servant hostels.16 The Penal Code of 1852 forwarded the assumption that hostels, local restaurants, and inns were susceptible to “immoral” influences and punished any attempt at procurement. For attempts at procurement, the penal code prescribed more severe punishments for servants in a Gasthaus or an inn than Gasthaus owners and innkeepers.17 The code considered any person who came from outside Vienna, even those who came from the other parts of the Habsburg Empire, as foreign and required

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that a foreigner should already have a placement at the time of his/her entry to Vienna. Upon termination, servants had to register their new residence with the police within a day. The code placed considerable restrictions on a servant’s residence. Servants could only stay with certain relatives and in specific hostels designated appropriate by the police. Otherwise, it was illegal to house unemployed servants. These precautions allegedly prevented servants from turning to “fornication” (Unzucht), being “seduced into fornication” (Verführung zur Unzucht), resorting to “earning through dishonorable ways” (Erwerb auf unehrbaren Wegen), and “debauchery” (Ausschweifungen). Through such provisions, the code specifically restricted servants from engaging in sexual activities outside the context of marriage. The code authorized the police to patrol unemployed servants closely for the same reasons. Following registration, servants had as little as eight days to find another service position, after which they would have to renew their registration. Since the servant had to personally submit the registration forms at the police stations, unemployed servants met the police every eight days. Servants who were unemployed for extended periods of time or who changed employers frequently were subject to police investigation. When officials found such servants guilty of “debauchery,” or earning “in a dishonorable fashion,” they were arrested and subject to punishment, and deported if they were foreign servants. The code also sought to circumvent the potential “harm” caused by ill servants. The code permitted instant dismissal of servants afflicted with contagious diseases and arrest and corporal punishment for servants who continued service despite having a deadly disease, and it prohibited any woman who was diseased from taking up a position as a wet nurse.18 The only recourse for servants who wished to leave their service without detrimental legal or financial consequences was marriage, which required eight days’ notice to the employer. The code eased its grasp on servants after marriage. It allowed married servants to shorten their termination time. Married servants who had their own house at the time of service termination had a ready residence to name in police registration forms. Marriage released foreign servants from their obligation to remain servants and to be subjected to police officials. The code also permitted servants to shorten their termination time in favor of factory work or business. But opportunities in factories became available to most urban maidservants only in the last decades of the nineteenth century.19 With little alteration, the Servant Codes enacted in other urban regions of the empire in 1810 imitated the Viennese Code detailed in the preceding paragraphs. The codes enacted for the rural areas were structured to encompass servants involved in agriculture and other allied work. The overall effect of the codes in the rural areas were much more draconian than those in effect in urban centers since they worked together with other restrictive regional stipulations. For instance, even marriage could not be viewed as a recourse to escape the stipulations of the 1810 Codes in many rural areas since servants were subject to regional

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marriage restrictions until the late 1860s.20 Consequently, in these regions, a servant’s marriage and subsequent family life also came under the authority of the master of the household. In other words, it was a replication of Leopold’s cameralist system. Therefore, the Franciscan Codes of 1810 had reincorporated the Leopoldine model that the Josephine servant reforms had allegedly dismantled into the empire’s judicial language. The judicial structure of the Josephine Codes had aided in tailoring this model for urban centers. The police, through their control of servant affairs, propagated this model in bourgeois society. Within two decades of the enactment of the 1810 Codes, the system of police regulation of private household affairs—commonly termed Haus Polizei (house police) or sometimes and perhaps more appropriately termed Dienstboten Polizei (servant police)—was an integral part of urban bourgeois life. Servants were the primary targets of this system that allegedly sought to secure the private individual rights of all members of a household.21

The Code That Lasted a Hundred Years The 1810 Codes did not specifically target female servants—it was vague in defining the term “servant.”22 But, what functioned as a stand-in for this definitional vagueness was the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant that had emerged during the Josephine era. For the one hundred years of its tenure in Vienna, the 1810 Codes supplied a legal crucible in which the cultural construct could gain credibility. The itinerant maidservant was the image upon which the bourgeoisie could project all their anxieties about “free” people. The legal system, the police, the government, politicians, religious groups, and bourgeois families supported the idea that maidservants were immoral, promiscuous, and frivolous. The solution to this situation, the narrative went, was to grant employers complete control over the lives of their maidservants. The persistence of the cultural construct is evident in many nineteenthcentury writings. The itinerant maidservant was foregrounded repeatedly in midcentury works. Adalbert Stifter et al.’s 1844 book of illustrations Wien und die Wiener: Bildern aus dem Leben (Vienna and the Viennese: Portraits of their lives) included a chapter on the chambermaid. Emulating Rautenstrauch’s refrain, the author emphasized that the Viennese chambermaid was vain, dishonest, disloyal, promiscuous, and extremely cunning. Above all, old age troubled her because she would no longer be a sought-after item.23 Karl Mahlknecht supplied illustrations for these character sketches. One such illustration, titled Böhmische Köchin (Bohemian female cook), depicted a female servant chatting gayly with a bourgeois man, her hand tucked firmly and comfortably in his arm.24 Another midcentury sketch portrayed maidservants as women who tended to switch lovers for personal gain. Two soldiers, a cannoneer and a grenadier, sit in

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a bar with a maidservant Lenerl and discuss a bet. Lenerl is the cannoneer’s lover, but the latter has wagered her in a bet with the grenadier. When the grenadier wins, the cannoneer hands Lenerl over to the former and leaves. The author concludes, “Lenerl took a new lover as casually as she takes up a new service position.”25 The short portrayal also reveals that nineteenth-century bourgeois men viewed servant girls as sexual objects they owned, thereby wagering them in bets. Similarly, Carl Lorens’s pithy comical dialogue between two maidservants—a female cook and a chambermaid—again portrayed them as promiscuous and obsessed with frequenting dancehalls at the Prater.26 Featuring plays such as Schildbach’s Die Dienstboten in Wien (Servants in Vienna) and Carl Haffner’s Die Wiener Stubenmädchen oder: Der Ball in der Schuster-Werkstatt (The Viennese chambermaid or the ball in the cobbler workshop), the latter of which again portrayed chambermaids as frivolous, the private as well as popular theaters in Leopoldstadt were perhaps the most effective medium for the dissemination of Rautenstrauch’s maidservant in prerevolutionary Vienna.27 The image of the prettily dressed maidservants frolicking with her male admirers was sometimes challenged. Johann Karl’s 1835 advice manual titled Der Herr und der Diener als Beytrag zur richtigen Behandlung, Veredlung und Verbesserung der Dienstboten männlichen und weiblichen Geschlechtes (The master and the servant as a contribution on the correct treatment, refinement, and improvement of the servants of male and female gender) was one of its kind in Vienna. Karl argued that employers should have a religious understanding of their servants. He suggested that religion prescribed a kind treatment of servants and that all servants have the right to be treated well as fellow members of humanity. Karl’s manual was unusual in its urging of employers to stop overworking their servants, policing their wages, nitpicking their small mistakes, and discriminating between servants based on their gender, age, and appearance. Further, the book urged employers to cultivate a good character among their female servants that may prove useful later in the latter’s married lives. He advised the same for male servants who may someday become landlords or independent business owners. He counseled bourgeois men and women to cultivate knowledge of household affairs in case their servants were ill and could not work. At the same time, he discouraged excessive familiarity with servants, especially those of the opposite gender and those of another household because this created problems for both the employer and the servant. Karl was careful to highlight in the introduction to his book that his argument did not absolve servants from all blame; rather, he suggested that they were error prone like any other human being.28 Notwithstanding occasional eccentrics like Karl who strove to humanize the servant as well as to be gender neutral in his analysis of bourgeois relationships with their servants, the maidservant was the main if not the only focus when one broached the subject of servants in the nineteenth century. Anton Zampis, for instance, built his reputation as a painter and lithographer through his depic-

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tions of the Viennese working classes—including female servants. His illustrations demonstrated the pain, dissatisfaction, and unrest of the working classes.29 By 1848, several newspapers and magazines in Vienna published articles on the terrible exploitation of maidservants in the city. Advice manuals that counseled housewives to treat their maidservants appropriately began to circulate. Johann Hochleitner’s 1848 advice manual Ein gutes Wort für Dienstmädchen und alle dienende Personen (A good word for maidservants and all working persons) highlighted the communication gap between bourgeois urban housewives and rural maidservants who worked for them. Among the suggestions he offered to bridge this gap was treating the maidservant as a member of the family and not as a foreign entity.30 To allay the growing unrest among servants, some Viennese housewives proposed the erection of women-operated private placement bureaus in the city. Private agents and middlemen were the very people that the 1810 Franciscan Codes targeted. Moreover, they were certainly a more expensive alternative since servants in search of placements had to apply to these agencies and paid fees for services rendered. Nevertheless, the argument in its favor was that it reduced police involvement in servant matters.31 During the revolutions later that year, a contingent of four hundred maidservants in Vienna protested suspicions of promiscuity levied against female servants. These women demanded better working conditions and the opening of private placement bureaus for servants. They also proposed the formation of servant organizations.32 Their demands for private placement bureaus were met. After 1848, private placement agencies mushroomed in urban centers of the empire and took over the responsibility of placing servants from the local police bureaus. Private placement bureaus were effective in decreasing police control over servants. The transformation of the empire’s police aided this phenomenon. Unlike France and Prussia, early nineteenth-century police stations within the Habsburg realm were military bodies both in terms of structure and function. They were the result of the crime-handling system introduced by War Minister Theodor Franz Count of Baillet von Latour. The prerevolutionary police were strong in the political sector, but they were feeble in terms of maintaining public order. Nevertheless, the system was successful in reducing criminal activity and therefore remained in place until 1848. Even the lynching of Latour in 1848 brought about little immediate changes to crime handling within the empire. In fact, the police were candid about their shortcomings and actively sought public sympathy and support in their activities. But, after 1848, many representatives of the liberal bureaucracy felt that the inability of autonomous police offices to control local mobs led to the outbreak of the revolutions. Upon the advice of such representatives as Franz von Pillersdorf, Emperor Franz Josef transferred the police system to the hands of the Ministry of Interior so that police power and administration were concentrated under one organ of the government. Over the next

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two decades, the Habsburg government reorganized the police system within the empire. A key feature of these reforms was to suppress revolutionary activities through increased border security measures and contacts with other countries. The international presence and participation of the Habsburg police created a system of surveillance within the empire. In 1869, the Habsburg government replaced the military police corps with a Viennese police security force with expanded powers and functions.33 During this period of transformation, the government in Vienna standardized many police procedures pertaining to servants. Until 1851, all official handling of servant matters including registration and documentation was done free of cost. In 1851, the Viennese government introduced a new document called the Dienstbotenbuch.34 The Dienstbotenbuch replaced registration certificates and other forms of identification such as passports and travel documents and contained all the biographical information as well as employment history of a servant. The document eliminated confusion created by handling multiple registration and identity documents in different police stations. It also streamlined the processing of servant matters by the police. By 1860, Habsburg authorities instituted the Dienstbotenbuch in all the urban centers of the empire, thereby creating a uniform system of document processing for servants. But the Dienstbotenbuch was not introduced in the countryside, and so many servants who moved to cities from villages for work still posed considerable technical challenges for the police. Still, the Dienstbotenbuch system was lucrative for the police, while it increased the financial burden on servants. A prospective servant had to purchase the Dienstbotenbuch for a considerable sum of twenty-five kronen. Since it was illegal for a servant to enter service without the Dienstbotenbuch, this charge was unavoidable.35 Since the Dienstbotenbuch allowed police officials to track servants with better efficiency, the police outsourced their labor-intensive and nonlucrative function of being a contact medium between the employer and the servant to private placement agencies. Consequently, with these agencies taking over this role, the police’s role transformed from that of an arbitrator between employers and servants to that of a surveillance agent focused on quashing revolutionary intents. But the decrease in police control due to the upswing of private placement agencies did not last long. Perhaps because police control over servants decreased in the postrevolutionary decade, bourgeois anxieties about the autonomous maidservant resurfaced. In this period, many middle-class women’s clubs and catholic organizations sought to “improve” the lot of servants.36 These clubs incorporated the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant in their approach to servant problems. Rautenstrauch’s idea that maidservants were prone to certain character traits made a comeback. So did the objection to this idea that maidservants like Viktoria had raised in the Josephine era—the idea that employers were responsible for the poor behavior of their female servants, not the servants themselves.

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So, Rautenstrauch’s detractors suggested that employers need to act as good role models for their maidservants. However, this time around, Viktoria’s criticism was repurposed by middle-class women’s organizations. They accepted the notion that employers were responsible for their maidservants’ behaviors. But the remedy to these character afflictions was based upon the idea that maidservants, like children, had to be taught to be good. Both these strains of thought manifested in the language of many charitable organizations. In 1852, in a presentation titled “Marien Stiftung for the Education of Good Maidservants Recognized as the Most Urgent Need,” a member of the Catholic organization in Josefstadt, Georg Schulz, argued that the main cause for the deplorable condition of maidservants in Vienna was the lack of religious education. This shortfall, he claimed, perpetuated a chain of immoral and irresponsible behaviors that caused poverty, misery, and anxiety to the maidservants, their husbands, and their children. To ameliorate this situation, Schulz urged the middle-class women’s organization Frauen Wohlthätigkeits-Verein (Women’s Charity Club, FWV) to create a school for maidservants. The school would provide free-of-cost food, residence, living supplies, religious education, and training in household chores to unemployed maidservants along with opportunity for placement with middle-class Catholic families.37 Schulz did not limit himself to detailing the rules and regulations for controlling the behaviors of maidservants entering such an education center. He also prescribed extending his recommendations for the “betterment” of the maidservant’s lot on a citywide level. He proposed submitting a written request to the mayor’s office to make the approval of marriage certificates more difficult for servants. An irreligious and immoral maidservant, he argued, would likely raise irreligious and immoral children and thrust her entire family into misery. Thus, marriage licenses should not be granted without strict examination of the maidservant’s testimony.38 Schulz’s vision of social control was not out of the ordinary. Seeking the approval of social superiors was a prevalent practice in many parts of the realm. Especially in the regions of Tyrol and Vorarlberg, such practices were part of the government policy. Even though the Habsburg authorities formally revoked these policies in 1870, they persisted in practice. In these regions, the marital laws permitted church elders to deny rights of marriage to people, especially mendicants, under the pretext that it increased poverty.39 Meanwhile, Rautenstrauch’s maidservant circulated more widely among the reading public and theatergoers in the empire’s urban centers. Gustav Schönstein’s 1850 sketches and pithy dialogues about Viennese servant-class women was published in Graz and was replete with commentaries such as “chatting and gossiping, as with all female creatures, is a major passion of the female cook,” again reinforcing the Rautenstrauchian refrain of the vain, frivolous, and sexually promiscuous maidservant.40 Some writers in the postrevolutionary decade

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noticed that Rautenstrauch’s refrain had yielded a blatantly cynical and entirely unexamined discursive habit in the urban bourgeois vocabulary. The midnineteenth-century publisher Franz Gräffer, for example, addressed this issue in several of his publications, including the Neuen Wiener Lokalfresken (1847), the Neuen Wiener Tabletten (1848), the Wiener Dosenstücken (1846), and the Kleine Wiener Memoiren (1845). Gräffer remarked that Rautenstrauch’s brochure simply depicted a “silhouette” of a type and completely lacked any kind of “sharpness or plasticity of life.” Furthermore, he argued that the brochures of the Josephine period contained substantial “shallowness, lameness, stupidity, nothingness, and general indifference” that the succeeding generations failed to recognize.41 By 1860, the “itinerant maidservant” was a façade for what was in reality an intense bourgeois distrust of migrants. The Habsburg Empire of 1810 was vastly different from the empire of 1860. In 1810, the empire was an agricultural state. In 1860, it had experienced the liberal revolutions of 1848, the subsequent reactionary reforms of the Habsburg government, and waves of intense internal migrations. The western part of the empire was in the midst of the industrial revolution. Vienna experienced the most intensive inflow of migrants of all European big cities, its population rising by 35.5 percent between 1860 and 1880, and further still by 130.8 percent from 1880 to 1900. A significant number of migrants came from the Bohemian crownlands, taking up menial jobs in factories, households, and commercial establishments.42 In this context, popular theaters featuring plays such as Karl Julius’s 1861 Blau und Gelb oder: Ein Wiener Stubenmädchen (Blue and gold, or a Viennese chambermaid), Carl Elmar’s 1866 Ein jüdischer Dienstbote (A Jewish servant), and Alois Berla’s 1868 Die Kindsmadeln (Nannies) kept the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant very much alive and well. Such plays contrasted the stereotypical maidservant with an ideal bourgeois maidservant. In Elmar’s play, for example, the proud, frivolous Betti is the self-proclaimed “right-hand” of the pleasure-seeking Gabriele. The former interfered in her mistress’s affairs and toyed with her admirer’s feelings. Betti is juxtaposed with the ideal bourgeois maidservant, the good, courageous, and forbearing Sarah. The play concludes with Sarah, the ideal maidservant, reaping the reward of a good marriage, while Betti, the devious maidservant, is reprimanded and subsequently remorseful for her frivolous behavior.43 The Habsburg authorities had amended, reworded, restructured, or overhauled almost every other piece of legislation between 1850 and 1860. But several factors assisted in extending the tenure of the outdated Franciscan Codes for over a hundred years. One important factor was that the Habsburg judicial and police officials routinely applied the 1810 Codes in matters pertaining to servants as opposed to the Civil and the Penal Codes. In 1811, the Universal Civil Code—the allegemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (ABGB)—came into effect to “give citizens full reassurance about the secure enjoyment of their private rights.” Paragraph 1172 of the ABGB specified that the Franciscan Codes had to

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be upheld in all matters concerning the rights and responsibilities of servants.44 The result was that the legal system viewed servanthood as a state of being or an identity of a person rather than an occupation. Another key factor responsible for keeping the Franciscan Codes alive were the Provisional Servant Codes enacted in different regions of the empire during the postrevolutionary era. Before 1850, ten different Servant Codes were in effect throughout the Habsburg Empire. With the rise of internal migrations, the differences between the Servant Codes led to irregularities in handling servant matters. For instance, if a servant from Bohemia was working at the home of a Viennese employer, which Servant Code would apply to her—the Bohemian one or the Viennese one? Such confusion occurred often, especially during legal disputes. The three Penal Codes enacted in the empire in 1850, 1853, and finally in 1873 contributed to this. Many stipulations of the 1810 Codes relied on the Penal Code of 1803. The Penal Code of 1853 had rendered all these stipulations impractical. Despite the misunderstandings it created, Habsburg officials made few definite changes to the original codes themselves. Instead, between 1854 and 1859, they simply enacted fifteen Provisional Servant Codes. Of these, seven were meant for the state capitals and eight for other cities and rural areas. The Provisional Codes augmented rather than replaced the original Franciscan Codes of 1810. For sake of convenience, Habsburg authorities selected model templates: the Provisional Servant Code of Klagenfurt served as a template for the capitals, and that of Küstenland (Littoral Austria) was the template for noncapital cities and rural areas. The idea was that officials could simply apply the stipulations of the templates for each of the two groups of Provisional Codes, only having to address some regional deviations should they arise. The assumption was a gross oversimplification. In reality, the wording and content of each of the Provisional Codes were sufficiently different to impair clarity. Moreover, even though they were meant to be temporary, the Provisional Codes remained in effect for the rest of the nineteenth century and underwent several alterations that led to considerable regional differences. By 1867, there were twentyfive different Servant Codes operating throughout the Habsburg Empire. In a few regions of the empire, the codes in effect were even older than the Franciscan Codes. For instance, the Josephine Servant Codes of 1783/1787 were still in effect in Trieste. In practice, however, the police deployed the Provisional Servant Code of Küstenland, entirely surpassing the application of the 1810 Franciscan Code in the region. Following the Imperial Community Code (Reichs-Gemeindegesetz) of 1862, the application of Provisional Servant Codes in some regions of the empire came under the purview of churchwardens and not the police. In still other regions, as in the case of Silesia where the Silesian Provisional Code of 1867 came into effect, the Provisional Code was never applied in practice and remained on paper only. To overcome the mounting confusion and discontent, Carinthia adopted a new Servant Order in 1874. But Carinthia was an exception.45

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In most parts of the empire, the regional and local governments introduced little tweaks that gave the illusion of reform.46 For instance, the Viennese DienstbotenKrankenkassa introduced in 1865 provided health insurance for servants. Similarly, in 1877, Lower Austria adopted an amended Servant Order. Aside from the shift in nomenclature—that is, from Gesinde to Dienstboten, the new provisions did little to alter the legal status or the living and working conditions of the servants themselves.47 A commissioner Wanka, in 1872, published a book detailing the stipulations of the laws pertaining to servants in force in Prague. A glance through this book reveals that rather than updating the outmoded stipulations of the original Servant Code of 1810 in Prague, the Provisional Code of 1857 effected in Prague only systematized certain police procedures.48 The same was the case for the Provisional Code effected in Styria in 1857.49 Similarly, a handbook on servant matters produced by police official Edmund Ehrenfreund and the imperial law secretary Franz Mráz reveals that in the Habsburg capital of Vienna most stipulations of the antiquated 1810 Codes were in force as late as 1908.50 Thus, the overall effect of the Provisional Codes was that the various Franciscan Codes in effect throughout the empire underwent negligible alterations. When the application of the original codes was impractical or unclear, officials applied either a Provisional Code in effect in that region or a stipulation in the ABGB or, in regions like Trieste, a much older code that had long been repealed. Stated differently, the application of the codes was arbitrary and depended more on prevailing social assumptions and practices. In 1910, servants, about 105,000 in number, were the only people in Vienna whose rights and responsibilities were defined by a document nearly a hundred years old. Furthermore, servants, fast approaching a population of half a million in Cisleithanian Austria, were the only people who were not governed by one uniform set of laws but by twenty-four different sets of codes. This meant that the rights and responsibilities of servants varied from region to region within the empire.51 This situation excludes the story of servants in Hungary. Servant Codes enacted in the empire since the Josephine era did not encompass Hungary, which continued to be a predominantly agricultural society where industrialization lagged considerably compared to the Cisleithanian half of the monarchy until the second half of the nineteenth century. Industrialization in Hungary began in the 1870s and 1880s, gathering momentum only in the 1890s. Budapest, the capital city, experienced a dramatic increase in its population in the first decade of the twentieth century, and this process continued well into the interwar period.52 Therefore, most servants in nineteenth-century Hungary remained attached to the large manorial estates of the countryside, and the laws in effect in these estates governed their lives for most of the century. The itinerant maidservant was powerfully foregrounded in late nineteenthcentury Viennese bourgeois culture, effortlessly cutting through dramatic socio-

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political and economic changes within the empire. Artists produced numerous images of maidservants showcasing their sexuality. Three examples among these were quite popular. The first was an 1889 painting by Louis Uhl of nannies along with their wards—infants and toddlers of their employers—gathered in a Viennese park. Having encountered several soldiers there, the nannies become engrossed in flirting while the activities of their underage wards are left unsupervised.53 The second caricature is a pen-on-paper drawing by Theodor Zasche in 1900. This is a depiction of a well-dressed older gentleman, probably her employer or a guest of her employer, caressing the cheek of a young and pretty maidservant.54 The third example includes Emil Mayer’s prints produced in the 1900s. These contain the one taken in 1908 titled Dienstmädchen und Soldaten, in which Mayer captures the image of a maidservant talking coyly with two soldiers,55 and three others from 1910, titled Im Wurstelprater, Dienstmädchen mit Galanen, and Dienstmädchen und Militär vor dem Wirthaus, that capture scenes in the Prater—a group of coquettish nannies, with a sleeping baby in a carriage, speaking with a gentleman; a maidservant in conversation with three gentlemen; and maidservants with military men waiting outside a pub.56 Such images found their way into leisure magazines and books that adorned coffee tables of bourgeois homes and cafés. These visuals powerfully reinforced the bourgeoisie’s anxieties about the autonomous maidservant over whom they seemed to have no control. Moreover, the empire’s illustrated newspapers were flooded with caricatures of maidservants, depicting female servants in the most stereotypical light. For instance, in April 1894, the illustrated satirical newspaper Figaro published a caricature bearing the title, “Unsere Dienstmädchen” (Our maidservants). A housewife interviews a maidservant about how much in wages she would take for her position. The maidservant replies, “That depends on how many secrets you have.”57 Similarly, in 1895, Figaro published another caricature sarcastically titled “Die Unschuld vom Lande” (The innocents from the countryside). An employer tells his maidservant, “Marie, I wish to kiss you.” To this, the maidservant replies, “But, my lord, you do not make the effort.”58 The first visual reinforced the idea that maidservants pay more attention to gossiping than their work, and the second visual reinforced the stereotype that maidservants welcome the sexual advances of their employers, and perhaps even actively encourage them.59 In 1906, a flood of images capturing nude women saturated Vienna’s visual culture. The kitchen with various cooking utensils was a favorite backdrop for these nudes.60 The same year, pornography in Vienna found a new visual medium when Johann Schwarzer founded the first Austrian fiction film production company in Vienna named Saturn-Film. Saturn was entirely dedicated to the production of short erotic features for its audience. Between 1906 and when the Vienna police seized its materials 1911, the company produced over fifty erotic short films.61 The stereotypical Rautenstrauchian chambermaid—one who is vain and engages in sexual activity with her employers—featured prominently in films

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such as Das eitle Stubenmädchen (The vain chambermaid). Released in 1908, this film details the following episode: a young maidservant enters a well-furnished living room that contains a statue of a naked woman in a sleeping posture. She is provoked by the beauty of the statue. She tries to emulate the statue by removing all her clothes and lying on the floor next to it in the same posture. Her employer, an older gentleman, enters the room while she is doing so. He is amused and a tug-of-war with her clothes ensues. The film ends with the maidservant hurrying into another room to dress and the employer following her inside, implying that they have sexual intercourse there.62 An overwhelming preoccupation of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century was to render the specter of the itinerant maidservant harmless. Ironically, the narrative used to achieve this end drew upon the argument of Rautenstrauch’s detractors—the argument that held employers responsible for maidservants’ behaviors as well as their poor condition. Women’s magazines blamed housewives for having a bad influence on their female servants. For instance, in December 1863, the woman’s fashion magazine Iris published a pithy article by Fanny Lewald, “Die Frauen und ihr Einfluss auf Dienstboten,” which accused housewives as well as their daughters. These women, the article argued, were spoiled with luxurious dresses. Maidservants often had to launder their mistress’s clothes well into the night so that she could wear it for just a few minutes. Moreover, the article argued, such excesses did not inculcate respect for the mistress in the minds of the maidservants; rather, they created false notions about family life for maidservants who strove to imitate their mistresses.63 This article echoed the arguments presented by the various pamphlets that circulated in Vienna in the wake of Rautenstrauch’s tract in the Josephine era. Viktoria, the author of one such pamphlet, for instance, had voiced the same opinion about the adverse effects of bourgeois women’s excesses on maidservants. The irony of deploying this narrative was that, whereas Rautenstrauch’s detractors had been maidservants themselves and their arguments were an assertion of their autonomy, those who made these arguments in the context of 1860s Vienna were bourgeois women intent on diagnosing and correcting the alleged faults in their maidservants. In other words, the bourgeois women who wrote these articles were intent on highlighting that the root cause of the maidservant’s behavior was to be found in her mistress. The maidservant—being as she was like a child— could only imitate and could not possibly behave of her own volition. In this context, Schulz’s vision of social control spread through the expanding network of women’s organizations all around Vienna. Marien-Stiftung was one of the first free-of-charge training and placement institutes for maidservants in Vienna. But, by 1875, almost all the private poor foundations in Vienna offered support to servants, and several of them catered specifically to old servants.64 In 1875, the women’s organization Wiener Hausfrauen-Verein (Viennese Housewives Association, WHV), established a free-of-cost placement agency for ser-

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vants. The WHV’s efforts expanded its reach in the succeeding decades. In 1883, the WHV provided free food supplies for three to four thousand poor girls.65 In 1890, the association founded Verein zur Errichtung von Dienstbotenasylen (Association for the Erection for Servant Asylums, VED).66 In October 1891, the VED opened the first servant hostel in Vienna in fourth district. The hostel also offered placement services. In the following years, more asylums were built. The feminist leader and one of the founders of the WHV Ottilie Bondy personally headed the asylum in Favoriten (tenth district) and became the chairman of the Catholic organization Caritas.67 By 1901, the WHV reported to have placed 46,325 servants and had awarded 591 servant premiums.68 In 1903, the VED expanded its activities and was renamed as Verein zur Errichtung von Heimstätten für Dienst- und Arbeit suchende Frauen und Mädchen (Association for the Erection of Hostels for Service- and Work-Seeking Women and Girls), and the organization, about 59 members strong, continued to erect charitable homes for all working-class women in Vienna. The asylum in Favoriten, for example, housed about 40 women at a time.69 Catholic organizations complemented the efforts of women’s organizations significantly. In 1894, the Catholic charitable organization Werk der heiligen Philip Neri (The Work of Saint Philip Neri) emerged in various cities of the empire, including Vienna.70 The association offered patronage to female servants, workers, salesclerks, and children. The objective of the foundation was “to encourage girls as much as possible for a Christian-religious life and to explain to them their duties to God, to their neighbors, and to themselves in a comprehensible and practical way.”71 In the year of its founding, the organization offered free stitching, stenography, calligraphy, language, and domestic service courses to its members at its office in Vienna’s first district. In addition, it claimed to offer asylum to fifty to sixty servants at a time and free placement services especially for migrant girls coming to Vienna from Bohemian and Hungarian lands. The association also corresponded with the offices of the Mädchenschutz-Verein (Girl Protection Association) in Freiburg and Switzerland that functioned to “protect” and “rescue” migrant girls from prostitution.72 By 1901, the organization had opened servant asylums and training schools in Vienna’s tenth district. In Vienna, the organization had forty to sixty servant trainees each year since the start of its training school in 1901. In 1903, the free-of-charge placement offices of the organization reported to have found placements for four hundred servants in Vienna, for six hundred servants in 1906, and for more than eight hundred girls in 1907.73 Not all writings on the subject treated the maidservant as a childlike exotic creature that needed appropriate training. Some authors were much more nuanced. In 1876, Moritz Anton Grandjean’s farces, Die neue Magd and Die alte Magd, highlighted the ridiculous situation of a domestic cook Refi within a bourgeois family at the start of service and after twenty-eight years of service,

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respectively.74 Similarly, Peter Altenberg’s 1896 work, Wie ich es sehe, included two short vignettes on domestic servants. The first, titled “Das Kindermädchen” (The nursemaid), depicted the life of an eighteen-year-old nursemaid from the countryside working with a family in Vienna. To an outsider she seemed to be in a wonderful situation, but upon closer investigation it was apparent that her employers neglected her youthful desires. Similarly, the second vignette, titled “Das Stubenmädchen” (The housemaid), depicted a young housemaid’s longing for freedom from her obligations to her employer family.75 In 1892 Karl’s thesis of humane treatment of servants found its way into the work of the well-known Viennese cookbook writer Anna Bauer. Her handbook Die österreichische Hausfrau (The Austrian housewife) urged housewives to educate themselves in household tasks. She advised her readers to be attentive and kind in their treatment of maidservants. She specifically argued that maidservants should be provided appropriate leisure time, healthy food, and a clean bedroom. Further, she asserted that a housewife who handles her maidservant badly can never expect to find a good maidservant. Proper treatment, on the other hand, would provide higher quality and more respectable maidservants.76 In the last decade of the nineteenth century, increasing literacy rates among urban servants spurred the availability of a wider range of reading materials. Until the 1860s, the literacy rate among servants was quite low, and the only reading material available for literate servants was advice manuals and commercial pulp fiction. Advice literature was primarily religious in nature and instructed servants to be pious, loyal, and subservient to their employers. Commercial pulp fiction featured romantic, humorous, and sexual themes that catered to the fantasies of a maidservant. The more elite ranks of servants adopted the reading culture of the bourgeoisie. However, increasing literacy rates and a growing press culture resulted in more diverse reading materials for servants at the turn of the century. In 1864, one of the first servant newspapers to emerge was a weekly periodical that expressed the program of acting as an intermediary to facilitate understanding between employers and servants.77 By 1910, 81 percent of Viennese servants could speak German, and several politically motivated servant newspapers emerged to cater to an organized community of servant readers.78 These politically motivated servant newspapers played a huge role in propagating the narrative that maidservants were the victims of their circumstances. For instance, in 1911, the Österreischisches Dienstpersonal-Zeitung published a short tract in Vienna titled Leidensweg unserer Dienstmädchen (The ordeal of our maidservants) that comprised two parts, one called “Factual Section” and the other ominously titled “A Maidservant’s Fate.” The latter section, also bearing a second title “What Lisi Sturm Experienced in Service,” recited the following tale: A young girl of about twenty years of age, Lisi Sturm, travels to Vienna from a small village in Upper Austria in search of a better life. She dreams of the big city and all the opportunities awaiting her there. Upon coming to Vienna, she rents

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one of four beds in a tiny room from a friendly woman for two kronen. When she reveals to the elder woman that she has come to Vienna in search of service, the elder woman reveals that she herself had been in service for twenty years and warns her that the big city can be hard and cruel to young girls from small towns. The next day, Lisi visits a placement agency. The agency requires that Lisi must give a third of her first wages to the placement agent when she finds a post. Lisi has the good luck of being placed in a domestic household on the same day. The story fast-forwards ten years. Lisi’s first job has passed wonderfully. She has been treated like a child of the house by her elderly mistress. She has learned all the workings of the household. The old woman dies suddenly. The old woman’s daughter offers her a position in her household, which Lisi accepts. In her new post as a cook in a large house, Lisi must share her small, dark, and dingy chambers with another maidservant. The work begins early in the morning and ends only late at night. The new mistress does not give her a single free minute. She has household duties to perform even on the one free Sunday she was supposed to receive every fourteen days. The other maidservant changes frequently. The same thing had happened with the previous cooks before she filled the position. But Lisi works hard. On one occasion, the mistress has one of her bad days and loses her temper with another maidservant in her employ. She takes the other maidservant to the police, who enforce a law that permits corporal punishment of household servants. Lisi is now an old maid. She has seen the children of her master’s family grow up and wishes she had a family of her own. However, she has had no time for finding a companion in all her years of hard work. One day, Lisi falls ill and needs to be hospitalized. She fights death for six weeks. When she returns to the house, there is a young girl in the kitchen. A new cook has been hired, the same way she had been thirty years earlier. She has been replaced. Lisi finds a new position soon, but she cannot retain it. She wanders from post to post until finally she gets a position as a cook with a doctor’s family. While working in the post, the doctor’s wife accuses her of stealing her ring. The wife checks her rooms and her clothes, and when nothing was found, she takes Lisi to the police. Lisi tells the police of her innocence, but they cut her off, stating, “They already know.” After some proceedings, she is released. Lisi wanders from street to street for several hours. She recalls her thirty years of service only to have it conclude with the accusation of petty thievery. Finally, she jumps into the Danube and drowns. Some days later, her body is found. At the same time, the police discover the ring that Lisi had been accused of stealing. Someone remarks, “Servants today are very sensitive.” The story concludes with the statement that the nameless body of Lisi in the cemetery represents the ordeal of countless servants. The story of Lisi Sturm captured several themes: the migration of women from the countryside to the city, their interaction with placement agencies and the police system, their relationship with their employers, their living and working

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conditions, and loneliness, illness, old-age, and death. The narrative presented the maidservant as an innocent victim in all these instances. In the “Factual Section,” the author Hermine Jungwirt explored these themes in detail, highlighting how employers in Vienna abused their maidservants. She argued that many young country girls came to Vienna with illusions of life in a big city. However, they had no idea of the harsh realities of servanthood. The police and the owners of local dormitories were the young maidservant’s first contact with city life. These establishments, Jungwirt claimed, were small cabinet spaces or a bed that cost two to three kronen per night, and many comprised renters of both genders. Many owners of such establishments were allegedly procurers, and, apparently, they ruined the “moral status” of young maidservants. Jungwirt also argued that a large portion of the servant problem rested with placement agents, who exploited servants for money. Bourgeois employers, her argument continued, compounded the maidservant’s misery. Many maidservants subsisted on insufficient or stale food, few received three good meals a day, and many survived on stale bread and a pot of coffee. The living space for maidservants was usually an attic room. This was a small and dark space that seldom had heating for the winters. In many households, two, three, and sometimes four maidservants shared this space. In other cases, maidservants often slept in the bathroom or on a pullout bed near the entrance or in a small cabinet under the stairs. Further, she also specified how the legal system and police practice victimized maidservants. For instance, she claimed that police misuse of the 1810 Codes often occurred in cases of false accusations. Employers often accused their servants of theft of household items or money and dragged them to the police station. In almost all such cases, the police pressed charges and kept the maidservant in lockup for a few days before conducting any investigation. When and if they found the accusations baseless, there was often no consequence for the employer, even though false accusations warranted a minimum of five years’ imprisonment under paragraph §209 of the Austrian Penal Code. Further, she argued that the Viennese police actively discouraged maidservants from filing complaints of maltreatment against their employers. She also claimed that the prospects of an old or ill servant in the placement market were nonexistent. The result of all these harsh conditions was prostitution, suicide, and so on. Moreover, she claimed that these conditions caused the dearth of maidservants in Vienna. Jungwirt concluded her essay by arguing that what maidservants wanted was more humane treatment, which could be accomplished only through the reform of the 1810 Codes.79 Jungwirt published more such tales of maidservant victimhood. In 1911, for example, the Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung published Jungwirt’s Die Heiratsschwindler (Marriage swindler), a story of an unsuspecting maidservant who falls into the trap of a marriage swindler.80 Jungwirt’s arguments aligned with the agendas of the Social Democrats who were gaining prominence in fin de siècle Austria-Hungary. Her stories and essays

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provide a comprehensive description of the victim narrative that took root in fin de siècle Vienna. She combined several aspects of a multifaceted problem with the literary theme of the fallen maidservant to generate a narrative with the following points: a naïve, young maidservant from the countryside falling victim to police brutality, procurers pretending to be bed renters, placement agency swindlers, marriage swindlers, harassment from employers, rape and unwanted pregnancy, unemployment, neglect and abandonment, and succumbing to prostitution, illness, and suicide. The 1810 Codes was the cause of all this misery. Therefore, she suggested that servants should unionize and demand reform of the legal system. In the years before World War I, servant newspapers propagated the victim narrative through their reportage of cases throughout the empire. These reportages aligned with the themes that Jungwirt highlighted in her tract. The following three cases are a sampling from numerous similar reportages that implicate employers, the police, and the system in general for servant misery and suffering. In each of the following instances, the maidservant is portrayed as a victim to unjust treatment. Police apathy. In 1910, the Oesterreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung reported the case of a young maidservant (eighteen years old at the time of her entry to this post) who had worked at the house of a high-ranking official in the government. One evening, the wife of the official accused the servant of stealing an eraser, and the latter denied it in a loud voice. The official entered the room while they were arguing, and the girl stamped her foot in frustration. For this insolence, the woman took her to the kitchen and fired her immediately. Furthermore, the official punched the servant in the face. When the servant girl went to the police, they dismissed her complaint on grounds that under paragraph 88 of the Viennese Servant Code, employers had the right to discipline their servants.81 In this instance, the report suggests that police officials were either completely apathetic to the plight of young servant girls who were abused by their employers or unable to aid them because of the harsh stipulations of the 1810 Codes. The target of the Social Democrats was the considerable interpretive license that the codes granted the police. The codes contained some stipulations to protect servants from employer-mediated abuses. For example, paragraphs 89–92 of the Viennese Code provided protections for servants against maltreatment by their employers. At the same time, paragraph 88 allowed employers the right to corporal punishment of their servants for “big mistakes.” There was nothing in the code that specified what constituted a big mistake. Similarly, paragraph 98 granted servant rights to terminate service before the fourteen-day mark in case of, for instance, threat to personal security and honor. It allowed servants to enlist the help of the police in dire cases. However, as per paragraphs 27 and 28 of the code, any servant who ran away or left her employer’s residence without permission was subject to arrest and corporal punishment.82 Therefore, the police had considerable license to interpret

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the code in either direction. In this regard, the Social Democrats argued that the police frequently took the side of the employers even in cases when they were clearly to blame. But, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters, this interpretive license worked in favor of servants in certain circumstances. Employer abuse. In 1910, the Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung reported the case of maidservant Agnes Kunte. A witness heard cries for help through the windows of a house in Josefstadt, Vienna. When the police investigated, the report went, they found that Kunte was in hysterics. Her employers, Agent Phillip Winter and his wife Josefine, had been verbally abusing Kunte. As the argument escalated, they had thrown her onto the floor, and Josefine’s brother, an engineer named Gustav Konradt, assaulted her. The police reached their place and took the agent, his wife, and her brother into custody. The district court found them guilty in December 1910. The accused, the report claimed, were fined a total of fifty kronen, which the court granted to Kunte as compensation.83 In this instance, the police had intervened, and the report asserted that the newspaper would not tire in pushing for a desperately needed reform. Suicide. An article in April 1911 reported the case of Johanna Blaha, a nineteen-year-old servant girl working in Vienna’s seventh district, who committed suicide by jumping off the fifth floor of a building. One evening, when Blaha had gone out to visit her stepbrother, she forgot to shut the door to the house. The following morning, her employer Frau Ernestine Pist apparently used some abusive words to scold her mistake. When Blaha told her employer that she could not handle being treated badly, Pist had responded that she would treat her that way when she went out and did not shut the door. Blaha left service the same day. That afternoon, Blaha came fresh out of a bath, wrote a farewell note to her mother and her fiancé, then jumped out of the window. The note to her fiancé allegedly revealed the motive of her suicide to be “a serious illness through her employer.”84 The article concluded with the remark that another maidservant had fallen victim to unjust handling by employers. The following week, the newspaper carried another article on the case, which included Blaha’s suicide note. The note revealed that she could not handle being called a “trollop,” and the word had killed her. The article again insisted that Blaha was a victim of the injustice and arrogance of many housewives.85 This example implied that maidservants were committing suicide due to employer mistreatment, which, in this instance, was not physical abuse but a verbal interlude during which the employer called the maidservant a “trollop” for not performing a task properly. Even though this type of mistreatment could not be equated with violent physical abuse, the article still put the incident in the same category and declared the employer to be responsible for the maidservant’s death. Aside from reporting on how maidservants were victimized, exploited, and neglected, servant newspapers further demonized bourgeois employers by publishing instances of how they resisted efforts to improve the condition of servants.

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For example, in 1911, the Hauspersonal-Zeitung reported that some bourgeois housewives questioned the right of servants to have their own associations and newspapers on grounds that they sowed disharmony between servants and their employers.86

Conclusion Despite the changes in other parts of Europe, the 1810 Codes within the Habsburg realm, modeled on the old Leopoldine model, stayed in effect throughout the nineteenth century, and the regional police forces had the power to enforce these laws.87 On the other hand, the paternalism of the Habsburg Codes continued to hold the employers responsible for their servants. All Habsburg Servant Codes since Leopold I’s 1688 Code imposed responsibility upon masters for providing food, boarding, and livelihoods to their servants and taking care of servants during an illness. Since they retained much of the Leopoldine paternalism, the idea that servants owed their masters service and loyalty persisted. So did the idea that masters were responsible for providing for them, guiding them, and enforcing good behavior like parents would do their children. Like its predecessors, the 1810 Codes still held masters responsible for their servants’ health, safety, and behavior, although there were few specifications about the consequences of a master’s irresponsibility. So, while the 1810 Codes were the crucible that sustained the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant as the century progressed, they also provided considerable space for maneuvering both by the employers as well as the servants. In the rapidly changing Vienna of the late nineteenth century, the itinerant maidservant simultaneously represented the freedom that the bourgeoisie sought as well as the threat they tried to render harmless. The chapters that follow examine how the cultural feminization of the servant occupation created a system of ideas that made reality very difficult to reach.

Notes 1. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 37. “Pest der kleineren und und noch mehr der grosseren Städte.” 2. Emperor Francis I was under intense pressure from the estates to abandon the Josephine agrarian reforms. Compulsory labor service soon revived under his reign. The Habsburg Empire under Francis I also faced considerable territorial losses and political upheavals. One outcome of Francis’s response to the onslaught of these challenges was the spread of police surveillance and censorship. See Charles W. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000), 223–24, 230–31. 3. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 38; “bey einigem Wechsel äusserer Formen, um in den Hauptideen ungefähr einander gleichende, meist utopische Entwürfe von obrigkeit-

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

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lichen Dienstboten-Ämtern oder um unter anderen Benennungen zu errichtende verbessernde Institute.” Some proposals suggested that a special office to handle servant matters be erected instead of a hostel, and the office would be responsible for tasks such as matching servants with new employers, monitoring unemployed servants, and so on. The uniformity of the process would be maintained in these offices through the circulation of updated logs and periodicals that contained information on registered maidservants. Since the employer could find out the character, the mistakes, and the number of times a maidservant had changed her position from these logs and periodicals, they could determine the appropriate wages, and those maidservants who were “bad” could be arrested. A separate office that handled matters concerning male servants was also to be set up. Other proposals suggested that the police offices should send all foreign servants, that is, servants who came from outside Vienna, directly to the servant office within twenty-four hours. See, Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 37–46. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 43; “ob und mit wieweit der von der Polizei-OberDirection gemacht Antrag ausführbar sei und mit den neuen Wohlthätigkeitsanstalten in Verbindung gesetzt warden könne.” Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 37–46. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 75; Hugo Morgenstern, Die in Österreich gestenden (24) Dienstboten-Ordnungen sammt dem Entwurfe der neuen Wiener Dienstboten-Ordnung und einigen allgemeinen, das Gesinde betreffenden Gesetzen und Verordnungen (Vienna, 1901), iii–viii. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien und die Umkreis innerhalb den Linien (Vienna, 1810), 4. “Die Benennung Dienstbot, Dienstvolk, Dienstgesind, welche unter der Verbindlichkeit dieser Gesindeordnung stehen, begreist einzeln, oder zusammengenommen diejenigen Personen, die sich gegen bestimmten Lohn, ohne, oder mit noch andern Nebenbedigungen, als für Kost, Kleidung, u. dgl. Auf längere Zeit, bei Privaten zu Dienst verdingen, mit Ausnahme der Haushofmeister, des Kanzleipersonals, der Wirthschafts- und Kasse-Beamten, auch überhaupt aller Bedienungen, zu deren Bekleidung eine wissenschafliche Vorbereitung erfordert wird. Darunter sind ferner nicht begriffen, Handlungsdiener, Arbeiter bei Kunstgewerben und Fabriken, noch Handwerksgesellen, als welche sich nach den besondern Satzungen und Vorschriften der Innungen und Zünfte zurichten haben.” “Wir Franz der Erste von Gottes Gnaden Kaiser von Oesterreich; König zu Hungarn und Böhmen; Erzherzog zu Oesterreich, u.u.,” in Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien. “Nachlässigkeiten des Dienstvolkes sehr zu vorgekommen.” Josef Freiherr von Sonnenfels, Bermerkungen über die für die Hauptstadt Wien und den Umkreis derselben innerhalb der Linien erlassene Neue Gesindeordnung (Vienna, 1810), xi, 38. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 24. “Wie Aeltern über ihre Kinder, eben so ist es . . . , Diensthältern über ihr Dienstvolk . . .” Paragraph 64 stated, “All the heads of families are obliged not only to watch over the manners and decent behavior of their servants within the house but also to not leave them out of sight outside, as far as can be done” (Alle ordnungsliebende Familienhäupter werden es sich selbst zur Pflicht machen, über die Sitten und das anständige Betragen ihres Dienstgesindes nicht nur im Innern des Hauses zu wachen, sondern solches noch ausserhalb desselben, so weit es geschehen kann, nicht aus dem Gesichte zu lassen). Similarly, under paragraph 73, employers had the authority to monitor the wages especially of their female

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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servants, and, per paragraph 66, a servant could be punished for “immoral acts.” Additionally, according to paragraph 51, employers could cut the wages of servants for “neglect or carelessness.” Paragraphs 94 and 96 specify the termination disclosure time to be fourteen days from both the servant as well as the master. Paragraphs 25, 65, 76, and 97 presented the various scenarios for shortening the termination notice. See Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 9–10, 15, 18–21, 26, 28; Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der Dienstbotenfrage: Sechste Publication des Allgemeinen öesterrichischen Frauenvereines (Vienna, 1895), 12. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, “Wir Franz der Erste,” 5–6, 10–11. In some parts of Central Europe, the legal codification of the Dienstboten-Zeugniss or character reference system took place as early as 1530. The 1530 mandate for some German-speaking lands recognized hiring a servant (male or female) without a reference as an offense, and the perpetrator was susceptible to a fine. See Heidi Müller, Dienstbare Geister: Leben und Arbeitswelt städtischer Dienstboten (Berlin, 1985), 75–84. Sonnenfels, Bermerkungen, xii–xiv, 43. “Der Dienstvertrag,” Der Kleine Hausadvokat, 25 November 1865, 105–8. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 10–15, 20–21, 28–29, 36. Ernst Finger and Anton Baumgarten, Referat über die Regelung der Prostitution in Österreich (Vienna, 1909), 6–8. The 1810 Codes treated contagious diseases and pregnancy as a reflection of the servant’s “immoral” and “dishonest” character. Since the main purpose of the code was to protect employers from the immorality, dishonesty, and disloyalty of the servant class, employers were permitted to dismiss pregnant and ill servants without notice. It also permitted employers to terminate service of those servants who had hidden facts such as illness, pregnancy, or marital situations from their employers. See Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 9–10. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 5–6, 9–10, 14, 16–17, 19–21, 27–28, 33–38. See also Auszug aus der neuen Dienstboten-Ordnung vom 1sten May 1810; was bey dem Eintritte und Austritte aus einem Dienste und während der Dienstlosigkeit zu beobachten ist (Vienna, 1810); Johann Tettinek, Die Dienstboten-Polizei (Salzburg, 1847), 17–53. Raffaella Sarti, “‘All Masters Discourage the Marrying of Their Male Servants, and Admit Not by Any Means the Marriage of the Female’: Domestic Service and Celibacy in Western Europe from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” European History Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2008): 417–49, esp. 423. See, for instance, the following work that details the system of policing private life in place in the early nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire and how policing servants was a major aspect of this system: J. L. E. Grafen von Barth-Bartheuheim, System der österreichischen administrativen Polizei mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf das Erzherzogthum Oesterreich unter der Enns: Dritter Band (Vienna, 1829). Although a few paragraphs in the code reflected the feminization of the servant occupation; see, for instance, paragraphs 18, 65, 73, 128 in Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 8, 18, 20, 36. Adalbert Stifter, C. E. Langer, C. F. Langer, Johann Nordmann, A. v. Perger, D. F. Reiberstorffer, Ludw. Schreyrer, Franz Stelzhammer, Sylv. Wagner, Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben (Pesth, 1844), 10–15. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number HMW 108706/19. Die Wiener Köchinnen wie sie sind (Vienna, 1842). “Lenerl nahm den neuen Liebhaber so auf, wie sie beiläufig einen neuen Dienst aufnimmt.”

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26. Carl Lorens, Köchin und Stubenmädel: Komische Duo-Scene (Vienna, n.d.). 27. Carl Haffner, Oesterreichisches Volks-Theater (Leipzig, 1846), 69–132. 28. Johann Karl, Der Herr und der Diener als Beytrag zur richtigen Behandlung, Veredlung und Verbesserung der Dienstboten männlichen und weiblichen Geschlechtes (Vienna, 1835). 29. See, for instance, Zampis’s illustrations titled Eine Wäscherin und ein Dienstmädchen, in the series Figuren aus dem Wiener Volksleben that appeared in late 1840s. See also, Katalog der historischen Ausstellung der Stadt Wien: Dritte Auflage (Vienna, 1873), 98; Kos, Wiener Typen, 97–103. 30. Johann Hochleitner, Ein gutes Wort für Dienstmädchen und alle dienende Personen (Vienna, 1848). 31. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung, 7. 32. Gabriella Hauch, Frau Biedermeier auf den Barrikaden: Frauenleben in der Wiener Revolution 1848 (Vienna, 1990), 193–98; See also, Maximilian Bach, Geschichte der Wiener Revolution im Jahre 1848 (Vienna, 1898), 270; Richter, “Die Produktion,” 63. 33. Mathieu Deflem, “International Policing in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Police Union of German States, 1851–1866,” International Criminal Justice Review 6 (1996): 36–57; Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (New York, 2002), 53. Historischen Kommission bei der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed., “Theodor Franz, Graf Baillet von Latour,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie: Band 18 (Leipzig, 1883), 16–17; Hsi-Huey Liang, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War (Cambridge, 1992), 24–34; Wolfram Siemann, Deutschlands Ruhe, Sicherheit und Ordnung: Die Anfänge der politischen Polizei: 1806–1866 (Tübigen, 1985), 170–72, 305–39. 34. Catholic religious principles of offering loyal and faithful service to God formed the religious undercurrent of the label Dienstbotenbuch. The Dienstbotenbuch evoked the idea that the servant ought to be loyal and sincere in the performance of his or her master’s tasks just as a devout Catholic is loyal and sincere in rendering service unto God. Some religious publications bore the title Dienstboten-Buch and were replete with religious stories to inspire devout Catholics. See, for instance, Das Dienstboten-Buch oder Beispiele des Guten Zweiter Jahrgang (Augsburg, 1833). 35. “Böhmischer Landtag,” Rumberger Zeitung, 27 January 1866, 1; Die Dienstboten-Ordnung für Wien und die im Wiener Polizei-Bezirke gelegenen Ortschaften: Zum Gebrauche für Dienstgeber, Dienstleute und Behörden nach dem jetzigen Stande der Gesetzgebung bearbeitet (Vienna, 1874), 72–84; Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 41; Ernst Mayerhofer, Handbuch für den politischen Verwaltungsdienst in den im Reichsrathe vertretenen Königreichen und Ländern mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der diesen Ländern gemeinsamen Gesetze und Verordnungen, Zweiter, materieller Theil (Vienna, 1876), 963; P. Prucha, Die Oesterreichische Polizeipraxiz mit besonderer Bedachtnahme auf jene der Wiener Polizei-Direktion (Vienna, 1877), 124–31, 159–60; Dorothea Wiesenberger, “Das Dienstbotenbuch: Ein Beitrag zum steirischen Dienstbotenwesen von 1857 bis 1922,” Mitteilungen des Steiermärkischen Landesarchivs Folge 34 (1984), 113–36. 36. See Beatrice Weiss, “Demokratische Frauenvereine im Revolutionsjahr 1848: ein Vergleich zwischen Wien und Berlin unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Präsidentin Karoline von Perin-Gradenstein” (Master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 2014), 1–5, 36. 37. Georg Schulz, Darstellung der Marien-Stiftung zur Bildung braver Dienstmägde, als ein höchst dringendes Bedürfniß anerkannt, und vorgetragen in der Filial-Versammlung des Severinus-Vereines Josefstadt von einem Mitgleide (Vienna, 1852), 9–13.

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38. Schulz, Darstellung der Marien-Stiftung. 39. Mantl, “Legal Restrictions on Marriage,” 185–207. 40. Gustav Schönstein, Wien, Wie es ist und—Trinkt: Drittes Heft: Wiener Köchinnen, Wiener Stubenmädchen, Wiener Bediente mit characterist Bild (Graz, 1850), 5. “. . . Plaudern oder Klatschen ist, wie bei allen weiblichen Geschöpfen, eine Hauptleidenschaft der Köchinnen . . .” 41. Gugitz, “Die Wiener Stubenmädchenlitteratur,” 142–44. 42. Monika Glettler, Böhmisches Wien (Vienna, 1985), 14; Kos, Wiener Typen, 289. 43. Alois Berla, Die Kindsmadeln (Vienna, 1868); Karl Julius, Blau und Gelb oder: Ein Wiener Stubenmädchen (Vienna, 1861); Carl Elmar, Ein jüdischer Dienstbote (Vienna, 1866). 44. Hugo Morgenstern, Die in Österreich gestenden (24) Dienstboten-Ordnungen sammt dem Entwurfe der neuen Wiener Dienstboten-Ordnung und einigen allgemeinen, das Gesinde betreffenden Gesetzen und Verordnungen (Vienna, 1901), v–vi; Dr. A. Nussbaum, “Der Entwurf der neuen Wiener Dienstbotenordnung,” in Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft IV Jahrgang, ed. Julius Wolf (Berlin, 1901), 523–27; Fritz Winter, “Die Revision des bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches,” Der Kampf 1, no. 10 (1 July 1908), in Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatschrift Erster Band (Oktober 1907 bis September 1908), ed. Otto Bauer, Adolf Braun, and Karl Renner (Vienna, 1908), 455–60; Fritz Winter, “Dienstbotenordnungen,” Der Kampf 4, no. 7 (1 April 1911) in Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatschrift Vieter Band (Oktober 1910 bis September 1911), ed. Otto Bauer, Adolf Braun, and Karl Renner (Vienna, 1911), 305–9. 45. In Carinthia, provisional laws were introduced in 1864. See, Dienstboten-Ordnung für das Herzogthum Kärnten, Gesetz von 4. Juli 1864 (Klagenfurt, 1864). 46. Adhémar Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure with Special Reference to France, trans. John Simpson (Boston, 1913), 581–83; Morgenstern, Die in Österreich gestenden, iii–v; Winter, “Dienstbotenordnungen,” 305. 47. Anton Wintersperger, Die neue Dienstbotenordnung von 22. Jänner 1877 für das Erzherzogthum Oesterreich unter der Enns und das neue Gesetz über die Einhebung der Bantaxen für die Gemeinden in Niederösterreich von 19. Jänner 1877 (Vienna, 1877). 48. Komissär Wanka, Die Dienstboten-Ordnung der königl. Landeshauptstadt Prag nach den bestehenden gesetzlichen Vorschriften gemeinsatzlich erläutert und herausgegeben (Prague, 1872); See also, Dienstboten-Ordnung für Königreich Böhmen mit Ausschluss der Landeshauptstadt Prag vom 7 April 1866 (Prague, 1866). 49. See, Landesgesetze des Herzogthums Steiermark. Zweites Bändchen: Dienstboten-Ordnungen. Winzer-Ordnungen (Graz, 1867). 50. Edm. Q. Ehrenfreund and Franz Mráz, Wiener Dienstrecht: Handbuch für politische und Gerichtsbehörden, Advokaten, sowie für das Haus (Vienna, 1908). 51. Monika Glettler, Alltag und Traum: Leben und Lektüre der Dienstmädchen im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna, Köln, Graz, 1984), 17; Richter, “Die Produktion,” 40–41; Winter, “Die Revision,” 455–60. 52. Gábor Gyáni, Women as Domestic Servants: The Case of Budapest, 1890–1940 (New York, 1989), 3–4. 53. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number: HMW 60.405. Andreas Brunner, Frauke Kreutler, Michaela Lindinger, Gerhard Milchram, Martina Nußbaumer, and Hannes Sulzenbacher, eds., Sex in Wien: Lust, Kontrolle, Ungehorsam (Vienna, 2016), 201. 54. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number: HMW 167.998/3; see, Brunner, Sex in Wien, 212.

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55. Wien Museum Karlsplatz Inventory Number: HMW 78458/11. 56. Brunner, Sex in Wien, 280. IMAGNO/Austrian Archives, Mediennummer 00141386, 00212400. 57. “Unsere Dienstmädchen,” Wiener Luft: Bleiblatt zum Figaro, 21 April 1894, 5. 58. “Die Unschuld vom Lande,” Wiener Luft: Bleiblatt zum Figaro, 14 December 1895, 1. 59. Heidi Hakkarainen argues that popular humor indicates underlying uncertainties and contradictions in the liberal era. Humor, she emphasizes, provided “one way of dealing with fears and anxiety arising from the uncontrollable nature of city life.” See, Hakkarainen, Comical Modernity, 4, 81. 60. IMAGNO/Austrian Archives, Mediennummer 00653039, 00653040, 00653041, 00653057, 00653974. 61. See, Michael Achenbach, Paolo Caneppele and Ernst Kieninger, eds., Projektionen der Sehnsucht: Saturn, die erotischen Anfänge der österreichischen Kinematografie (Vienna, 1999); Willy Riemer, “The Cultural Status of Early Austrian Cinema and Film,” Modern Austrian Literature 37, nos. 3/4 (2004): 1–12. 62. Filmarchiv Austria, Das eitle Stubenmädchen, “Filmpionere,” in K.U.K. Kinobox: Die Donaumonarchie in Originalen Filmdokumenten 1896–1918 (Vienna, 2016). 63. “Die Frauen und ihr Einfluss auf Dienstboten,” Iris: Original Pariser und Wiener DamenModen-Zeitung, 8 December 1863, 183. 64. Städtischen Statistischen Bureau, ed., Das Armenwesen in Wien und die Armenpflege im Jahrzehnt 1863–1872: Geschichtlich, Administrativ und Statistisch (Vienna, 1875), 179–350. 65. “Wiener Hausfrauenverein,” Dokumente der Frauen 5, no. 3 (1 May 1901), in Dokumente der Frauen Band V April 1901–September 1901, ed. Auguste Fickerte, Marie Lang, and Rosa Mayreder, 108–9. 66. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 158. 67. Elisabeth Malleier, Jüdische Frauen in der Wiener bürgerlichen Frauenbewegung, 1890– 1938 (Vienna, 2001), 14–17. 68. “Wiener Hausfrauenverein,” Dokumente, 109. 69. OeStA, AdR, BKA BKA-I BPDion Wien VB Signatur II-741, Verein zur Errichtung von Dienstboten-Asylen, 1890–1897, # 741, An die Polizeidirektion, Vereinsbüro, 20 Mai 1927; Bericht an das Bundeskanzleamt, Wien, 26 Mai 1927; An die Polizeidirektion, Vereinsbüro, 25 April 1930; Abscrift Löblisches Bundeskanzleamt, Wien, April 1930. After the war, the organization concentrated on the welfare of female students and working women in Vienna and was, thereafter, renamed Heimstätte für lernende und erwerbende Mädchen und Frauen des Mittelstandes (Hostels for Learned and Working Middle-Class Girls and Women) in 1920. The hostel in Favoriten was renovated in the 1930s, and in the interwar period it housed mostly young women who studied and worked in Vienna. 70. Richter, “Die Produktion,” 99. In Vienna, the organization emerged in 1900. See Stephan Sedlaczek, Wilhelm Löwy und Wilhelm Becke, eds., Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien für das Jahr 1900 (Vienna, 1902), 680. 71. Werk des Heil. Philipp Neri: Patronage für Arbeiterinnen, Verkäuferinnen, Dienstboten und andere des Schutzes bedürftige Personnen besonders die des weiblichen Geschlechtes (Vienna, 1902), 1; “. . . die Mädchen soviel als möglich zu einem christlich-religiösen Leben anzueifern und ihnen ihre Pflichten gegen Gott, gegen ihren Nächsten und sich selbst auf eine fassliche und praktische Art zu erklären.” 72. Ibid., 2–3.

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73. General Bericht des Vereines Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1903 (Vienna, 1904), 8; General Bericht des Vereines Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1904 (Vienna, 1905), 6; General Bericht des Vereines vom Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1905 (Vienna, 1906), 11. General Bericht des Vereines Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1907 (Vienna, 1908), 12; General Bericht des Vereines Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1908 (Vienna, 1909), 12. General Bericht des Vereines Werk des heiligen Philipp Neri für das Vereinsjahr 1909 (Vienna, 1910), 11; 74. Moritz Anton Grandjean, “Die neue Magd: Schwank in einem Akt,” in Wiener TheaterRepertoir (Vienna, 1876); Moritz Anton Grandjean, “Die alte Magd: Schwank in einem Akt,” in Wiener Theater-Repertoir (Vienna, 1876). 75. Harold B. Segel, ed. and trans., The Vienna Coffee House Wits 1890–1938 (West Lafayette, 1993), 137–39. 76. Anna Bauer, Die österreichische Hausfrau: Ein Handbuch für Frauen und Mädchen aller Stände (Vienna, 1892), 9–15. 77. “Programm,” Dienst-Bote, 9 October 1864, 1. 78. Margaret Beetham, “Domestic Servants as Poachers of Print: Reading, Authority and Resistance in Late Victorian Britain,” in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, ed. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Wills (Hampshire, 2009), 185–203; Tichy, Alltag und Traum, 25–26, 62–75. See also, Julia Karolle-Berg, “Creating a Maidservant Community through Newspapers: The Berliner Dienstboten-Zeitung, 1898–1900,” Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 49–75. 79. Hermine Jungwirt, Leidensweg unserer Dienstmädchen (Vienna, 1911). 80. This story was published as a series in several subsequent issues of the newspaper. For one such issue that published a section of the story, see Hermine Jungwirt, “Der Heiratsschwindler,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 13 April 1911, 7. 81. “Das Züchtigungsrecht,” Oesterreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 December 1910, 3–4. 82. Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 10, 24–28. 83. “Das misshandelte Dienstmädchen,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 December 1910, 4. 84. “Selbstmord eines Dienstmädchens,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 27 April 1911, 3. 85. “Aus Kränkung in den Tod,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 4 May 1911, 4. 86. “Mahnwort an die Hausfrauen,” Oesterreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 December 1910, 2–3. 87. VGA-Wien, Fritz Winter, “Dienstbotenordnungen,” Der Kampf 4, no. 7 (1 April 1911) in Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatschrift Vieter Band (Oktober 1910 bis September 1911), ed. Otto Bauer, Adolf Braun, and Karl Renner (Vienna, 1911), 305.

Chapter 3

DEMOGRAPHIC FEMINIZATION

d B

y the end of the nineteenth century, the male servant—that is, butlers, porters, and footmen in large aristocratic and upper-class households as well as hotels—was a category linked with luxury services. Maidservants were linked with lower rungs of service. This reality was fueled by demographic conditions. The feminization of the servant occupation in the latter half of the nineteenth century narrowed the definition of the term “servant” to such an extent that it excluded vast swaths of people of both genders who would have at an earlier time been considered both socially and legally servants. Although the legal definition of “servant” in the 1810 Codes was relatively vague, the cultural feminization of the occupation contributed to a narrower understanding of the term. Several laws and police decrees effected after 1850 in conjunction with influential sociopolitical movements considered the servant occupation as one predominated by women. In this context, urban male servants sought to distance themselves from the occupation. They did so by redefining their jobs as a distinct and specialized occupational category and demanded legal recognition for the same. This process transformed the term “servant” from an occupation—oftentimes a temporary and transitory job for many men and women—to a sociocultural identity that encompassed a very specific subsection of the population. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the term “servant” in urban centers of the empire meant a female domestic principally working in a bourgeois household. When used for a male, the term servant implied a person with specialized training and qualification such as a butler or a server employed in an aristocratic upper-class household or a luxury establishment such as a Viennese café.1 Thus, the demographic feminization of the servant occupation cannot be delineated from the persistent cultural construct that preceded the phenomenon.

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The “Disappearance” of the Male Servant A common misconception about the servant occupation is the alleged gender hierarchy it espoused. The argument is that male servants occupied the higher, more prestigious, and specialized ranks of the household hierarchy in large manorial estates; female servants occupied the lower ranks of domestic labor primarily involving unspecialized, menial tasks. While high-ranking positions such as butlers, accountants, and estate caretakers were male dominated, there were also high-ranking positions for women, such as governesses, ladies-in-waiting, and head housekeepers. These positions were prestigious, and the women who occupied them were educated and often had considerable influence in their spheres of activity.2 Furthermore, many people often used the term “servant” to conceal their real identities. For example, in the sixteenth century, many people, predominantly women, were subject to exorcisms. Records documenting these exorcisms referred to the women subjects as “maids” and described them as servants. In reality, they were from noble families.3 Thus, the term “servant” was extremely malleable and continued to be used in many ways into the nineteenth century. Both men and women joined the lower ranks of the servant hierarchy and performed menial tasks. Written during his travels around the Habsburg realm in 1780, the letters of the geologist Benedict Franz Hermann indicate that most men and women from peasant families in the countryside became servants. In one letter, Hermann observed that the school system for peasant communities in the empire’s provinces was terrible. Parents and families left most children to themselves until six to eight years of age. At about eight years of age, these families inducted their children into doing work. Some peasants sent their children to school if the school was in the vicinity of their site of work; however, most children were not sent to school. Instead, the children worked with cattle and livestock, sometimes, in some regions such as Carniola, as early as five to seven years of age. Gradually, they performed increasingly difficult servant work in the fields or in industries. Finally, they entered service as a man- or a maidservant. Thus, formal education in a school system for most of these men and women was completely absent.4 In the context of eighteenth-century serfdom, the Theresian mass schooling system thus proved highly expensive and ineffective for most of the rural population.5 Many men and women stayed in the servant occupation all their lives. But, for many others, servant work was simply a stepping-stone to other types of occupations or opportunities and, in the case of women, to marriage.6 In other words, work as a servant did not constitute a permanent identity or a perpetual state for many people within the occupation. Rather, the servant occupation was a transitory stage that offered many men and women the experience and training required to build reputable careers in different industries and professions.

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The trajectory of Georg (1755–1833) and Johann Huebmer’s careers illustrates the transitory nature of the servant occupation. In their teens, the Huebmer brothers sought work as servants in the salt marshes of their birthplace at Gosau in Upper Austria. When they were unsuccessful, they migrated from place to place, working as servants principally involved in the forestry sector. In 1776, they received employment from the Imperial Iron Company. When the wild groves of Herrnalpe were cleared, the two men proved their skill by completing the formidable task of removing the felled wood. In 1779, the Imperial High Administrative Office at Reichenau near Gloggnitz negotiated with Count Hoyos, the owner of the Nasthales virgin forests. The felled wood from these forests were to be transported to Hirschwang using an alluvial flood system, then to the countryside for use by Imperial Iron Works. The Imperial High Forestry Office for Iron employed the Huebmer brothers for this task. Since the office at Reichenau doubted the possibility of creating an alluvial flood system for the transport, they contracted the brothers on the condition that they would not be paid until the wood—approximately three to four thousand cubic klafters—was transported to Hirschwang. The brothers began work in 1782, and by 1783, they had created the alluvial system for the transport of the wood. The project built up the reputation of the brothers. They continued their wood-felling business until 1799, until Johann Huebmer’s death, after which Georg’s work with the iron company grew increasingly difficult. In 1805, upon the successful completion of a contract with Count Hoyos, Georg Huebmer received the position of alluvial-master with the count. In this capacity, Huebmer transported fourteen thousand klafters of wood to Vienna annually. By the time of his death in 1833, Huebmer had an enduring reputation in the industry for his alluvial canal transport system.7 As per the legal definitions of the period, the Huebmer brothers were in the servant occupation all their lives. But they had established a prestigious reputation for themselves in the forestry and canal-building sector. The servant occupation, thus, was much more diverse and flexible than one that involved domestic tasks in a household. In other words, the category of male servant included persons other than butlers, accountants, and footmen. Comparable career trajectories could be seen for women who entered the servant occupation. For instance, Rosa Barach (1841–1913) was from a stonemason family, and she studied at a girls’ high school in Brünn. Upon completing her education, she took up a position as a governess with an upper-class family in Moravia. She was sixteen at the time. She passed her teacher’s exam at twenty-one and, soon after, she founded a girls’ school in Rudolfsheim near Vienna in 1867, then established several philanthropic educational institutions, a children’s asylum in Kahlenbergerdorf, a soup kitchen, and a women’s home. She also founded the Viennese female writer’s association Vorwärts and became well-known in Vienna for her writings.8 Barach’s tenure in the servant occupation was about five years.

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By the time she was twenty-three years of age, she had passed her teacher’s exam and had set up a girl’s school. For Barach, the servant occupation was a temporary one and served to bridge the gap not toward marriage but toward her profession as a writer and a teacher. Compared with the circumstances faced by the Huebmer brothers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the context of Rosa Barach’s career trajectory was subject to the changing economic cycles in the postrevolutionary era. The postrevolutionary period was a time of intense economic expansion (Gründerzeit) and industrialization within the empire. After 1850, the unevenness of industrialization and urbanization within the empire spurred large-scale internal migrations.9 Vienna drew large numbers of men and women of the Catholic faith, as well as a significant number of Jews, from Bohemia and Moravia.10 Quantitative data show that as the century progressed, women migrated in larger numbers than men.11 These migrations were influenced by economic cycles: first, the stagnation between 1860 and 1866, the following period of expansion between 1867 and 1873, and the recession of 1873. The agricultural sector experienced a severe depression between mid-1870s and early 1890s, again causing an upswing of migration from rural to urban areas.12 However, as Annemarie Steidl points out, migrations were not unidirectional: “Up until the twentieth century, rural migrants in search of work in urban centers typically maintained tight bonds to the countryside.”13 Additionally, many of these migrations occurred over short distances. In the case of fin de siècle Vienna, scholars such as Andreas Weigl have shown that as many as nine hundred thousand individuals were temporarily Viennese. Vienna, in other words, acted as a passageway for migrants moving to other locations. Furthermore, he has argued that between 1900 and 1910, the balance of births and deaths exceeded the balance of migrations out.14 Vienna therefore witnessed an increase in population, not only through migrations but also due to increased birth rates. Most migrant women worked as servants.15 Until 1848, servants constituted 15 percent (approximately 40,000 in number) of the population in Vienna. Between 1880 and 1900, the servant population of Vienna rose by 45 percent.16 Only 7.3 percent of female servants in Vienna were locals; the rest came principally from Bohemia and Moravia.17 At the same time, the proportion of men in domestic service declined.18 In 1890, 94.27 percent of servants in Vienna were women. This percentage meant that there were approximately 86,500 female servants and 5,300 male servants working in the city. Within the next ten years, 97 percent of Vienna’s servants were women.19 External migrations also included many female servants. For example, in 1901, Paris had a total of 406 servants from Austria-Hungary, of which 363 were women and 43 men.20 Katherine M. Donato and Donna R. Gabaccia have argued that the so-called feminization of migration was not a new phenomenon. By analyzing global patterns of migration over the centuries, they have shown that women have always migrated in sub-

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Figure 3.1 Absolute Numbers of Servants in Four Economic Sectors in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 113. Graph made by author.

stantial numbers.21 José C. Moya has demonstrated that there is a significant link between the growth of the domestic service industry in the nineteenth century and the feminization of migration.22 I shall refer to the process of decline of men in the occupation as demographic feminization. The demographic feminization of the servant occupation was not a universal phenomenon but one that affected specific pockets of the Habsburg Empire— the industrializing urban centers. Even among urban centers, Vienna was exceptional in attracting a heterogenous mix of migrants. Most migrants in other regions of Cisleithanian Austria did not travel very far from their home districts. They came from another district of the same region.23 Figure 3.1 shows the absolute numbers of local and foreign servants in four economic sectors in Cisleithanian Austria.24 Barring the agriculture and forestry sector, where most servants came from the same district, the maximum number of servants in the other three sectors came from another district of the same region. Further, in three sectors, a significant number of servants stayed in the place of their birth or came from the same district. According to Hugo Morgenstern’s study published in 1902,25 the demographic feminization of the servant occupation was starkest in rapidly urbanizing small and medium-sized towns. Small and medium-sized cities with greater than two

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Figure 3.2 Sex Ratio among Servants in Five Economic Sectors in Three Regional Categories in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 119. Graph made by author.

thousand inhabitants had many more servants than the large urban centers of Vienna, Graz, Trieste, Prague, Brno, Lemberg, and Krakow. Figure 3.2 shows that female servants outnumbered male servants in all sectors of work in all three regional subcategories, that is, large urban centers, small and medium-sized cities, and flat lands or small towns inhabited by two thousand or fewer inhabitants.26 In all three categories, the gender difference was lowest for the agricultural and forestry sector. The difference was more pronounced in this sector in small and medium-sized towns where 12.2 percent of servants were male and 87.8 percent were female. It was least pronounced in big cities where 28.2 percent of servants working in the agricultural and forestry sector were male and 71.8 percent were female. In other words, demographic feminization of the servant occupation began to reverse at least in the agricultural sector in later stages of urbanization.

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Figure 3.3 Comparison of Sex Ratios of Urban and Rural Servants in Five Economic Sectors, Only Rural Servants, Both Urban and Rural Servants [Per 1,000]. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 129, 131, 184. Graph made by author.

Barring the industry sector, this reversal can be seen in other sectors as well, albeit to a much smaller degree. Three points are of significance here: first, the agriculture and forestry sector was not at all predominant in big cities; second, the sector was becoming increasingly insignificant in industrializing smaller cities; and third, it was extremely important in flat lands and small towns. These points are best expressed in the following statistics: only 8.7 percent of servants in big cities and 24.7 percent in small and medium-sized cities were employed in the agricultural and forestry sector as opposed to 66.6 percent in flat lands and small towns. On the other hand, as seen in figure 3.3, the percentages of male and female servants in rural areas were roughly equal, with the percentage of male servants exceeding female servants in eight of the seventeen regions surveyed.27 In these

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regions, servants were predominantly employed in agricultural- and forestryrelated activities.28 It is the data on servants in both rural and urban areas that revealed a marked gender difference, with the percentage of female servants significantly higher than male servants in all regions of the empire. This gender difference is evident both in the data on servants working in five economic sectors and in the data collected without this classifying system. The latter dataset reveals slightly higher proportions of male servants compared to the former in all regions of the empire. Two factors contributing to this discrepancy include (1) the exclusion of servants who could not be classified under any of the five economic sectors in the former dataset, and (2) the exclusion of servants thought to fall in some other occupational category when the data was collected. As discussed earlier, “servant” was a very vague term both legally and socially. In the rural regions of the empire, where much of the feudal hierarchies were still in place, the term encompassed large populations of agricultural laborers and other types of workers engaged in the maintenance of manorial estates. Considerable confusions existed among statistical surveyors whether a person not living with an employer could be considered a servant.29 The basis of this confusion was twofold. First, per the Leopoldine model still in effect throughout the empire, servants were considered to be propertyless and part of the employer’s household. So, the demographic data on employer households served as the primary source of data on servants, and those servants who lived independent of the employer’s household were likely to be omitted. Second, servanthood was not a lifelong occupation for many people, especially women. So, some people who had been servants in the past and those who were unemployed at the time of data collection would not be represented in the data. Moreover, government institutions that could provide data on unemployed servants were fewer in number. These problems were less evident for urban servants since property ownership among servants in urban areas was insignificant. One statistic suggests that in 1890, only about 2 percent of servants individually owned properties and about 2.5 percent of servants jointly owned properties.30 Further, in urban centers, various organizations such as servant hostels, poor homes, and foundling hospitals were important sources of data on unemployed servants for surveyors. But, in rural areas, significant numbers of servants owned properties. Figure 3.4, for instance, shows that, in 1895, property ownership among rural female servants was significantly higher compared with their male counterparts.31 The lower rate of property ownership among males was due to the difference in the life cycles of male and female servants. In both rural and urban areas, many male servants remained in the occupation much longer, making it a lifetime occupation for them compared with their female counterparts for whom the occupation was a transitory time in their lives.32 So, a majority of rural male servants postponed purchasing or failed to purchase property as they were housed in their employers’ estates. However, the situation of property ownership for rural

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Figure 3.4 Sex Ratio per 1,000 Property Ownership among Rural Servants in 1895. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 156. Graph made by author.

female servants changed upon marriage and/or other events in their lives such as widowhood. Stated differently, whereas the bulk of the data points for females comprised those who were passing through a stage in their lives when they had to “serve” a propertied family, the bulk of the data points for males comprised those who remained in the occupation for a long period of time. There was another complication. Some regions of the empire employed certain categories of servants more than others. For instance, the population statistics from 1890 showed that in Istria and the southern regions of the empire, female servers and attendants played a much more crucial role in the economy than in Vienna. On the other hand, excluding Vienna, a high number of male servants were employed in Lower Austria. Many rich landowners and senior civil servants lived in this region, and they required luxury services replete with caretakers, footmen, porters, and gardeners.33 Thus, the gender differences in some regions reflected the economic structure of that region. Moreover, the Servant Codes in effect in the rural areas of the empire were different from the codes that were in effect in the urban centers. In fact, in the first decades of the twentieth century, there were several servant protests in various regions of the realm. These demonstrations comprised predominantly male

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rural laborers in the agricultural and industrial sectors of these regions. The regional Servant Orders often served as an effective tool for the regional authorities to curb these protests. For instance, in the first decade of the twentieth century, both the Social Democratic Party and the National Socialist Worker’s Party launched intensive campaigns in the rural regions of Bohemia to induce the laborers in these villages to form local organizations. They organized and encouraged strikes among rural agricultural workers and servants for better wages and working conditions. The regional officials in Bohemia took the following measures to curb these strikes and encourage “settlements” between the employer and the workers. First, they distinguished the strikers into three categories: (1) highly qualified, contractually employed persons, (2) persons considered servants per the Servant Order; and (3) agricultural and forestry wage laborers. The authorities supposed that the first category would not resort to protests, and therefore they did not investigate these people irrespective of whether they came under the purview of the Servant Orders. The second category of persons formed the most important element in both agricultural as well as industrial sectors. To squash their strikes, the regional authorities applied the stipulations of the Bohemian Servant Orders strictly in every single case. As per the Servant Orders, if servants failed to perform their tasks, the employer had full authority in every case to dismiss the servant. The dismissal included the loss of food, accommodation, and other provisions that the servant received from his employer. Further, if the employer sought such a measure, the authorities would compulsorily banish such servants from the local community. The third category of persons, that is, wage laborers in the agricultural and forestry sector, were also handled under the Servant Orders.34 In late February 1906, servants in the towns of Dłźniów, Hulcze, and Przewodów districts in Lviv resolved to go on strike for higher wages and a change in work conditions. In the following weeks, servants in Hulcze and Dłźniów, in Przewodów, in Liski, and in Żniatyn left service in tandem to strike. The district administrations in these regions arrested the strikers based upon the stipulations of the regional Servant Order and subdued the protests. Some strikers returned to service, while others were sent to regional court in Bełz for trial.35 Similarly, about twenty-eight rural servants in the East Galician district of Zadarów went on strike in April. The local administration of Buczacz crushed the protests.36 Instigating servant protests in the rural areas was one of the principal criticisms that the Christian Socials levied against Social Democratic reform propositions. In the 1901 meeting, for instance, the Social Democrats argued that some religious orders caused immense damage to private lives by allegedly “using the servants as detectives of their own employers.”37 To this, the Christian Social Baron Morsey responded: “Do you know what farmers complain about? About servants incited by Social Democrats, not the religious orders or the monasteries, but about these servants, with whom they cannot exist anymore.”38

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Thus, the demographic feminization of the servant occupation was primarily a phenomenon that accompanied urbanization. It was closely linked with differences in the lifestyles of men and women in the occupation and changes in patterns of property ownership. In late stages of urbanization, the phenomenon began to reverse significantly in one sector—the agricultural sector—and to a negligible degree in other sectors. This begs the questions: What about urbanization led to the feminization of the occupation? What stymied or slowed the reversal of this phenomenon in big cities? The following sections highlight a movement originating in Vienna’s hospitality establishments that contributed considerably to weaponizing the construct of the itinerant maidservant against female servants in the era of prostitution regulation. This movement was particularly effective at instigating the specialization of male jobs that had so long been part of the servant occupation, precipitating the latter’s feminization, and preventing its reversal.

The Beyfuß Report After 1848, many private agencies sprouted throughout Vienna offering placement services to different types of servants. These agencies also catered to service personnel in Vienna’s hospitality industry. Along with male waiters and other service personnel, these agencies also served female service personnel such as the Kassierinnen (female cahiers) and the Kellnerinnen (waitresses) who worked in Viennese hotels, restaurants, pubs, bars, inns, taverns, beer halls, and coffeehouses. Some placement agencies charged a specific base fee from job seekers for mediating placements. Others left the payment of fees to the discretion of the job seeker. However, if the job seeker did not pay or paid a low amount, s/he would not receive a placement the next time s/he approached an agency. Further, many agencies, especially those catering to waiters, sent a “congratulatory card” at the end of the year. The waiter was then expected to make a cash payment to the agency. This practice was considered an “insurance,” as a waiter could count on the services of the placement agency to find them a job quickly in the event of sudden unemployment. Many proprietor and employee organizations sprouted in nineteenth-century urban centers. Although they represented different interest groups, these organizations were united in their concern about the level of control that placement agencies seemed to exert within the hospitality industry.39 In Vienna, employee organizations emerged in the 1860s. Two important ones among these were Wiener Kellner-Verein, founded in 1868, and Wiener Marqueur-Verein, founded in 1873.40 These two associations were successors of two older waiter associations that had emerged in 1848—the Grazer Kellnerverein in Graz and the Centralverein der Kellner in Prague.41 Many independent newspapers representing

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the interests of hospitality industry employees also began to circulate.42 These organizations decried the high fees and the degree of control that placement mediators exhibited and began to offer free placement services to employees. However, the placement services they offered catered principally to male job seekers.43 The public representative bodies of trade—the various cooperatives and the Lower Austrian Chamber of Commerce and Trade—had debated the issue of placement agency exploitation since the 1860s.44 Proprietors also disapproved of private placement mediators as they tended to exercise tremendous control in the hiring process. Since many poor workers could not afford the fees, placement agencies stymied the flow of cheap labor into these establishments. In 1878, the proprietor newspaper Kaffee- und Gasthaus-Zeitung compared the state of placement agencies that recruited waiters and servants for the hospitality industry to the slave trade in Africa. These agencies apparently “lured” unsuspecting waiters with promise of good wages, extorted a lot of money from them, and trapped them in exploitative service positions. The newspaper decried such practices and called for hoteliers and Gasthaus and coffeehouse proprietors to remove such evils from the industry.45 Aligning with the employee organizations, many proprietor organizations such as the Cooperative of Innkeepers began to offer free placement services.46 So, the relationship between employee and proprietor organizations was cordial. But, after 1882, the relationship between the cooperatives and the Viennese waiter associations soured. The agendas expressed by the Waiter Congress that took place in June 1882 was the primary cause of this rift. About seven hundred members gathered at Schottenring, Vienna, around a quarter past 1:00 am. The association head Herr Scheichelbauer and the speakers principally discussed one concern—the categorization of waiters as servants. The 1810 Codes (of Vienna) governed service personnel hired in Viennese hospitality establishments. In a separate appendix, the code specified two types of servants in a hospitality establishment such as a Gasthaus—first, a servant hired by the owner, and second, a servant employed by the guest. The owner was responsible for the former. The code mandated that there was no difference in the laws that concerned Gasthaus servants and those that concerned domestic servants. Provided they abided by the stipulations of the 1810 Codes, Gasthaus owners could employ multiple servants. Even though personal servants of guests were not the responsibility of the owner, they also came under the purview of the 1810 Codes. The code required all foreign guests staying in local inns to register their personal servants with the police.47 After 1853, there was tremendous legal confusion over who was to be considered a servant and issued a Dienstbotenbuch in Vienna. Until 1853, the 1810 Codes applied to all service personnel irrespective of gender. A High Court Order in 1853 declared that waiters, house attendants, wine carriers, assistants at coffeehouses, cashiers, fire boys, coachmen in cities and towns, deputy coachmen,

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fiacres, and buggy drivers were to be considered business assistants. A Trade Ministry mandate in August 1862 interpreted the law in the same way. However, the order was contrary to the Trade Order issued in December 1859, which stated that “Persons who perform housekeeping services only in the operation of a business such as waiters, drovers, and so on are not considered to be assistants.”48 In Vienna, a Magistrate’s Decree in May 1860 classified these same persons as servants and mandated that they were thereby governed by the 1810 Codes. Following this, a police decree in April 1862 issued Dienstbotenbücher to waiters, cashiers, and similar attendants. In November 1871, a decree from the Ministry of the Interior reverted to an even older Servant Order of 1784. As per this order, caretakers, gardeners, and porters were classified as servants.49 In November 1875, another decree specified that servants, commercial assistants, and apprentices were governed by the servant laws stated in the Trade Order. The decree attempted—unsuccessfully—to clarify the differences in the working relationships between a servant and his employer and a factory worker and his employer.50 For all practical purposes, waiters and waitresses were categorized as servants.51 This situation continued until 1885. Waiter associations were interested in increasing the standard of living and improving the social status of employees in the hospitality industry, as well as framing hospitality service as a dignified profession. In 1872, the official newspaper of the Viennese Waiter Association, Central-Blatt des Wiener Kellner-Vereines, expressed the association’s main task to be the “spiritual and moral refinement of its members.”52 Accordingly, it sought to arouse “decency, without which . . . a gratifying economic upturn is out of the question,” and, therefore, “not refrain from being encouraging and instructive in this direction, to gradually bring about the cessation of recognized evils.”53 Following the prostitution reform of 1873, many working-class female migrants in the servant occupation bore the brunt of the medico-police surveillance. As a step toward enabling upward economic mobility and ensuring a dignified status for waiters, waiter organizations sought to distance themselves from the servant occupation. In 1875, the Viennese Waiter Association sent a petition to the Austrian assembly requesting that waiters be categorized as commercial workers, not servants. The assembly rejected the petition, claiming that it resulted in increased police suspicion of waiters as socialists and criminals. At the 1882 Waiter Congress, the speakers revisited the issue of the 1875 petition. Emphasizing that waiters were not socialists, they resolved to continue pressing the classification matter with the government. They also decried the practice that existed in the industry of employing waiters only after a three-year apprenticeship and promoting them only by the recommendation of the Cooperative of Innkeepers. Accordingly, they passed two resolutions: one demanded that the police stop characterizing waiters as criminals; the other demanded increased participation in determining apprenticeship durations and promotions of waiters.

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The entire matter displeased hospitality industry proprietors in Vienna. The Kaffee- und Gasthaus-Zeitung reported the incident as “mostly attacks against the Cooperative” (Ausfälle gegen die Genossenschaft).54 In 1885, one of the Waiter Association’s objectives succeeded. That year, authorities made an amendment to the Trade Order of 1859, which specified that servants hired in businesses should not be categorized as servants.55 The 1885 Trade Order only escalated the discontent among proprietors. In March 1892, through their personal initiative, influential proprietor Rudolf Beyfuß and his colleagues submitted a report to the meeting of the Lower Austrian Chamber of Commerce and Trade.56 The Beyfuß report represented the interests of proprietors of establishments that benefited from cheap female labor. Accordingly, it sought to cut out two sources that hindered the latter’s supply: employee associations that catered principally to male staff and placement agencies. In the report, Beyfuß decried the practices of placement agencies, but he did not limit his criticisms to them. He further argued that the free placement services offered by many waiter organizations only catered to male employees. While the Cooperative of Innkeepers also offered placement services for female personnel, these were inferior positions to their male counterparts. Only through the intervention of placement agencies commissioned by the Lower Austrian provincial government could female service personnel find placements in the local restaurants, pubs, inns, and hotels. Many establishments, therefore, exploited this situation to employ female employees in lower positions and use them unlawfully. To acquire better positions, women had to use private agencies that charged between twenty-five and two hundred gulden, a fee that the poorer classes could not afford. The report thus requested the Lower Austrian government end the unlawful activities of placement agencies.57 For this, Beyfuß suggested that representatives from associations of hoteliers, innkeepers, and waiters should investigate the situation.58 To deal with the Beyfuß report, the chamber requested all associations interested in the matter to submit a report on the situation. The Cooperative of Innkeepers submitted a report arguing that the placement agency problem had been a source of debate for some decades. The report noted that the main cause of the problem was that the Trade Order of 1859 had classified employees in inns, taverns, and coffeehouses as servants. At this time, apparently many placement agencies received government concessions, and they took advantage of the change in professional classification to also exploit a wider range of workers. The report went on to argue that due to their indiscriminate reliance on placement agencies, these bureaus heavily exploited workers. Furthermore, the report noted that since the Trade Order of 1885 had classified employees in the hospitality industry as unskilled workers, placement agencies that catered to servants could no longer mediate for employees in the hospitality trade. However, apparently these bureaus continued recruiting apprentices who were not in compliance with the law. The Cooperative of Innkeepers, therefore, recommended that concessions

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to placement agencies be completely withdrawn and that the right to recruit employees of both sexes in inns should rest only with innkeepers. Representatives from the Association of Hoteliers and Tourist Accommodations noted that hotels and other establishments that employed many female servants could expect prompt assignment from placement agencies only if they also hired male staff. They were, therefore, unable to use the service of placement agencies without incurring surplus employees that they could not use.59 At first, waiter associations agreed with such suggestions since placement agencies exploited male service personnel as well. The Viennese Waiter Association suggested convening an inquiry into the situation.60 However, not long after, associations that represented waiters realized that the report did not align with their cause. In 1895, the proprietor newspaper Stammgast stated, “No power in the world today can stop Viennese coffeehouse owners from introducing nocturnal female servants.”61 In the same article, Der Stammgast opposed the suggestion of the head of the Wiener Marqueur-Verein (Viennese Marqueur Association) Rudolf Reiterer that coffeehouse employees should receive fixed wages. The article argued that it was no great art to serve guests a glass of coffee.62 Following the Beyfuß report, waiter associations found themselves on the defensive. The new Trade Order of 1885 had classified them as commercial workers instead of servants. However, the category of commercial worker also included Gasthaus cooks, waitresses, female cashiers, and other female service personnel.63 Many female service personnel were unskilled migrant women who cycled between household jobs and jobs in hospitality establishments. Female service personnel did not have access to the apprenticeships. Proprietors, however, expected male service personnel to train for a minimum of four months. Depending on the position they aspired to, the apprenticeship could continue for up to four years. Since they wished to construct a waiter’s job as a dignified profession requiring special skills and training, waiter organizations began to distance themselves from female service personnel. Especially after 1885 and amid the severe depression from the 1870s to 1890, the specter of female employment in the hospitality industry seemed particularly formidable to waiter associations: Since the enactment of the new trade regulations—that is 12 years ago—the waiter is no longer a servant, but, a commercial laborer . . . the waiter . . . was relieved that the new trade regulations had removed him from the category of servants and ranked him a commercial worker because he was sitting in short panties on the school-bench. He never thought that he would become the editor of a midwife- and waiter- newspaper.64

In this context, the mere idea that “untrained” waitresses could potentially occupy positions that waiters could avail only through training enraged waiter associations to no end. To maintain the distinction between themselves and unskilled women, such associations decried establishments that hired female employees.

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Their narrative against female service—Mädchenbedienung or weibliche Bedienung—borrowed on an already existing trope that linked waitressing in hospitality establishments to prostitution.65 Some nineteenth-century books reveal how the rhetorical linkage between female service personnel and prostitution was generated. The antisemitic “prostitution expert” Josef Schrank, for instance, provides the following account of waitressing in Vienna.66 In the period following the revolutions of 1848, the act of visiting prostitutes attracted less social stigma than it had done in the past. During this time, several establishments frequented by prostitutes and their clients developed in various districts of Vienna. After the introduction of prostitution regulation in 1873, two types of prostitutes emerged: tolerated prostitutes who carried a health card, and clandestine prostitutes who did not. Apparently, tolerated prostitution flourished in cafés, hotels, and bars.67 These establishments were of three types: those frequented only by elite courtesans who catered to exclusive clienteles, those visited by prostitutes who catered mostly to a bourgeois clientele, and those visited by prostitutes who catered to the lower classes. Public prostitutes particularly frequented locales known as night cafés. These cafés employed prostitutes as waitresses and female cashiers to attract male clients.68 These women, who often functioned as servers and hostesses, dressed in costumes to increase their appeal to the male clientele and receive larger tips. Such locales were divided into two groups—ones in which the female employees donned foreign costumes, such as Tyrolean dresses and Turkish costumes, and ones in which female employees donned local costumes.69 Schrank’s narrative reveals three key elements about the rhetorical linkage between female service personnel and commercial sex. First, the narrative fails to distinguish between women working late hours in a hospitality establishment and women engaged in commercial sex. Second, the narrative suggests that the main aim of hiring waitresses and female cashiers in these establishments was to attract and entertain male clientele. Commercial sex was part of this entertainment and therefore part of a waitress’s job description. Third, the narrative depicts female employment in hospitality establishments as an occupation lacking “respectability.”70 Undoubtedly, Rautenstrauch would have prided himself on the versatility with which his fabrications about maidservants could be extended to just about any woman who worked for a living. The narrative of coffeehouses as “private brothels” conducting “orgies” was rampant in other regions of the empire such as Prague, Linz, Galicia, and Bohemia well before 1873. In Pilsen, for instance, authorities subjected waitresses to medical examinations as early as 1868, before prostitution regulation existed in Vienna. A vitriolic narrative on the use of young waitresses as prostitutes in cafés, bars, wine locales, and other establishments swept through these regions.71 The narrative borrowed in equal measure from a new visual landscape that emerged in post-1848 European cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.72 This imagery incorporated the erotic ele-

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ments of nightlife, such as prostitution in coffeehouses and bars.73 Between 1850 and 1873, some of Vienna’s locales had a character that paralleled the eroticism of Paris and London.74 For instance, an establishment named Sperl in Leopoldstadt was frequented by prostitutes who induced the men to drink, dance, and engage in other forms of merriment. However, much like many others, the police shut down the locale in 1873.75 After the institution of prostitution regulation in 1873, a barrage of decrees targeted female service personnel in hospitality establishments. Several police commissariats complained that some coffeehouses encouraged the activities of clandestine prostitutes by keeping their establishments open well beyond the recommended curfews.76 To suppress the alleged spread of clandestine prostitution and Mädchenhandel in such establishments, a Lower Austrian Edict of 1874 allowed the employment of waitresses in bars only in exceptional cases.77 In 1879, the Viennese police headquarters standardized the curfews for hospitality establishments.78 In the same year, police decrees also specified that the use of female employees for sex in coffeehouses was punishable under §512 of the Penal Code.79 A police decree of December 1884 ordered officials to investigate and report on coffee shops and inns that employed female servants.80 The Trade Order of 1885 forbade owners who tolerated the “excesses” of female servants from hiring female personnel in their establishments.81 The police decree of October 1885 altogether forbade costumed female personnel in coffeehouses and inns.82 Following this, the employment of female personnel in bars and cafés in Vienna required police permission.83 In addition, the police instituted more stringent control of cafés and inns with female employees.84 Another police decree issued in March 1888 criticized coffeehouses of “lower rank” that remained open beyond the permitted curfews, played music till the early hours of the morning, and encouraged prostitutes to carry out their activities. The decree mandated that no more licenses would be issued to coffeehouse owners who employed waitresses and more than one or two female cashiers. Further, the decree called for strict enforcement of curfews for those coffeehouses with female employees that had already been granted licenses.85 In July 1888, the Lower Austrian government issued a decree that further tightened curfews on coffeehouses, enforced strict hygiene requirements, and introduced regulations concerning the use of music, dance, and other performances in coffeehouses.86 Another police decree tightening the issuance of licenses was issued in December of the same year, and in the following two years, the Lower Austrian government issued more decrees that further strengthened police control over these establishments.87 Before 1890, proprietor organizations often supported increased regulation and policing of hospitality locales. Because they wished to preserve the malecentric bourgeois character of Viennese cafés, the Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners that represented the interests of coffeehouse proprietors especially supported such measures. As opposed to inns and wine locales that were mostly

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working-class enclaves, Viennese cafés were places for bourgeois men to discuss business affairs over a game of pool or enjoy some quiet leisure time.88 Therefore, Viennese cafés developed into exclusively male locales so much so that the service personnel were exclusively men.89 The Kassierin (female cashier) was the only female component of Viennese coffeehouses. So typical of Viennese culture was the construction and ambience of the Viennese café that in the 1878 Parisian World Exhibition, the “Wiener Kaffeehaus” was considered a unique type of European locale.90 The Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners targeted specific locales that violated the norms of the all-male Viennese café. Between 1870 and 1900, Vienna’s Prater developed into a grand center of entertainment with a variety of amusements. In 1873, for instance, Vienna hosted the World’s Fair. The world’s first theme-park, Venedig in Wien, developed in 1895. Two years later, the Ferris wheel became operational. New Viennese cafés and hotels proliferated around the Prater to serve the booming number of visitors. Along with coffee and refreshments, these locales served up entertainments such as dance and music.91 Some of these cafés hired female service personnel and attracted the censure of the Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners. In 1878, the Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners appealed to the Viennese municipal government for the abolition of female personnel serving guests. The petition was issued to circumvent the alleged problems caused by costumed cashiers and waitresses in such locales. Smaller coffeehouses and cafés, the cooperative argued, encouraged prostitution and increased immorality among the lower classes. Further, the petition argued that “the trade authority should withdraw concessions from locales that entertained prostitution and functioned as a cover for procurement.”92 Later that year, the newspaper Oesterr.-Ung. Café- und Gasthaus-Zeitung—edited by the coffeehouse and Gasthaus proprietors S. Pollak and Julius Fröhlich—published an article on prostitution in coffeehouses and pubs. The article targeted specific locales—that is, night cafés where such activities apparently occurred—and remarked that, “no matter how much strict control proprietors exercise on night-cafés, no matter how tidy they are . . . they will always encourage the social evil of prostitution.”93 In January 1888, the Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners bemoaned of cases in which coffeehouses remained open till 3:00 am, well beyond the legally mandated curfew.94 However, as their discord with waiter organizations escalated, proprietor associations began to view female service more favorably. They no longer sided with measures that prevented the employment of female service personnel. Despite their criticism of prostitution in certain locales, proprietors of other hospitality establishments such as pubs, inns, and taverns had never aimed to abolish weibliche Bedienung or female service in Vienna. They were only interested in preserving the reputation of their establishments as suitable locales for family recreation. In 1879, Oesterr.-Ung. Café- und Gasthaus-Zeitung published an article

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titled “Weibliche oder männliche Bedienung?” This article explained a popular topic discussed by several south German proprietors—the question of whether to hire male or female service personnel. The article argued that unlike most female employees, male waiters, especially those trained in the Viennese system, were praiseworthy for their skill and punctuality. The article conceded that hiring female service personnel had some pitfalls—such as a certain amount of prostitution. However, it also asserted that “under the hand of good and prudent employers, some girls often become very useful pillars of the business. Very often, and this is characteristic of the comfortable southern German relations, a rather patriarchal relationship between the master and the servants develops.”95 The souring relationship with waiter associations spurred proprietors to push for female employment in the hospitality industry. The elimination of placement agency interference recommended by the Beyfuß report was a step in this direction. Prior to the Beyfuß report, while waiter associations occasionally alluded to the pretty young waitresses in the distant beer halls of Prague, their method of dealing with the issue of “waitress prostitution” was to behave as though female staff were not among the category of persons they represented.96 The waiter newspaper Central-Blatt des Wiener Kellner-Vereines claimed to represent waiters from throughout the empire, not just Vienna. It published articles on the working conditions, problems, and demands of only male service personnel. By 1873, the newspaper was renamed Oesterreichisch-ungarische Kellner-Zeitung. Following the Beyfuß report, waiter associations launched a campaign against Mädchenbedienung. Even though most waiter organizations claimed to be nonpartisan, their rhetoric incorporated a heavy dose of Christian Social antisemitism.97 In October 1896, the Österreichische Kellner-Zeitung—the official newspaper of the Viennese Marqueur Association—argued that there were many establishments masquerading as “good, bourgeois recreation sites” that turned into places of orgies at night. It also bemoaned of some locales that encouraged “Mädchenbedienung ohne Lohn” or “female service without wages” and conducted their business at night more than during daytime. The article emphasized that such problems were not the fault of male employees in the hospitality industry. The blame rather fell on “Jewish liberalism” and the “corrupt offices of the liberal era in Vienna.” To underscore this point, the article argued that Viennese coffeehouse employees had done a considerable amount to aid the fight against Mädchenbedienung. Specifically, it referred to the efforts of Carl Lucas, the head of the organization Wiener Kaffeehausgehilfen (Viennese Café Workers).98 Beyfuß, it argued, raved about Social Democratic principles of “free love” and cultivated “private brothels” of Mädchenbedienung in his canteens and wine locales.99 The article certainly did not frame waitresses as naïve victims but as willing participants in the trade. It stressed that immoral female personnel were taking jobs away from qualified men:

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Even at the time when hotel, Gasthaus, and coffeehouse employees were still in the category of servants, Mädchenbedienung, which was practiced only in small, simple inns with their “darkrooms,” was, from a moral standpoint, reprehensible; today, it is an absurdity. The male employee in inns and drinking establishments must learn for three to four years, attend technical college, acquire language skills, and train in his profession at home and abroad; the girl who replaces such an employee needs only a big portion of shamelessness—and a good stomach—and she is a competent coffeehouse or restaurant employee.100

By 1890, numerous police decrees governed the running of hospitality establishments. The following example illustrates the extent of policing exercised in these establishments. In December 1897, Theresia Schmidt, the owner of a coffeehouse in Vienna’s second district, wished to have a music concert at her café basement until 2:00 am and keep her coffeehouse open until 3:00 am. For this, she applied for permission at the regional police commissariat at Leopoldstadt as early as July 1897. In July, the commissariat agreed to grant her permission for the concert provided she abide by the appropriate police decrees. In their letter, the police commissariat specified fourteen points to ensure that she met the conditions of the decree. These specifications included the following: the coffeehouse should not contain sleeping rooms; the band should use only string and percussion instruments and play only slow, lumbering music, and should contain no more than six musicians; no female employees should be kept; there should be no prostitutes seen in the locality; children should be accompanied by their parents or relatives; the locale should contain no curtains or coverings so that police officials could freely observe from outside. In addition, the commissariat was to conduct an official inspection of the coffeehouse and monitor the operation of the coffeehouse on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. If there was any breach of requirements, the commissariat would cancel the owner’s license.101 Despite this level of policing, visuals depicting nightlife circulated in the plethora of illustrated periodicals and kept the Mädchenbedienung narrative alive. In October 1891, some young artists formed a circle known as Spirit of Vienna at Night (Geistige Wien bei Nacht). This private initiative published postcards with images of coffeehouses, hospitals and streets at night and introduced erotic implications in these pictures. A postcard titled “Wien bei Nacht: Porzelanfuhr” (Vienna by night: Porcelain carriage) released in 1900 was a silhouetted image of a man and a woman seated and kissing in a horse-drawn carriage. Similarly, another postcard titled “Wien bei Nacht: Novargasse” displayed a silhouetted image of men and women interacting on a night street. At the windows, women appear in their chemises and men cruise the street, some entering the houses with scantily dressed women.102 A 1906 illustration titled “Wein bei Nacht” (Vienna at Night) in the newspaper Wiener Caricaturen depicted a scene with waitresses serving, frolicking, and picking the pockets of the inebriated clients in a hospital-

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ity establishment. The sentence below the illustration reads, “The Girls: what you must put up with from men these days. Even their wallets.”103

Against Working Women Throughout the 1890s, waiter newspapers rallied against Mädchenbedienung. They underscored the banes of female service and how it led to the abuse of various male professionals in the hospitality industry. The Austrian “Gemütlichkeit” (hospitality), they argued, had turned into “Gedankenlosigkeit” (thoughtlessness), as waiters and other service professionals were second-class people.104 Apparently, Mädchenbedienung led to the erosion of dignity from the service profession. In February 1897, a newspaper reported on the mishandling of a waiter Wilhelm Geist by the local innkeepers Jacob and Michael Gruber. Apparently, Geist had a dispute with a female cashier, with whom the Grubers seemed to “be in the best of terms” (besten einvernehmen zu leben scheint). The cashier complained to Michael Gruber, and the “gallant knight” had apparently rushed to avenge his damsel by slapping and cursing Geist in front of guests in a guestroom. The article detailed the brutal handling and working conditions that all other employees, who were allegedly male, had to endure in the inn. The female cashier alone was apparently an exception to the mistreatment.105 Waiter newspapers published copious articles and feuilletons that caricatured the character of all types of female employees in the hospitality industry. In September 1895, the Kellner Zeitung published a short feuilleton titled “Die Hotel-Zimmermädchen” (The hotel chambermaid) that sexualized and belittled what it described as the “Species of Eternal Femininity,” that is, the chambermaid and the tasks she performed in hotel rooms.106 Similarly, the feuilleton titled “Der Kellnerinnen-Streik” (The waitress strike) described how the strike of the female staff, including servants and waitresses, in a hotel in America inconvenienced the guests.107 Waiter organizations also underscored how waitresses, despite their “immorality,” received a better deal in the hospitality industry. When Venedig in Wien opened in the Prater in 1895, numerous restaurants, cafés, and bars proliferated in the area.108 Since the Prater was also a hub for commercial sex activities, waiter newspapers were quick to make the argument that these locales employed prostitutes as Animiermädchen.109 These were “hostesses” hired in hospitality establishments to seduce the guests toward drink and sex. In April 1897, the Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung reported on the alleged proliferation of Mädchenbedienung in the eateries of Venedig in Wien. More than sixty girls, the article claimed, served at the restaurants and cafés of the park. The article went on to report that a large portion of these girls were shameless and had a “good stomach” that they used to serve a variety of drinks to the masses, meaning that these girls indulged in all

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kinds of venal pleasures. They had allegedly applied this “shamelessness” to occupy positions that should be held by waiters. These waitresses, the article continued, used their bodies to earn the kind of food and wages that waiters could never hope to receive. The beer halls and buffets at the Prater allegedly hired known prostitutes. Apparently, owners who hired such girls had to mandatorily provide them with health insurance that would cover the cost of their venereal disease treatment as well as pregnancies. Male service professionals, the article insisted, could never avail themselves of such privileges.110 Thus, according to waiter newspapers, even the mandatory subjection of these women to medical examinations was an advantage. Female service personnel in the hospitality industry not only received better benefits from their employers but also better tips from the clients on account of their “immorality.” It was not just “immoral” waitresses that the Österreichische Kellner-Zeitung targeted. The newspaper was particularly harsh about higher-ranking female staff. In July 1897, the paper published an article titled “Köchinnen, wie sie –nicht sein sollen” (Female cooks, how they should not be).111 The article described two cases of badly behaved female staff. The first was Xantippe Kranz who worked as a manager in the restaurant of a Herr and Frau Bieregger. Kranz, the article argued, was abusive to kitchen staff and sometimes threatened them with a kitchen knife. In one instance, she stomped the foot of the meat cook, a Fraülein Pompl, and locked her out of the staff’s bedroom. The second case was that of Julie Weininger, who was the “nice” head cook in the restaurant of Josef Janetschek. Weininger, apparently, distributed food to the kitchen staff unevenly. Those staff members who fell out of favor with Weininger did not receive any meat and had to survive on soup and vegetables. The article concluded with the ominous threat that if the restaurant owner failed to understand that his staff did not want to be dependent on a “hysterical cook,” his staff would soon leave.112 Ironically, although they seemed only to represent male service personnel, waiter organizations were not all-male associations. Neither were they always unappreciative of female workers of the hospitality industry.113 However, when they appreciated female staff, they were careful to underscore their loyal and patient service as having an almost nun-like quality so favored in domestic servants. In December 1897, for instance, the Viennese Marqueur Association commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of a Fraülein Marie Haid. Haid was born in Munich in 1840 and traveled to Vienna when she was sixteen years old. At this age, she joined the Hotel of Erzherzog Carl and Meißl u. Schadn as a chambermaid. In 1872, she became the first chambermaid in Vienna’s Grand Hotel.114 Therefore, when the women in the hospitality industry fit the model of a docile and uncomplaining maidservant who occupied those job positions in the hospitality industry that waiters did not want for themselves (that is, jobs that usually involved menial tasks akin to the ones maidservants performed in middle-class households), waiter associations were quick to applaud her accomplishments.

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The election of the Christian Socialist Karl Lueger to the mayor’s office in April 1897 proved a triumph for the campaign against Mädchenbedienung. Until 1897, the campaign remained confined to a chorus of complaints from waiter organizations that establishments were hiring prostitutes in the guise of waitresses. During Lueger’s regime, however, the campaign gained political valence. In 1897, waiter associations began targeting specific locales and proprietors who hired female staff. The Österreichische Kellner-Zeitung reported that a restaurateur named Schenk had replaced all the waiters at his establishment in Vienna’s Wallfischgasse with waitresses not for service but for “amusement” and “enticement” of the guests. Similarly, in the summer of 1897, the exhibition of zoological objects at the Venedig in Wien required the setup of many more buffets and eateries to cater to the larger crowds that the show would attract. The newspaper reported that the man in charge of this project was a local restauranteur Sigmund Spitzer and that he had contracted the hotelier Carl Wolf for setting up the buffets. Wolf had hired nearly forty waitresses to work at the eateries.115 In April 1897, a deputation comprised Hans Preyer (1870–1956), the head and representative of all hospitality workers in Vienna, the secretary of the Viennese Marqueur Association Ludwig Bayer, and the editor in chief of the Österreichische Kellner-Zeitung Hans Rothbach submitted a memorandum to the police president on the case of Mädchenbedienung in Vienna.116 The deputy chief of police Hofrat Johann Hebra discussed the issue with the deputation and promised police cooperation in combating Mädchenbedienung. Then he sent them to the head of the first section of the police department, Dr. Hans v. Freibeis. Rothbach emphasized that thousands of waiters and their families were close to starvation while many establishments continued to hire Animiermädchen and female cashiers who were apparently recruited principally from ranks of prostitutes. In May 1897, an application for the abolition of Mädchenbedienung, supported by both Hebra and Freibeis, was brought to the floor of the Austrian assembly. While the assembly rejected the application, the incident proved that the campaign against Mädchenbedienung now had supporters among high-ranking members of the police department as well as Christian Social members of the diet.117 In 1898, on the fiftieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef coming to the throne, the government organized an exhibition (Kaiserjubiläums-Ausstellung) that included several restaurants. Claiming that these restaurants used waitresses to attract guests, the members of the association Österreichischer GastgewerbeAngestellter (Austrian Hospitality Worker) initiated action against Mädchenbedienung in these locales. Another deputation composed of association members Preyer, Steiner, and Rothbach approached the Viennese police president and Mayor Lueger of Vienna to tighten regulation on such establishments. They received moderate success in the form of increased police regulation and surveillance of these establishments. The association was also successful in launching a campaign against waitresses in Prague, Reichenberg, Gablitz, Aussig, Karlsbad, and Linz.118

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An incident in 1898 further spurred voices clamoring for the elimination of Mädchenbedienung and increased police restrictions on hospitality establishments. In March of that year, the police detained the flower girls in a vaudeville establishment on suspicion of clandestine prostitution. Claiming that all the girls carried venereal diseases, the police placed them under medical supervision. Clandestine prostitution in such establishments, the Viennese police headquarters argued, was “highly deplorable” from a social hygienic viewpoint.119 In January 1900, the Viennese police headquarters issued a set of instructions for police supervision of prostitutes. The instructions targeted taverns and inns as sites of clandestine prostitution. The instructions specified strict action against owners of establishments that hired flower girls, waitresses, and female servants with the intention of prostituting them to their guests.120 In 1901, the police headquarters mandated that the regional commissariats should bring instances of clandestine prostitution of female employees in inns, local restaurants, pubs, and coffee shops to their attention immediately.121 By 1900, waiter organizations had acquired a nationalistic and political character and could potentially derail the hospitality businesses.122 The Austrian Hospitality Worker and many waiter organizations around the empire merged to form the organization Hausvereines der Gastgewerbe-Angestellten (Domestic Association of Hospitality Workers). The organization sought to reform the problem of Kellnerinnenunwesen (waitress mischief )—another term they used interchangeably with Mädchenbedienung. The official newspaper of this club, Allgemeine Kellner-Zeitung—renamed Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ in 1904123— stated that “all Austrian hospitality staff should agree to give the most thorough consideration to all civil questions of the profession so that a unanimous decision can be reached to reorganize the present, sad conditions of the employees of our industry.”124 In this regard, the association supported the extension of apprenticeships to female service personnel.125 An article published in January 1908 recommended nine measures for the “protection” of both the population and the women who took to waitressing. Mandatory registration of waitresses with the police within twenty-four hours of finding a service position and regulation of the living quarters of waitresses were among the suggestions prescribed in the article.126 The organization opened bureaus that offered free placement services to female service personnel. However, the true purpose of these bureaus was to ensure that owners of hospitality establishments did not give female personnel preference over male service personnel. In Vienna, the association opened a placement bureau in October 1904 under the management of Fräulein Adele Maix. The goal of the office was to ensure that female personnel met the same standards as their male counterparts since many male personnel allegedly remained unemployed even after a long apprenticeship. Therefore, the office allegedly checked documents and forced owners to consider applications of male personnel also.127

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By 1907, the narrative became so hostile that waiter associations did not even pretend to make a distinction between waitresses and “prostitutes.” In August 1907, the newspaper Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue reported that Germany sent three times more women than men to other countries and that Bavarian waitresses were the key “export-article” for Germany.128 During the 1908 Inquiry, S. Ehrmann claimed that hospitality staff, especially waitresses, and staff of showman trades such as circuses and cabarets were among the occupations that showed relatively high numbers of venereal disease incidence. The Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ seized on this observation and published an article in April of the same year, piggybacking on the connection that Ehrmann made between waitresses and showman trades. The article claimed that waitresses represented nothing more than showpieces to service guests and argued that the spread of Kellnerinnenbedienung, or use of waitresses, should be curbed with rigorous regulation in some locales.129 Similarly, in October of that year, the newspaper claimed that despite there being over two thousand unemployed waiters in Vienna, some Gasthaus owners shamelessly employed waitresses.130 In September 1909, the Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue ran a pithy but particularly spiteful feuilleton on female coffeehouse cashiers (Kaffeehauskassierin): “She is not only a cashier but also an information bureau for those guests who think that she is there for pleasure or even to animate them.”131 While Social Democrats argued passionately with Christian Socials on most other social issues, their political participation in the issue of Mädchenbedienung was lukewarm. The Arbeiter-Zeitung published a few articles supporting better working conditions for waitresses, but the newspaper’s principal concern was factory workers, not service personnel.132 In the late 1890s, precisely one Social Democratic newspaper catering to Austrian service personnel emerged. This was the newspaper titled Vorwärts. Despite its short lifespan between 1898 and 1900, the newspaper was sympathetic to the lot of female service personnel and reported some problems these women confronted. In March 1898, the paper reported the case of a female cashier Hermine Wolf working in Café Fromme in Vienna’s eighth district. Her colleague Theodor Huber apparently asked her to leave her post. When she refused, Huber lodged a complaint. The regional court at Josefstadt tried her on the accusation that she received tips for being a “pretty blonde.” Huber also accused her of swiping more bottles of beer than was her due. Other witnesses in the café argued that they were not aware of such happenings. The paper reported the ridiculousness of the case and the bad behavior of waiters who resented the influx of women into such posts.133 Nevertheless, the newspaper accepted the Mädchenbedienung narrative and argued that Mädchenbedienung was the product of the modern economic order that made it impossible for women to enter male professions without prostituting themselves.134 Furthermore, the newspaper attempted to introduce the reactive victim narrative in its short feuilletons on the life of a waitress. In 1900, Vorwärts

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published “Der Lebenslauf einer Kellnerin” (The life of a waitress). Sounding extraordinarily similar to Jungwirt’s tales of maidservant victimization, the story detailed the ordeals of a poor waitress who received barely two guldens for her difficult and often demeaning labor.135 The opposition to the Mädchenbedienung narrative came principally from owners of hospitality locales. They opposed the campaign against Mädchenbedienung by simply arguing that there were not enough waitresses in Vienna to exploit. In 1897, when Preyer’s deputation submitted a memorandum to abolish Mädchenbedienung to the Vienna police, the Oesterreichisch-ungarische Gasthaus-Zeitung,136 which represented interests of the proprietor organizations such as the Cooperative of Innkeepers, responded: We only take note of the matter to register a response. For the majority, it has no further significant interest since proprietors in Vienna do not employ permanent female waiters, and the latter play a role only in some coffee shops, isolated mostly in thirdclass coffeehouses and in certain seasonal inns, such as, for example, in “Venedig in Wien,” Hagenbeck and so on. We believe no permanent Viennese innkeeper, mindful of his reputation, would even dream of introducing female service.137

Any opposition from the waitresses themselves are difficult to find. The only instance that came to the fore was the following. In December 1914, a waitress named Mizzi Leimsieder wrote a letter to the editor of the Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue criticizing the language used by the newspaper against waitresses. She pointed out that while the newspaper was quick to target waitresses, waiters themselves did not seem to have problems being served drinks by chambermaids, even late at night in hotels. Further, she claimed that waitresses had as much difficulty finding jobs in Vienna as waiters. In fact, she argued, no bureau in Vienna placed waitresses. Finally, she underscored that three-quarters of Austrian waiters were not members of any association. Therefore, waiter associations did not represent the waiters of Austria. She signed off the letter as a “solid” waitress.138 Leimsieder’s article appeared amid World War I, when many men, including waiters, were being conscripted and women filled their vacated positions. At this time, the anti-Mädchenbedienung campaign died down considerably, leaving only the occasional article that echoed the vindictiveness against waitresses of the previous decade. Leimsieder’s criticism was perhaps a frustrated response to a few such articles. The efforts of waiter organizations to distance themselves from the servant occupation undermined opportunities for working-class women. The Mädchenbedienung campaign against waitresses served to decrease the employment availabilities for female service personnel in Vienna. At the turn of the century, Vienna held the distinction of having the fewest number of female coffeehouse employees of all the big cities in Europe. In 1886, of the 458 coffeehouses in Vienna, only 67 had permits to employ female servers.139 A typical fin de siècle Viennese

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coffeehouse hired exclusively male service personnel. The one exception was the coffeehouse renowned to be Empress Elisabeth’s favorite, Café Demel, that hired only female waitresses called Demelerinnen.140 The relentless campaign against the employment of female service personnel, one that equated female employees to prostitutes, made Vienna’s hospitality establishments inhospitable for female employment. In his 1886 manuscript, Schrank himself admitted that prostitution of female employees in hospitality establishments was not rampant in Vienna.141 Even the statistical data produced by vice police officials suggest this. Since the Trade Order classified waitresses and female cashiers as servants prior to 1885, it is unknown how many of the 8,333 servants apprehended on charges of clandestine prostitution in Vienna between 1877 and 1885 were waitresses and female cashiers.142 However, in the statistics on the years between 1898 and 1907, only 19 of the 2,349 newly registered prostitutes were former waitresses. Further, only about 11.2 percent of women were in the nonspecific category of female cashiers and saleswomen.143 By the turn of the century, dwindling opportunities for employment in Vienna caused many women to migrate to other parts of the empire in search of positions. Although the discourse on “immorality” of female service personnel was pervasive in these regions, women continued to play an important role in the hospitality establishments. In Istria and southern regions of the empire, many establishments employed female servers and waitresses in large numbers. These women were crucial for the ambience of the various cafés, inns, and pubs in these regions.144 However, the migration of female job seekers to these regions only increased police scrutiny, as we shall see in chapter 5. In 1911, Hungary surpassed Vienna’s antiwaitressing measures when the influential Hungarian minister György Lukács de Erzsébetváros (1865–1950) instituted a universal ban on waitresses. Following this, no hotel, restaurant, inn, or coffeehouse in Hungary was permitted to use female staff for serving guests. Further, the government revoked licenses of proprietors who failed to abide by the ban.145

Conclusion The painting and the furniture of the “silver” coffeehouse were of a simplicity that would be found poor today, but at the back tables, on the horsehair-cushioned dark leather armchairs sat well-known and admired regulars and at the cash register, as one says, was enthroned the most beautiful cashier in all of Vienna, the black-haired Kathon, who at the time of the French invasions of 1805 and 1809 was once known by the name Katharina. On a dull autumn afternoon of 1826, several regulars were grouped around the cash register . . .146

This is an extract from Anton Langer’s famous folk novel series Die Kassierin vom Silbernen Kaffeehaus.147 The first issue of the series was illustrated by a printed

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version of an 1826 lithograph of the same name. The famous artist Vinzenz Katzler created the lithograph. Katzler’s image supported by Langer’s words captured the ambience of a typical Viennese coffeehouse of the Biedermeier period (1824–46). An inseparable part of this ambience was the Sitzkassierin or simply Kassierin (female cashier). During the Biedermeier period, her significance in the coffeehouse was much more than merely collecting payments from the guests. A typical Biedermeier café with its lush silver interiors was often called “silver.” The hostess of this “silver” establishment was the Kassierin.148 Yet, by the turn of the century, a relentless campaign against the employment of female service personnel made employment in Vienna’s coffeehouses hostile for this cultural symbol. The demographic feminization of the servant occupation thus involved not merely increased migrations of working-class women from the countryside to cities such as Vienna. It also involved social movements that reacted to this migration. The push for increased paternalistic control over working-class women’s bodies and increasing policing of this subsection of the population characterized such movements. The anti-Mädchenbedienung campaign initiated by male service personnel in Vienna’s hospitality industry was one such movement. As I will argue in the following chapters, by the end of the nineteenth century, the seemingly contradictory narratives deployed by the medical community, the Christian Socials, and the Social Democrats were in reality very much in alignment. They did not, by any measure, forward a more egalitarian and less paternalistic bargain for the female servants themselves. They did, however, propagate and saturate the culture of fin de siècle Vienna with a system of ideas derived from the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant that portrayed a numerous and heterogenous group of people capable of agency and autonomy as exotic and hapless creatures in desperate need of guidance.

Notes 1. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 129. 2. In fact, studies on servants in a number of regions around the world have shown that most women who lived in the imperial palace or large manorial estates including relatives and noblewomen worked as servants. Furthermore, servants could also become relatives. Conversely, even mothers and wives of the monarch were viewed as servants of the monarchy. So, it could be argued that all men and women, barring the ruler or the head of the estate, were servants. See, for instance, Anne Walthall, ed., Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berkeley, 2008), 3. Even in nonaristocratic households, it was common in many regions for families to hire relatives as servants. See, Raffaella Sarti, “Who Are Servants? Defining Domestic Service in Western Europe (16th–21st Centuries),” in S. Pasleau and I. Schopp (eds.), with R. Sarti, Proceedings of the “Servant Project,” 5 vols., vol. 2, Liege, Éditions de l’Univérsité de Liège, 2005 (but 2006), pp. 3–59. [Cited in the format requested by the author.]

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3. Brian P. Levack, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, vol. 1: Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft (New York, 2001), 103. 4. Benedikt Franz Hermann, Reisen durch Oesterreich, Steyermark, Kärnten, Krain, Italien, Tyrol, Salzburg, und Bayern (Vienna, 1783), 109–11. 5. See, Tomáš Cvrček, Schooling under Control: The Origins of Public Education in Imperial Austria, 1769–1869 (Tübingen, 2020). 6. In the context of the late nineteenth century, Teresa McBride has termed domestic service as a bridging occupation. She argues that while factory labor provided better financial rewards for women, many migrants and their families took an unfavorable view of young women working in factories. They associated factory work with loose morals, the loss of honor, and the failure to make good marriages. It is in this context that McBride terms domestic service as a bridging occupation—a temporary state before marriage and not a life-long career. See, McBride, Domestic Revolution, 47–48, 82–84. 7. Wilhelm Franz Exner, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Gewerbe und Erfindungen Oesterreichs von der Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1873), 70. 8. Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie 2. Ausgabe (München, 2005), 363. 9. Annemarie Steidl, “Migration Patterns in the Late Habsburg Empire,” in Migration in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof and Dirk Rupnow (New Orleans, 2017), 69–86. 10. Monika Glettler, Böhmisches Wien (Vienna, 1985), 65. In addition to late industrialization and urbanization, the large-scale influx of migrants to Vienna is also related to some changes that took place in the Bohemian and Moravian agriculture. See Petra Grešlová, Simone Gingrich, Fridolin Krausmann, Pavel Chromý, and Vít Jančák, “Social Metabolism of Czech Agriculture in the Period 1830–2010,” AUC Geographica 50, no. 1 (2015): 23–35. For Czech migrants’ work, life, and politics in Vienna, see Jakub S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890– 1918 (New York, 2017); Monika Glettler, Sokol und Arbeiterverein (D.T.J.) der Wiener Tschechen bis 1914: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der nationalen Bewegung in beiden Organisationen (München und Vienna, 1970). 11. By 1910, around 70,000 women in Vienna were from Bohemia versus only 65,000 men. Similarly, approximately 112,000 women versus 99,000 men arrived from Moravia. See Glettler, Böhmisches Wien, 62. 12. See, Andeas Weigl, Von der Existenzsicherung zur Wohlstandsgesellschaft: Überlebensbedingungen und Lebenschancen in Wien und Niederösterreich von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts biz zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 2020). 13. Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire (West Lafayette, 2021), 49. 14. Andreas Weigl, Demographischer Wandel und Modernisierung in Wien (Vienna, 2000), 67, 109. 15. Several historical studies that focus on servants in different urban centers of Europe provide socioeconomic as well as cultural reasons why women chose to join domestic service instead of working in factories. For instance, Edith Rigler argues that servanthood fit into the ideal of women performing domestic tasks, and many young women entered service to save up for their dowry and to train for their future lives as wives and mothers. See Edith Rigler, Frauenleitbild und Frauenarbeit in Österreich vom ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkreig, vol. 8 of Sozial- und wirtschaftshistorische Studien (Vienna, 1976), 54–57. Moreover, at the start of the industrial revolution, do-

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mestic service was one of the few avenues available to poor, unskilled, migrant young women to earn a living. The average age of a servant girl was between fifteen and twenty years. Their work generally ended upon their marriage at twenty to thirty years of age. See Gábor Gyáni, Women as Domestic Servants: The Case of Budapest, 1890–1940 (New York, 1989), 20. John R. Gillis argues that, unlike factory work, domestic service readily provided food, wages, and boarding for a newcomer to the city. See, John R. Gillis, “Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risk of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900,” in Sex and Class in Women’s History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith R. Walkowitz (London, 1983), 119. In Vienna, for example, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, about 9 percent of working women had their food and shelter provided for by their employers. These women included waitresses, cooks, and chambermaids. See, Josef Ehmer, “Frauenarbeit und Arbeitfamilie in Wien: Vom Vormärz bis 1934,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7, nos. 3/4 (1981): 449. Felix Czeike, Historisches Lexicon Wien: Band 3 H-L (Vienna, 1997), 95–96. Tichy, Alltag und Traum, 25; As Glettler points out, the legendary clichés of the böhemische Köchin and böhemische Dienstmädchen, applied to servants in Vienna, arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Glettler, Böhmisches Wien, 61–62. For an interpretation of the figure of a Czech servant in Viennese literature, see Karin Ofner, “Max Brod: Ein Freund der Tschechen?” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 1993), 34–46. Some female Jewish migrants also entered domestic service. According to Rebecca Korbin, a belief was cultivated among Jewish communities that domestic service threatened a woman’s purity. See Rebecca Korbin, “‘The Murdered Hebrew Maidservant of East New York’: Gender, Class, and the Jewish Household in Eastern Europe and Its Diaspora,” in Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2011), 81. Due to such cultural stigmas, Jewish women often refrained from domestic service. Of the women who joined service between 1787 and 1847 in Vienna, over 40 percent of Jewish servants came from Bohemia or Moravia, and 38 percent came from Hungary. In 1869, 43.4 percent came from Hungary, 28.9 percent from Bohemia, 19.4 percent from Moravia or Silesia, 4.2 percent from Galicia or Bukovina, and only 1 percent were local-born Viennese. Many Jewish families had migrated to Vienna following Joseph II’s Patent of Tolerance issued in 1782. These were merchant families who formed the Jewish middle class of Vienna. Such families employed only Jewish servants since social pressure not to employ Christian servants was high. Gasser argues that, after 1867, there were no significant differences in the employment of Christian and Jewish servants among the Jewish middle classes in Vienna. See, Wolfgang Gasser, “Aus dem Ghetto in die bürgerlichen Familien—DienstbotInnen im Zeitalter der jüdischen Emanzipation 1770–1870,” DAVID: Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift, no. 66 (September 2005). See also, Wolfgang Gasser, “Jüdische DienstbotInnen in Wien—von den napoleonischen Kriegen, dem Biedermeier bis zur 1848-Revolution” (master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 2001), 64–72. In 1869, 13 percent of servants were men; in 1890, 6 percent; and by 1900, only 3 percent of servants in Vienna were men. See, Czeike, Historisches Lexicon Wien: Band 3 H-L, 96. Fritz Winter, “Statistisches,” Dokumente der Frauen, Band II, no. 21 (January 1900) in Dokumente der Frauen Band II October 1899–März 1900, ed. Auguste Fickert, Marie Lang, and Rosa Mayreder, 585. See also, Richter, “Die Produktion,” 12. Mareike König, ed., Deutsche Handwerker, Arbeiter und Dienstmädchen in Paris: Eine vergessene Migration im 19. Jahrhundert (München, 2003), 71.

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21. Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia, Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015). 22. See, José C. Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration, and Ethnic Niches,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 559–79. 23. Annemarie Steidl’s work reveals that short-distance migration patterns have had as significant an impact as long-distance migrations. See, Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire (Purdue, 2021), 163–210. 24. For source data for figure 3.1, see, Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 113. 25. Morgenstern’s study included a number of statistical surveys from 1880 to 1900. The data presented in my book are from 1895, unless mentioned otherwise. 26. For source data for figure 3.2, see, Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 119. 27. For source data for figure 3.3, see, Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 129, 131, 184. 28. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 186. 29. Ibid., 187–88. 30. Ibid., 155. 31. For source data for figure 3.4, see, Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 156. 32. Ibid., 157. 33. Ibid., 141. 34. OeStA, AVA, MdI Präs., Karton 20/9 (1905–1906) 1-4100, #2436, 1906. Report from the k.k. Statthalter at Prag to the k.k. Statthalterrei-Präsidium, 18 März 1906, 1–6. 35. OeStA, AVA, MdI Präs., Karton 20/9 (1905–1906) 1-4100, #2904, 1906. Report from the k.k. Statthalter at Lemberg to the k.k. Minister des Innern in Wien, 8 März 1906. 36. OeStA, AVA, MdI Präs., Karton 20/9 (1905–1906) 1-4100, #3394, Report from the k.k. Statthalter at Lemberg to the k.k. Minister des Innern in Wien, 14 April 1906. 37. Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Hauses des Abgeordneten des österreichischen Reichsrathes im Jahre 1901, VIII Band (Vienna, 1902), 7047. 38. Ibid., 7134. 39. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82. 40. Ibid., 168. 41. Ibid., 144. 42. “Rechenschaftsbericht des Wiener Kellnervereines vom Jahre 1866/87,” Gastwirthschaftlicher Reformator, 15 November 1887, 1. 43. See, Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82, 144, 168; “XIX Rechenschaftsbericht des Wiener Kellnervereines vom Jahre 1866/87,” Gastwirthschaftlicher Reformator, 15 November 1887, 1. 44. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82. The Genossenschaften were cooperatives formed by proprietors in the hospitality industry. These included the Genossenschaft der Gastwirte (Cooperative of Innkeepers), the Genossenschaft der Wiener Kaffeesieder (Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners), and the Gremium der Hoteliers und Fremdenbeherberger (Association of Hoteliers and Tourists Accommodations). They published specialized newspapers. For instance, the first issue of Der Stammgast: Allgemeine Gast und Kaffeehaus-Zeitung, which would become tremendously popular among Viennese coffeehouse aficionados, first circulated in 1869. See, Der Stammgast: Allgemeine Gast-und Kaffeehaus Zeitung, 1 January 1869, 1. 45. “Moderner, Sklavenhandel,” Oesterr. -Ung Café- und Gasthaus-Zeitung, 15 February 1878, 2–3.

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46. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82–83. 47. “Anhang: Von Lohnbedienten,” in Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 46–48. 48. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1862, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1883), 4. “Personen, welche bei dem Betriebe eines Gewerbes nur Hausgesinde-Dienste verrichten, wie Kellner, Fuhrknechte, u.s.w., werden unter, Gehilfen” nicht begriffen (§73).” 49. Ibid. 50. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1875, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 47. 51. Josef Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien in historischer, administrativer und hygienischer Beziehung I. Band: Die Geschichte der Prostitution in Wien (Vienna, 1886), 410. 52. “Unser Programm,” Central-Blatt der Wiener Kellner-Verreines, 30 November 1872, 1. “Eine Hauptaufgabe des Vereines liegt in der geistigen und moralischen Veredlung seiner Mitglieder.” 53. Ibid.; “. . . wenn es uns gelingt in dem Kreise unserer Berufsgenossen jene Wohlanständigkeit zu wecken und zu befördern, ohne welche in unseren Kreisen ein erfreulicher geschäftlicher Aufschwung gar nicht zu denken ist. Wir werden nicht unterlassen, in dieser Richtung anregend und belehrend zu wirken, um dadurch die Abstellung anerkannter Uebelstände allmälig zu erwirken.” 54. “Die Wiener Kellner und die Wiener Gastwirthsgenossenschaft,” Oesterreichischungarische Kaffee- und Gasthaus-Zeitung, 1 July 1882, 4–5. 55. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1886, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 74. 56. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82. Beyfuß was an influential person in Vienna’s hospitality industry. He was a member of the Genossenschafts and the niederösterreichischen Handels- und Gewerbekammer, the editor in chief of Der Stammgast, and the owner of a prominent wine locale and a hotel in Vienna. Further, he was among the delegations sent by the Austro-Hungarian government to the World Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. See, Officieller Bericht der K.K. Österr. Central-Comission für die Weltausstellung in Chicago im Jahre 1893 Erster Band (Vienna, 1894), 7, 34, 38. 57. Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 82. 58. Ibid., 83. 59. Ibid., 82–83. 60. Ibid., 83. 61. VGA-Wien, “Zum Verbot der Mädchenbedienung,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 1 October 1896, 1. Signatur: E9. “Keine Macht der Welt kann heute die Wiener Kaffeesieder daran hindern, über Nacht weibliche Bedienung einzuführen.” 62. Ibid., 1–2. At the time, there was no fixed minimum wage for waiters in Vienna. Individual proprietors determined the wages of the waiters in their establishment. Of course, waiters augmented their salary through tips. In some establishments, tips exceeded the wages they received. 63. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1888, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1894), 68.

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64. VGA-Wien, “Offener Brief,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 May 1897, 3. Signatur: E9; “. . . die Kellner seit dem Inkrafttreten der neuen Gewerbenovelle—das ist seit circa 12 Jahren—keine Bediensten mehr sind, sondern gewerbliche Hilfsarbeiter . . . die Kellner vor circa 12 Jahren, als die neue Gewerbenovelle in Kraft trat, erleichtert aufathmeten, weil sie aus der Kategorie der Dienstboten gestrichen und in jene der gewerblichen Hilfsarbeiter eingereiht wurden, weil er damals noch in kurzem Höschen auf der Schulbank gesessen und nie daran gedacht, daß er einst Redacteur einer Hebammen- und Kellner-Zeitung werden wird.” 65. VGA-Wien, “Die Behörden und das Kellnerinnenunwesen,” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 15 February 1912, 2. Signatur: E10. 66. Schrank’s story about the connection between prostitution and waitressing starts in the eighteenth century. He claims that between 1745 and 1776, Habsburg authorities took several measures to eliminate this practice in such establishments. This included a decree in 1745 that forbade the opening of a billiards room on the first floor of a coffeehouse. Similarly, coffeehouses on ground floors had to have their windows facing the street and their doors off the street. These regulations enabled police officials to monitor the activities in these establishments. In April 1754, the police “prostitution proofed” more than forty-five bars. In Lower Austria, an edict issued by the government in 1774 mandated that waitresses in pubs, inns, and local restaurants should not be affected by prostitution and that they should be employed as respectable household servants. The police could confiscate businesses of establishments that violated this edict. In 1775, there were incidents when police arrested girls for the crime of “being a waitress” and confiscated the establishments where they worked. See, Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, I. Band: Die Geschichte, 164–65. See also, Ulrike Spring, Wolfgang Kos, and Wolfgang Freitag, eds., Im Wirtshaus: Eine Geschichte der Wiener Geselligkeit (Vienna, 2007), 245–46. 67. Schrank here is discussing the connection between prostitution and hospitality establishments such as cafés, bars, restaurants, and inns. He is not referring to establishments that developed exclusively for prostitution. He discusses the latter in his book as well. 68. Schrank, Die Prostitution, Band I: Die Geschichte der Prostitution, 407–8. 69. Ibid., 410–11. 70. Other works on prostitution such as H. Montane’s book (1925) also refer to the connection between prostitution and waitressing that existed in nineteenth-century Vienna. See, H. Montane, Die Prostitution in Wien: Ihre Geschichte und Entwicklung von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg, Vienna, Leipzig, 1925), 81–84. The connection between waitressing and prostitution existed in other big cities in Europe as well. For instance, see, Andrew Israel Ross, “Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 2 (2015): 288–313. 71. Nancy M. Wingfield, “Regulating Prostitution and Controlling Venereal Disease in the Bohemian Lands at the End of the ‘Long’ Nineteenth Century,” Prager wirtschafts- und sozialhistorische Mitteilungen-Prague Economic and Social History Papers 20, no. 2 (2014): 7–25. 72. Peter Payer, “‘Wien bei Nacht, wie es tanzt und lacht’: Stadtimage und Erotik 1840 bis 1930,” in Brunner et al., Sex in Wien, 248–59. 73. Jill Smith, Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 2014), 130–32.

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74. For prostitution in Parisian coffeehouses, see W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore, 1996), 179–206. 75. Payer, “Wien bei Nacht wie es tanzt und lacht,” 248–59. 76. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1873, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1883), 47. 77. Schrank, Die Prostitution, Band I: Die Geschichte der Prostitution, 311. 78. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1879, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1881), 67–69. 79. Ibid., 7. 80. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1884, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 94. 81. Schrank, Die Prostitution, Band I: Die Geschichte der Prostitution, 410. 82. Ibid., 311. 83. Ibid., 368. 84. Ibid., 410. 85. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1888, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 25. 86. Ibid., 57–59. 87. Ibid., 87; ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1889, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 102; Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1890, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 11. 88. Reingard Witzmann, “Das Wiener Kaffeehaus als Ort städtischer Geselligkeit und Kultur 1685–1880,” in Das Wiener Kaffeehaus: Von den Anfängen bis zur Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna, 1980), 27–35. 89. Charlotte Ashby, “The Cafés of Vienna: Space and Sociability,” in The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture, ed. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller (New York, 2013), 9–31. 90. Witzmann, “Das Wiener Kaffeehaus,” 30. 91. Ashby, “Cafés of Vienna,” 13. See also, Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (New York, 2007). 92. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1878, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 16. “In den Fallen, in welchen die Prostitution gehegt und die Kuppelei, unter welchem Deckmantel immer, nachweisbar betrieben wird, ist auf die Entziehung der Concession bei der Gewerbsbehörde nachdrücklich hinzuwirken.” 93. “Zur Prostitution,” Oesterr. -Ung Café- und Gasthaus-Zeitung, 15 November 1878, 2; “. . . die Nachtcaféhäuser, mögen sie noch so sehr unter der strengen Auffsicht des Eigenthümers stehen, mögen sie noch so ordentlich—soweit dies eben möglich ist—geleitet werden, möge es daselbst noch so anständig hergeben, immer werden sie dem socialen Uebel der Prostitution Vorschub leisten.”

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94. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1888, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 8–9. 95. “Weibliche oder männliche Bedienung?” Oesterreichisch-ungarische Kaffee- und GasthausZeitung, 1 June 1879, 2. “Unter der Hand guter und umsichtiger Dienstgeber werden solche Mädchen oft recht brauchbare Stützen des Geschäftes.—Sehr oft entwickelt sich—und es ist dies bezeichnend für die gemüthlichen süddeutschen Verhältnisse—ein recht patriarchalisches Verhältniß zwischen dem Herrn und den Bedienerinnen.” 96. “Briefe und Prag,” Central-Blatt des Wiener Kellner-Vereines, 3 May 1873, 2. 97. For Christian Social antisemitism in fin de siècle Vienna, see, Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 188–205. See also, John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago, 1988). 98. VGA-Wien, “Zum Verbot der Mädchenbedienung,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 1 October 1896, 1. Signatur: E9. 99. Ibid., 2. 100. Ibid., 1–2. “Zu jener Zeit, als die Hotel-, Gastwirthe- und Kaffeehausgehilfen noch in die Kategorie der Dienstboten eingereiht waren, war die ,Mädchenbedienung‘ welche sich in dieser Zeit zumeist nur auf die ,Tschecherl‘ mit ihren, Dunkelkammern erstreckte, vom moralischen Standpunkte verwerflich, heute ist dieselbe ein Unding. Der männliche Hilfsarbeiter im Gast- und Schankgewerbe muß drei bis vier Jahren lernen, die Fachschule besuchen, sich Sprachkentnisse aneignen und sich im In- und Auslande in seinem Berufe ausbilden, das Mädchen hingegen, welches den Gehilfen ersetzt, oder ersetzen soll, braucht nur eine große Portion Schamlosigkeit und einen—guten Magen und sie ist eine befähigte—Kaffeehaus- oder Restaurantgehilfin.” 101. LPDW, Karton: Vereins & Versammlungswesen 1897, Akte: Vereins .u. Versammlungswesen 1897, Letter from k.k. Polizei-Bezirks-Commissariat Leopoldstadt, Wien, 28 July 1897; Protokoll, 31 July 1897; Application, 20 December 1897. 102. Payer, “Wien bei Nacht wie es tanzt und lacht,” 248–59. 103. “Wien bei Nacht,” Wiener Caricaturen, 4 February 1906, 8. “Die Mädels: Was man heutzutage von die Männer alles einstecken muß. Sogar ihre Brieftascheln . . .” 104. VGA-Wien, “Offener Brief,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 May 1897, 3. Signatur: E9. 105. VGA-Wien, “Ein Principal als ‘Ritter’ seiner Cassierin,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 February 1897, 4. Signatur: E9. 106. F.F Budapest, “Die Hotel-Zimmermädchen,” Allgemeine Kellner-Zeitung, 15 September 1895, 2. 107. F. Reinstein, “Der Kellnerinnnen-Streik,” Allgemeine Kellner-Zeitung, 1 October 1894, 2–4. 108. “Venedig im Prater,” Wiener neueste Nachrichten, 4 March 1895, 5. 109. For instance, an article in August 1896 titled “Die Kellnerin: Eine Gelegenheitsstudie” (The waitress: A casual study) criticized the hire of female employees in the establishments in Venedig in Wien. See “Die Kellnerin: Eine Gelegenheitsstudie,” Allgemeine Kellner-Zeitung, 15 August 1896, 1. 110. VGA-Wien, “Kampf gegen das Unding, genannt ‘Mädchenbedienung,’”Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 April 1897, 3. Signatur: E9. 111. According to the 1885 amendment, female cooks in inns, pubs, and local restaurants were classified as commercial workers. See, ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-

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112. 113.

114. 115. 116.

117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

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Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1888, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1894), 68. VGA-Wien, “Köchinnen, wie sie—nicht sein sollen,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 1 July 1897, 5. Signatur: E9. For instance, the obituaries reveal many female members. See, VGA-Wien, “Verzeichnis der verstorbenen Mitglieder der Gehilfen-Krankenkasse der Gastwirthe in Wien in der Zeit vom 1. November 1909 bis 31. Oktober 1910: Weibliche Mitglieder,” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 November 1910, 2–3. Signatur: E10. VGA-Wien, “Zwei Jubilare unseres Standes,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 December 1897, 2. Signatur: E9. VGA-Wien, “Kampf gegen das Unding, genannt ‘Mädchenbedienung,’” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 April 1897, 2. Signatur: E9. Maren Seliger, Scheinparlamentarismus im Führerstaat: “Gemeindevertretung” im Austrofaschismus und Nationalsozialismus Funktionen und politische Profile Wiener Räte und Ratsherren 1934–1945 im Vergleich (Vienna and Berlin, 2010), 289. VGA-Wien, “Die Gehilfenvertreter im Polizeipräsidium,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 April 1897, 3. Signatur: E9; VGA-Wien, “Die, Mädchenbedienung—abgeschaft,” Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung, 15 December 1897, 3–4. Signatur: E9. At the turn of the century, waiter associations garnered considerable influence in the waiter community. For instance, in its thirty-one-year period, Wiener Kellner-Verein had spent 202,858 kronen 90 hellers on medical expenses of its members, and, of this, it had spent 588 kronen to aid poor waiters and their families. In 1898/99, the association was 1,434 members strong and had helped 110 poor waiters and their families. In this period alone had spent 14,531 kronen to cover medical costs of 222 of its members, 77 kronen to cover hospital costs of 7 ill members, 2,000 kronen to cover the funeral charges of 22 dead members, 77 kronen 60 hellers as rewards and 203 kronen 40 hellers on miscellaneous charges. See, Rechenschaftsbericht des Wiener Kellner-Vereines vom Jahre 1898/99. Its influence remained during the World War I years as well. In 1914, for instance, the head of the association, Oskar Klausberger, introduced the 4 Heller-Invoice-receipt. The invoice books were available as a book of 100 pages for 4 kronen. The price was expected to lower to 3 kronen 60 hellers, and the collection went to the Red Cross. The association requested its colleagues to use the invoice to increase sales volume as a patriotic act. See, LPDW, Karton: Vereins & Versammlungswesen 1914, Akte: Vereins .u. Versammlungswesen 1914, Notice from Oskar Klausberger to the Hotel- and Gastwirtegehilfen. VGA-Wien, “Front dem Kellnerinnenunwesen,” Central-Blatt des Wiener Kellner-Vereines, 10 October 1908, 1. Signatur: E11. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1898 (Vienna, 1898), 34. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1900 (Vienna, 1900), 1, 10–11. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1901 (Vienna, 1901), 59. For instance, in 1906, a restauranteur named B. Hofer was to open a restaurant, Bürgerhof, in Vienna’s third district and hire waitresses for his establishment. Preyer, who had by then been elected to the Viennese administrative council (Gemeiderat), sent an interpellation to Lueger’s office, highlighting the issue. The report argued that the Trade

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125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

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Order recommended a three-year apprenticeship that many female service personnel lacked, and, as a result, many male service personnel suffered from the spread of Mädchenbedienung. Hofer was denied concession to open the restaurant; however, Lueger noted that such establishments were leading enterprises in the city’s commerce. The Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant- Revue speculated that the mayor might not have responded as such had the Vienna city administration not included the hotelier, Wimberger, among its members. See, VGA-Wien, “Gehilfenobmann Gemeinderat Preyer gegen die ‘Mädchenbedienung,’” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 October 1906, 1–2. Signatur: E10. Despite the delay, Hofer still managed to purchase a leasing concession that enabled him to open the restaurant in a leased property in Vienna’s third district. See, VGA-Wien, “Mädchenbedienung im Restaurant ‘Bürgerhof,’”Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 15 October 1906, 2. Signatur: E10. VGA-Wien, “Mädchenbedienung,” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 7 May 1904, 1. Signatur: E11. “Ein österreichischer Kellnertag in Wien,” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 18 June 1904, 2; “. . . alle österreichischen Gastgewerbe-Angestellten untereinander uns Einvernehmen setzen, um alle Standesfragen der genauesten Erwägung zu unterziehen, damit zur gründlichen Reorganisierung der gegenwärtig bestehenden traurigen Verhältnisse der Angestellten unseres Gewerbes ein einmütiger Beschluß gefaßt werden kann.” Ibid., 2. “Abschaffung, respektive gesetzliche Regelung der Mädchenbedienung durch die Ausdehnung des Lehrlingswesens auf das weibliche Servierpersonal.” VGA-Wien, “Tagespresse und Standesfragen,” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 25 January 1908, 1–2. Signatur: E11. “Eine weibliche Stellenvermittlungsabteilung der Sektion ‘Wien,’” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 15 November 1904, 4. VGA-Wien, “Die ‘Kellnerin’ als Exportartikel,” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 August 1907, 6. Signatur: E10. VGA-Wien, “Kellnerinnen und Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 10 April 1908, 1–2. Signatur: E11. VGA-Wien, “Front dem Kellnerinnenunwesen,” Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ, 10 October 1908, 1–2. Signatur: E11. VGA-Wien, R. Frühauf, “Feuilleton: Die Kaffeehauskassierin,” Oesterreichische Hotelund Restaurant-Revue, 1 September 1909, 2. Signatur: E10. “Sie nicht nur Kassierin, sondern auch ein förmliches Auskunftsbureau derjenigen Gäste, die von derselben denken, daß sie zum Vergnügen oder gar zum animieren derselben da ist.” Spring et al., Im Wirtshaus, 246; See also, Karin Jušek, Auf der Suche nach der Verlorenen: Die Prostitutionsdebatten im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna, 1994), 193–202. “Die Cassierin,” Vorwärts, 15 March 1898, 4–5. “Der Kampf gegen die Mädchenbedienung,” Vorwärts, 15 April 1898, 2–3. “Feuilleton: Der Lebenslauf einer Kellnerin,” Vorwärts, 20 November 1900, 1. The newspaper started publication in 1894. “Unser Programm,” Oesterreichischungarische Gasthaus-Zeitung, 1 November 1894, 1. “Zur Frage der Mädchenbedienung,” Oesterreichisch-ungarische Gasthaus-Zeitung, 1 May 1897, 2. “Wir nehmen von der Angelegenheit nur darum Notiz, um eben ein Vorkömmniß zu registriren. Für die Principalenschaft hat sie weiter kein wesentliches Interesse, den die ständigen Wirthe beschäftigen in Wien keine weibliche Kellner und diese spielen nur eine Rolle in einigen Kaffeschänken und höchst vereinzelt in Kaffee-

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138. 139. 140.

141. 142.

143.

144. 145. 146.

147. 148.

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häusern dritter Güte und endlich bei gewissen Saison-Gasthäusern, wie z.B. in ‘Venedig in Wien,’ Hagenbeck u.s.w. Wir sind der Ansicht, daß kein ständiger, auf Reputation haltender Wiener Gastwirthe auch nur im Traume daran denkt, weibliche Bedienung einzuführen.” VGA-Wien, “Feuilleton: Offener Brief einer Kellnerin,” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 December 1914, 2–3. Signatur: E10. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 414. “Hofzuckerbäcker Demel,” Oesterr.-Ung. Café- und Gasthaus-Zeitung, 1 August 1878, 4. See also, Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, eds., Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Waterford, 1999), 493. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 368. Josef Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien in historischer, administrativer und hygienischer Beziehung II. Band: Die Administration und Hygiene der Prostitution in Wien (Vienna, 1886), 244. “Vierter Abend: Diskussion,” in Die Enquete der Österreichischen Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten, ed. S. Ehrmann (Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten Im Auftrage der Deutschen Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten IX Band, ed. A. Blaschko, S. Ehrmann, E. Finger, J. Jadassohn, K. Kreibich, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser) (Leipzig, 1908), 190. Against this, in 1881 Berlin, the vice police apprehended 345 waitresses, of whom 129 were allegedly prostitutes. See, Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 412. In 1909 Baden, a report stated that over 70 percent of the waitresses had sex with guests for money and 50–60 percent were former maidservants. See, “Tagesgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 8, no. 2 (1908), in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten VIII. Band, ed. A. Blaschko, S. Ehrmann, E. Finger, J. Jadassohn, K. Kreibich, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1908), 82–83. Further, there were approximately four thousand waitresses working in München. See, VGA-Wien, “Die Kellnerinnen in München,” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 September 1910, 3–4. Signatur: E10. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 141. VGA-Wien, “Die Kellnerin in ganz Ungarn verboten!” Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue, 1 August 1911, 5. Signatur: E10. Anton Langer, “Die Kassierin von silbernen Kaffeehause Volksroman: Erstes Kapitel; Die Stammgäste,” Roman-Beilage zur Volksschrift “Hans Jörgel von Gumpoldskirchen” 40, no. 1 (1871), 2. “Die Malerei und das Ameublement des ‘silbernen’ Kaffeehauses waren von einer Einfachheit, die man heutzutage ärmlich finden würde, aber an den schwarzen Tischchen, auf den roßhaargepolsterten dunklen Ledersesseln saßen die vielgekannten und bewunderten Stammgäste und ‘in der Kassa,’ wie man damals sagte, thronte die schönste Kassierin von ganz Wien, die schwarzlockige ‘Kathon,’ wie man seit den Franzosen-Invasionen 1805 und 1809 dem Namen ‘Katharina’ zu gallifiren pflegte. An einem trüben Herbstnachmittage des Jahres 1826 waren um die ‘Kassa’ mehrere von den Stammgästen gruppirt . . .” Die Kassierin vom Silbernen Kaffeehaus was first published as a miniseries in 1871 in local Viennese newspaper Hans Jörgel. Ashby, “Cafés of Vienna,” 15–16; Reingard Witzmann, “Das Wiener Kaffeehaus als Ort städtischer Geselligkeit und Kultur 1685–1880,” in Das Wiener Kaffeehaus: Von den Anfängen bis zur Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna, 1980), 78–79.

Chapter 4

THE NUMBER GAME

d Statistics are only of value according to their exactness: without this essential quality, they become useless, and even dangerous, since they conduce to error.1

I

n 1862, Josef Hermann, the director of the Syphilis and Dermatology Department at the Imperial Hospital in Wieden, opined that the whole weight of the problem of the spread of syphilis fell on prostitution. Hermann was a keen participant in a debate that would forge an unprecedented alliance between the medical community and the police network within the Habsburg Empire. In 1873, this alliance emerged in the Habsburg capital of Vienna under the banner of the prostitution regulation program. The bourgeois desire to distance themselves from the migrant population in big cities lay at the heart of this program. The growing population in the empire’s big cities forced the bourgeoisie to confront the social problems of disease and unhygienic living conditions. Syphilis, in this context, was a scourge to the health and reputation of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Confronted with the syphilis epidemic that perforated the boundaries separating the bourgeoisie from the lower classes, the liberal class aligned itself with policies that increased the cooperation between the police and physicians in regulating sexual conduct.2 The exaltation of statistics as an impartial and exact instrument of measurement formed the basis of this medico-police alliance. But preexisting policing tendencies had already skewed the medico-police alliance toward targeting servantclass women, thus rendering the impartiality and exactness of statistics moot. In other words, the key contribution of the empire’s medico-police alliance was to express preexisting narratives about servant women in the form of numbers instead of words. The numerical expression of these narratives not only legitimized biases against these women but also enabled the medico-police network to increase the surveillance and targeting of the lower classes.

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Statistics in the Second Vienna Medical School In the late eighteenth century, the orthodox school of statistics in Europe, a subject encompassing the descriptive study of the state, faced challenges from a new trend in the field that relied on numerical data, whose easy availability from official statistical bureaus of various regions of Europe spurred the transformation of the statistical discipline from one that provided descriptive information to statemen about the condition of a state to one that could be adapted for use in a variety of scientific and social disciplines. Influenced by the methodology of the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, scientists could now correlate statistical data with social conditions. Quetelet’s main contribution in this arena was the introduction of the concept of the Average Man. According to Quetelet, there was a certain type of fictitious man from whom all other men more or less differed. When the nature of the source and the conditions under which data are collected and grouped was uniform and the data was sufficiently large, Quetelet proposed, any individual variation could be attributed to accidental causes. Called the “bell curve,” Quetelet enabled the application of this statistical model to the study of social phenomena. The implication of Quetelet’s concept was profound, as it extended a sense of relative exactness to many scientific fields that dealt with social objects. Physicians, for instance, could determine the treatment of a particular patient by comparing him to a fictitious average. Quetelet prescribed a plan of international statistical uniformity whereby European states adopted a standard method of data collection and grouping to enable comparability of the progress of nations. Quetelet’s methods spread quickly among the various nationalistically charged regions of post-1848 Europe.3 Not unlike other European countries of the time, the Habsburg government’s promotion of statistical procedures reflected its keenness to boost its international reputation. Emperor Franz Joseph I’s government regarded statistics as a means to achieve multiple political agendas: to enable efficient communication within the bureaucracy, to halt revolutionary impulses in the postrevolutionary era, to assess the condition of the military and the population on the whole, and to establish the cooperation between science and the state. A specialized body to collect population data existed in the Habsburg realm as a part of the accounting directorate from 1829. In 1840, this office emerged as a separate directorate bearing the name the Imperial Office for Administrative Statistics. Led by its director Karl von Czoernig, the office introduced uniformity and comprehensiveness in data collection and processing. From the first volume released in 1841, scholars outside state offices could access the statistical publications of this office. Further, from 1850 onward the office published statistical surveys and handbooks annually for public perusal.4 State-driven statistics found fertile soil in the empire’s medical system that emerged in the postrevolutionary period. The Habsburg medical system, created by Maria Theresa’s court physician Gerard van Swieten (1700–1772) in 1745, was

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a highly bureaucratic system.5 The regulation of medical knowledge in this system concentrated at the Vienna Medical School, with the Josephinum and the Imperial General Hospital in Vienna being the main sites where medical education circulated.6 Rote learning of prescribed medical texts generated in the more advanced regions of Europe such as the Netherlands and France characterized the medical education in these centers.7 In this system, an amorphous group of physicians, including neurologists, internal medicine experts, and surgeons, handled sexually transmitted diseases. After 1848, the impulse to enhance the empire’s international standing yielded a new generation of physicians interested in producing knowledge rather than simply consuming the breakthroughs of Western Europe.8 Several reforms in 1849 granted increased teaching and research freedoms to the new generation of physicians.9 The Prague-trained physician and pioneer of the Second Vienna Medical School Carl von Rokitansky (1804–78) who assumed deanship of the Collegium of Professors in 1849, the presidentship of the Imperial Society of Physicians in 1850, and the chancellorship of Vienna University in 1852 created two new chairs at the school: the Chair of Dermatology, occupied by Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra, and the Chair of Venereal Diseases, occupied by Carl Ludwig Sigmund Ritter von Ilanor. Hebra separated dermatology from internal medicine and surgery, while Sigmund combined the dispersed units of syphilis patients in the Imperial General Hospital into a single clinic called the Viennese Clinic for Syphilis. Here, he trained young physicians to diagnose, research, and treat venereal diseases. Syphilis thus came under the purview of dermatologists and venereal disease specialists.10 The officialization of demographic procedures and the aspirations of officials such as Czoernig to find causal links between all major social phenomena created the impetus for the use of numerical data in these new medical specializations. Medical experts based their social and prophylactic measures upon numerical data on diseases and vital statistics that the imperial state collected from various regions of the empire.11 The onerous aspect of this project was the requirements and limitations inherent in the statistical methodology. Quetelet’s Average Man was an ideal that few social phenomena could emulate. Moreover, to establish causal links, not only would the conditions of data collection and groupings need to be uniform but the samples themselves had to be sufficiently large so that it could represent with reasonable accuracy the population under study. The medical community within the empire was fast confronted with the sheer unfeasibility of this project. A sample large enough to establish causal links was only available from regions of the empire that were subject to military occupation and systematic surveillance. Even in such cases, establishing causation from numerical data depended on the medical community reaching a consensus on how to interpret the statistical results. Physicians were frequently engaged in debates over the classification of specific diseases. This subsequently affected the interpretation of statistical results.

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In the early eighteenth century, Habsburg authorities had built a sanitary cordon at the military frontiers of the empire out of concern that military men would contract endemic infections from the local population. Between 1760 and 1859, Habsburg authorities conducted large-scale campaigns to eliminate an endemic nonvenereal form of syphilis called bejel in the provinces of Istria, Carniola, Slovenia, and Dalmatia. To circumvent the spread of endemic diseases, imperial authorities administered compulsory medical treatment to infected populations in these regions. These regional campaigns continued until 1880. Officials deployed in these regions had allegedly examined over 97 percent of the population to curb the epidemic. At the same time, the police had collected venereal disease data for women involved in trading in sex in the peripheral crownlands of Istrea, Krain, and Slovenia. After the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878/79, Habsburg authorities again imposed mandatory medical examinations on the local population.12 According to the new schema of classification adopted in 1855, the medical community in Vienna categorized venereal diseases into two forms—syphilitic and nonsyphilitic. Per this scheme, gonorrhea, white ulcers, and syphilis were all different forms of the same disease—gonorrhea being the mildest manifestation and syphilis being the most severe manifestation.13 After 1860, when statistical data from the peripheral crownlands became available in Vienna, debates ensued among physicians on how to classify endemic syphilis. Some physicians considered it to be a transformed type of leprosy, while others argued that it was the same syphilis manifesting differently since it was newly introduced in these regions. Key to these debates was the physicians’ failure to note the nonvenereal etiology of bejel. The result was that physicians classified bejel as sexually transmittable and hereditary. Consequently, they could argue that the data on both venereal syphilis and bejel represented the number of syphilis sufferers in the peripheral crownlands of the empire. Because of this anomalous classification, physicians could combine the data on venereal disease among women trading in sex with the data on endemic syphilis in the peripheral crownlands. The medical community could now construct women who traded in sex as key transmitters of venereal diseases.14 Sigmund, the chair of venereal diseases at the Vienna Medical School, who viewed diseases through the lens of population hygiene, had devoted his practice to “the systemic control of venereal diseases through individual as well as population education, and by mobilizing the means available to the state in legislation and administration.”15 Sigmund was instrumental in applying Quetelet’s methods to venereal disease data and correlating the statistical results obtained to social phenomena. His plan was to first calculate the statistics for syphilis in Vienna and then extend this procedure to the rest of the monarchy, and still further internationally. While Sigmund adopted the classification system of 1855 for the patients admitted to his clinic, the medical community in Vienna that

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included a loosely organized network of physicians working in private and public clinics and hospitals in addition to ambulatory care facilities had not universally adopted the schema. The confusion in terminologies and classification resulted in the production of highly inconsistent and unreliable venereal disease data in Vienna, not to mention other regions of the empire.16 Sigmund and many of his contemporaries sought to eliminate the problem of uniformity in data collection and grouping by bringing certain sections of Vienna’s population who were allegedly more vulnerable to venereal diseases under a regulated system of medical surveillance. Many medical experts particularly approved of Eduard Nusser’s 1850 suggestion to subject women involved in sex trading—or “prostitutes” as medical professionals termed them—to regular health examinations.17 The prostitution regulation program, suggested by Nusser, divided the medical community into three camps: the ones who agreed with him, those who considered the proposals insufficient, and a minority who opposed regulation entirely.18 Prostitution regulation became a major debate within the medical community in the 1860s. By this time, the police in Vienna already categorized maidservants and female factory workers as opportunist “women who surrendered to extramarital satisfaction of sexual drive” (ausserehelichen Befiedigung des Geschlechtstribes).19 This category was based upon the manner of policing informed by the Viennese police “experience.” The Theresian and Josephine mandates had propelled the police to target “immoral” women in Vienna. By the start of the nineteenth century, the Viennese police were already exercised in preferential targeting of female servants for “immorality.” The police headquarters proposal of 1803 for the reform of servant law indicated that the police had experience targeting a specific subsection—female servants—of the diverse occupational group. Indeed, they proposed constructing laws that aligned with their experience. Suggestions that the law should not classify some higher ranks of people as servants and include more working-class women such as female factory workers under the occupational category of servants were rampant in police proposals. While the 1810 Codes tightened the definition of “servant,” it did not construct the occupation as one predominated by women. However, since the code granted considerable authority to the police on servant matters, the application of the code was invariably subject to police experience. Police experience indicated that maidservants provided significant numbers of recruits to the city’s sexual commerce. In the decade that followed the 1848 revolutions, police control over servants in Vienna reduced on account of the takeover of placement responsibilities by private agencies. This was the time when the Habsburg government reorganized the police system within the empire, centralizing authority and reducing the autonomy of regional police offices. The police system became increasingly centralized as the decades progressed, with the Viennese police functioning as the headquarters to a network of police offices throughout the empire. These re-

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gional police offices thus picked up the practices and experience of the Viennese police either through osmosis or, more effectively, through the adoption of police decrees and mandates in effect in Vienna. For instance, the Viennese police first adopted the practice of issuing Dienstbotenbücher to servants. Other urban police forces adopted this practice. Moreover, the Habsburg government as well as the Viennese police pressed for uniformity in police functioning throughout the empire to better process information on an increasingly mobile population.20 This mobile population predominantly comprised people migrating from rural areas to urban centers in search for jobs and a better life. In this context, when judges and officials applied the 1810 Codes in conjunction with the stipulations of the Penal Code of 1852, it clearly made servant women easier police targets. The Penal Code of 1852 contained provisions to restrict specific types of diseased servants, and these clauses could be extended to venereal diseases. For instance, paragraph St.G. §335 and §431 punished the conscious and/or negligent spread of disease. St.G. §279, §476, and §379 forbade any woman with an infectious disease from becoming a wet nurse or continuing their profession.21 Through the preferential application of the 1810 Codes to female servants, the police contributed to the rising anxiety among the bourgeoisie about the itinerant maidservant in the decade following 1848. Thus, before physicians even entered the debate, female servants were already vulnerable to intense police surveillance. The police only stepped up their surveillance of this population in the 1860s. The Police Decree of 1865, for instance, increased police surveillance of unemployed female servants and shortened their residence permits.22 During the Viennese prostitution regulation debate of the 1860s, some medical experts expressed concern about the alleged susceptibility of maidservants to prostitution during periods of unemployment. In an 1863 book titled Die Prostitution und deren Regulirung in Wien (Prostitution and its regulation in Vienna), the director of the Children’s Hospital at Wieden, Franz Seraph Hügel,23 argued that maidservants were a rich source of material for prostitution. Foreign servants who stayed in Vienna without means of livelihood allegedly took to prostitution. Similarly, in many cases, servants who lost their positions and remained unemployed for a long time were supposedly susceptible to prostitution. According to Hügel, only situations that assured a secure livelihood could guarantee the “morality” of a female servant. Notwithstanding the paternalistic tones, Hügel’s remarks centered on concerns for the female servants themselves rather than their employers. Hügel did not propose a program of regulation for female servants; rather, he suggested measures that would address the problem of unemployment among servants and ensure financial security of maidservants, thereby reducing their alleged propensity to take up prostitution. He suggested the reform of the Dienstzeugniss, that is, the system of character reference. The reference, he argued, should specify the

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duration and performance of the servant in her previous job so that it could aid employers to distinguish between good and bad servants. He pointed out that the character of a good, moral servant should be preserved. Apparently, unemployment and the bad company of friends frequently led servants into prostitution. He argued that young girls should not be allowed into certain professions such as street sales and working in coffeehouses. Instead, they should be encouraged to take up work in other areas. As an example, he suggested that the Hof- and National-Theaters provided enough good wages for the female employees to lead honorable lives. Such employment options, the author argued, would protect the honor of young girls and prevent them from becoming victims of sexual diseases.24 Unlike Hügel, many physicians found that prostitution regulation meant the medical supervision of not only so-called prostitutes but also several categories of working-class women. The primary concern for these physicians was not the health of the working-class women themselves but the threat that these women presented to the health of their bourgeois employers. In August 1863, an article in a Viennese newspaper Glocke argued that since government authorities did not classify prostitution as a distinct profession, police registers referred to these women as workers, maidservants, laundresses, and so on.25 In 1863, the body in charge of public health and sanitation in Vienna, the Stadtphysikat, proposed compulsory medical examinations for maidservants as well as artisans.26 In February 1864, the Collegium of Professors, spearheaded by the influential physicians Dlauhy, Hebra, and Sigmund, recommended to the Viennese City Council a prostitution reform that comprised bringing categories of women who “from experience” contributed to the spread of syphilis as much as prostitutes. This specifically included erection of special hostels for homeless female servants to bring them under medical supervision.27 In August of the same year, the Collegium of Physicians submitted similar recommendations to the Viennese City Council. The Stadtphysikat also advised the council to bring servants and artisans under medical regulation.28 In October, at a sitting of the Viennese City Council, all the suggestions made by the Collegium of Physicians excepting the medical supervision of homeless maidservants through erection of special hostels received majority votes.29 However, the legal department objected to some stipulations on judicial grounds. For the next few years, the sanitation and legal departments issued several proposals and counterproposals on the issue.30 While most physicians approved of placing so-called prostitutes under medical surveillance, opinions on regulating maidservants were less unanimous. An 1863 article in the prominent medical journal Wiener Medicinische Wochenschrift asserted that maidservants were distinct from prostitutes,31 and while there might be some maidservants who practiced prostitution, it did not justify bringing the entire numerous class of servants under regulation since prostitutes, not servants, were the chief source of syphilis.32 Hügel also opposed regulation of

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female servants. In his 1867 work Ueber die Quästionirung und Lösung der Prostitutionsfrage (On the questions and solutions of the prostitution question), Hügel argued that the medical regulation of female servants was a gross infringement of personal freedoms and “female innocence.” He stated that implementing such measures against the lower classes was unjustifiable when nobody dared to propose such remedies for mistresses of high-class men. He further declared that the belief among some medical professors that syphilis existed mostly among female servants was a grave misconception. Hügel refuted this belief on statistical grounds. The belief principally pivoted on the observation that the syphilis department of hospitals comprised mostly workers, prostitutes, and servants—servants emerging in high numbers in this contingent. Hügel accepted this observation. However, he pointed out that when one considered the total numbers of all syphilitic patients treated by all syphilis physicians, servants comprised a very small number. Furthermore, Hügel asserted that there was no proof that the spread of syphilis through syphilitic servants was more pervasive than through syphilitic men who had probably infected the servants in the first place. He acknowledged that syphilitic servants presented a peculiar problem since their disease would first be contracted by their lovers, then by other members of the household in which they worked— more specifically the master and his son. However, he also asserted that because they worked in a household, their disease would be more easily noticed, and they would immediately be taken to a hospital. Furthermore, he contended, irrespective of whether they had syphilis or not, itinerant or unemployed servants from outside Vienna, who were blamed considerably for spreading syphilis, would be deported if they did not find jobs within fourteen days. Consequently, even this pool of servants could not possibly continue to spread syphilis. Therefore, he emphasized, servants were not the most important contingent spreading syphilis in society.33 Hügel’s attempts to clarify the error in interpreting the statistical data in hospitals vis-à-vis the social context fell on deaf ears. The idea to regulate female servants persisted. Many medical professionals, journalists, and administrators assumed that unemployed female servants engaged in prostitution and, as a result, contracted venereal diseases. This assumption served as the basis for the justification of medical examination of female servants. In 1868, Vienna city councilor Dr. Klucky submitted a report to the sanitation section of the municipal office recommending police surveillance of both open prostitution and clandestine prostitution. For this, the report suggested the compulsory medical examination of those maidservants who were “vagrant” as well as those who were traveling. He also prescribed banning privately owned maidservant hostels.34 The suggestion to ban maidservant hostels was reminiscent of the claims made in the 1810 Codes that servant hostels were centers of “immorality,” “fornication,” and procurement.

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In the same year, an article in the Constitutionellen Vorstadt-Zeitung argued that the successful regulation of prostitution in Vienna must begin with the regulation of maidservants. The article claimed that most prostitutes were recruited from ranks of female servants. Hospital identity cards, the article continued, show that servants constituted the highest percentage of patients in hospitals. The susceptibility of servants to prostitution, the author argued, was related to the high number of itinerant servants. The article claimed that there were fifteen thousand “vagrant” servants in Vienna and that this number had remained relatively constant in the nineteenth century. Ironically, the article blamed the defective provisions of the 1810 Codes that had allegedly created a vanguard of prostitutes among servants.35 Further, the author linked the idea of the “vagrant” servant with the institution of Bettfrauen, that is, women who rented out beds to unemployed servants. A large majority of these women, the author asserted, were either thieves or procurers.36 The article, therefore, declared, “The first and most successful step toward the regulation of prostitution will be the regulation of servant conditions.”37 To circumvent servant prostitution, the author recommended increased and direct official supervision of unemployed servants and increased help in finding them jobs without the mediation of placement agencies.38 Such arguments received a strong rebuttal from Jewish physician Wilhelm Schlesinger. In his 1868 book Die Prostitution in Wien und Paris (Prostitution in Vienna and Paris), Schlesinger criticized suggestions to bring maidservants under medical supervision and police regulation. He opposed, more broadly, police regulation of lower-class women, including prostitutes, female workers, and maidservants, arguing that such practices would be a gross violation of personal freedoms and was discriminatory to the lower classes.39 He also criticized the Russian police practice of medical examination of maidservants who were “vagrant” and traveling.40 Schlesinger’s argument about servants may have received some support from the medical community had he not altogether opposed prostitution regulation. However, many physicians vehemently censured Schlesinger’s antiregulation stance. In 1870, an article in the Vorstadt-Zeitung pointed out that the daughters of the female underclasses who allegedly registered as servants were subject to a life of depravity and slavery. Such a life of slavery, the article argued, required immediate reform.41 However, there was some lukewarm agreement that measures to regulate maidservants were extreme. In 1872, a Dr. Bittmann from Brünn argued that it was the function of the police to ensure the rule of law, and in this regard, police regulation of prostitution was justifiable. However, he granted that even though some members of the sanitation commission had proposed ideas to regulate maidservants, subjecting young girls coming from the countryside to medical examinations was not acceptable in big cities. Nevertheless, he also insisted that the alternative of first visiting a service placement bureau was in no way a better option since it allegedly led to “vagrancy” and prostitution.42

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Reigen The medical community’s determined call for greater involvement in public hygiene and policing spearheaded by influential venereal disease physicians like Sigmund and Nusser soon yielded fruit. In 1868, the Ministry of the Interior approved the creation of an official public medical corps to organize the sanitation system in Vienna. The medical corps replaced the loose coalition of sanitation institutions that were formerly advising the police about public hygiene.43 A police commission in 1869 proposed that the sanitation system and the police should have a separate set of physicians.44 When Anton Ritter von Le Monnier (1819–73) became the president of the Viennese police that year, he introduced several reforms in its structure and function. One reform included the formation of a separate division of physicians assisting in police work;45 the other was the introduction of prostitution reform in 1873.46 The 1873 prostitution regulation forms a significant backdrop of Vienna’s servant story. Prostitution regulation in nineteenth-century Vienna emerged from the intersection of a restructured Viennese police force and the increasing involvement of physicians in official public hygiene agendas. Prostitution regulation really meant the creation of a thick medico-police surveillance network that focused on migrant women. Physicians, who were part of the network, conducted the examination and treatment of women in specific medical facilities and collaborated with the vice police in producing data on prostitution and venereal disease.47 One of the outcomes of Le Monnier’s police reforms was the establishment of a distinct branch of police (Sittenamt) with an autonomous corps of physicians whose focus rested principally on prostitution. As per these reforms, all prostitutes had to voluntarily register with the police and carry a health book (Gesundheitsbuch). The police required prostitutes to undergo biweekly heath checks conducted by a police-approved physician. The police would tolerate healthy prostitutes. On the other hand, they confiscated the health books of ill prostitutes and forcibly admitted them to hospitals for medical treatment.48 Thus, a separate office of the security police, Büros für sittenpolizeiliche Angelegenheiten (Sittenpolizei)—the vice police—dedicated to the surveillance of prostitution activities, emerged in Vienna. Further, the police subjected anyone involved in sexual commerce who did not abide by these regulations to arrest under paragraphs §509, §510, §511, and §512 of the Austrian Penal Code. These sections pertained to unauthorized commercial fornication (Gewerbemässige unzucht) and procurement for the purposes of fornication (Kuppelei). Thus, the extensive police surveillance system that had developed in Vienna in the 1850s and 1860s focused on working-class women after 1873. The Viennese prostitution regulation program of 1873 excluded maidservants from the category of people subjected to medical examinations. But by no means did the debate on servants as potential carriers of venereal diseases end. Statistical

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data generated following regulation raised concerns among medical experts and the city’s sanitation department about the spread of venereal diseases through clandestine prostitution. In this context, the idea that infected maidservants working in bourgeois households could easily spread the disease to their employers resurfaced. In 1876, the statistical data from three Viennese hospitals suggested that female servants were the largest contingent of patients.49 Dr. Kraus, the chief editor of the medical journal Allgemeine Wiener medicinischen Zeitung, suggested that, along with the registration certificate, every servant should carry a health certificate (Gesundheitsschein) to control the spread of contagious disease to their employers. The health certificate should be stamp free and affordable for a poor servant. Every physician, he argued, should have the right to issue it, and no physician should charge above twenty-five kronen. The health certificate should contain all of the servant’s health information, and in this manner the family members could be assured that the person who handles their personal belongings, including their food and clothes, was free of contagious diseases. Further, he suggested that the Dienstzeugniss should contain the word “healthy,” and when a servant was recognized to have a disease, the family should immediately send her to a hospital. Such procedures, Kraus opined, would not affect loyal servants, but, at the same time, it would check those servants who changed their positions “wantonly.”50 The notion of working-class women as transmitters of venereal disease is best illustrated in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play Reigen. In this play, syphilis spreads through a series of sexual couplings between a prostitute and a soldier, then between the soldier and a maidservant, the maidservant and a young man, the young man and a young woman, the young woman and her spouse, the spouse and a sweet maiden (a young and attractive lower-class woman), the sweet maiden and a poet, the poet and an actress, and the actress and a count. The infection completes a full circle with the sexual interaction between the count and the prostitute.51 The sexual alliances of characters in the play originate with a prostitute and end with a prostitute after circulating through the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy via several working-class women.52 Although maidservants were not included in the prostitution reform of 1873, the Viennese police headquarters issued a series of edicts in the 1870s that increased police surveillance of unemployed servants. These edicts specifically categorized unemployed servants as “vagrant.” An edict of Vienna police headquarters issued in September 1874 ordered the government commissariats to pay special attention to the activities of itinerant servants.53 The police decree of 20 November 1875 mandated that police officers should mark the registration forms of an itinerant servant with the rubric “vaz” and the forms of an employed servant with the rubric “D.B.” to distinguish the two.54 This rule was again emphasized in a mandate released in January 1877.55 Similarly, the mandates issued in January 1876 underscored the necessity to follow strict registration and deregistra-

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tion protocols for itinerant servants and to place them under careful surveillance. These mandates also cautioned that while many servants held Dienstbotenbücher, they did not secure a Zeugniss or recommendation certificate from their masters since they had stayed in the job for a very short time.56 An edict in July 1876 required that the Dienstbotenbuch contain specifications of how many times a servant had changed her service position and how often she had received police warning for it.57 Moreover, while this edict directed commissariats to observe extreme rigor in issuing health books to female persons, for female “vagrant” servants alone, this rule was relaxed:58 From the side of the commissariats, it is necessary to proceed with the utmost rigor in the delivery of health books in the future. This applies to those female persons who are still minors or barely stepped out of the age of immaturity. However, certain persons are not included in this decree, chiefly vagrant servants, who are to be subjected to the most urgent processing on the occasion of their application for health books, and required cases are to be relentlessly removed from local places. By the way, there is evidence that they work as non-native prostitutes, who, as a result of their activities, repeatedly give rise to police intervention.59

In 1880, police officials produced a dataset on the former professions of 410 registered prostitutes. It revealed that a majority—more than 50 percent—had formerly worked as household servants.60 Another dataset published in the 1895 periodical Jahrbericht des Chefarztes der k.k. Polizeidirektion showed that a majority of new recruits to prostitution in Vienna, most of whom did not have health books, were formerly working as servants.61 Furthermore, after 1873, police officials arrested several unregistered women suspected of clandestine or “wild” prostitution. The data generated on clandestine prostitutes seemed to prove that maidservants especially formed a large contingent of prostitutes (figure 4.1).62 These data reflected the inconsistencies in data collection. Note from figure 4.1 that until 1876, the police systematically collected such data on only one category of women—female servants. But it is evident from the data collected from 1877 to 1885 that while the category of “servant” was a significant contingent, the category of “artisan” comprised most of the arrests. Further, the number of female servants arrested on suspicion of prostitution declined significantly after 1873, albeit with a sudden spike in the year 1885 (the spike can probably be attributed to the Trade Order of 1885). Moreover, the Viennese police did not clarify in their arrest records who qualified as a prostitute. Indeed, this was a highly porous category. Arrests were therefore subject to police “experience” rather than based upon concrete guidelines. Historian Nancy M. Wingfield argues that detentions on suspicion of prostitution resulted from a combination of denunciations from neighbors, tip-offs, having a “bad reputation,” or simply walking along the Prater or Leopoldstadt—the hub for streetwalkers. Some women who

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Figure 4.1 Occupations of Women Arrested on Suspicion of Prostitution. Source: Josef Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien in historischer, administrativer und hygienischer Beziehung II. Band: Die Administration und Hygiene der Prostitution in Wien (Vienna, 1886), 244. Graph made by author.

engaged in prostitution temporarily to tide over periods of financial difficulties might not even have considered themselves prostitutes. Nevertheless, police officials subjected the arrested women to forced health exams.63 The inconsistencies in data collection compounded in 1885. In 1885, a new Trade Order decreed that some occupations that officials thus far included under the category of servants were to be classified differently. The resulting confusion among various administrative and police officials over categorization, especially when it came to categorizing working-class women, persisted for several decades. As early as 1878, Sigmund recognized the sheer impracticality of the venereal disease project. The 1855 schema of venereal disease classification depended upon the accurate collection of a patient’s personal history. This included recording his or her familial, regional, occupational, and sexual background. Based upon this information, the physician would deduce whether the patient suffered from a venereal or a nonvenereal disease. Rather than being based upon concrete numerical evidence, much of this deduction relied on the physician’s moral judgments. Blatantly laced with preexisting regionalism, sexism, and classism, these judgments were often regurgitated as a matter of habit. Sigmund, for example, was of the view that people in certain occupations, such as bakers, waiters, washerwomen, female cooks, and nannies, as well as of certain racial and regional habits, main-

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tained poor personal hygiene, and such people contracted venereal diseases. This observation was of course made from Sigmund’s personal results, that is, some studies that he had personally conducted with a small sample of patients. Again, from his personal results, he maintained that the influence of clandestine prostitution in spreading venereal disease was far greater than regulated prostitution. The program of prostitution regulation itself, so willfully supported by the majority of the medical community, had been based largely upon the personal results of Sigmund and his contemporaries rather than consistent and systematic statistical results. By Sigmund’s own admission, the inconsistencies of data collection could not yield any reliable statistical results or significant social or prophylactic gains thereof. In Vienna alone, Sigmund noted, there were several inconsistencies in sample collection in the period between 1849 to 1876 due to reasons ranging from the movement of patients to a newly established treatment facility to difference in the quality of patients during wartime and the World Exhibition. A heterogenous patient pool from different regions with different occupations further compounded the Viennese situation. Even though Sigmund recognized the unfeasibility of such a universalist project,64 his only student, Ernst Finger, and an entire generation of influential venereal disease specialists, including the future Nobel laureate Josef Kyrle, whom Finger trained, were much more persistent in their efforts.65 Sigmund’s successors had good reason to persist with this unwinnable statistical methodology. By the 1870s, the empire’s sanitation campaigns to control the spread of infectious diseases, whose greatest proponent was Sigmund, had aligned with those in other regions of Europe, principally England, France, and Germany. From 1877, International Congresses on Hygiene and Demography took place in various capitals of Europe every two years. The principal aim of these congresses was to exchange scholarly opinions on issues of public health, including preventing the spread of infectious diseases.66 To increase the empire’s international standing, the Habsburg government incorporated increasing numbers of medical professionals into its bureaucratic structures. In 1879, the Ministry of the Interior created the Supreme Medical Council along with nine regional medical councils to advise on medical and hygiene-related matters. In the decades that followed, venereal disease physicians from the Vienna Medical School, including Finger, held prestigious positions on this council.67 Other physician graduates from the school such as Josef Karl Schrank and Anton Merta held influential positions in Viennese police commissariats, principally aiding the vice police’s activities.68 The venereal disease campaign that focused primarily on prostitution regulation had provided prestigious careers for an entire generation of physicians. Moreover, these physicians wielded considerable authority and influence in regulating the sex lives of the city’s population. However, regulation had not significantly increased the number of prostitutes who came under police surveillance. For example, in 1862, the police had 1,988 prostitutes in their records; in 1873, the number of

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prostitutes with health books were 1,546. Between the years 1876 and 1885, these numbers remained roughly stable at an average of 1,463.69 To justify the continuation of the prostitution regulation project—one that cost the Habsburg government one hundred thousand crowns per year70—physicians and vice police officials claimed that a regulated prostitute did not represent the Average Prostitute. Rather she was an anomaly and fell at the 5 percent higher and lower extremes of the bell curve, meaning only 10 percent of prostitutes came under regulation.71 In other words, the Average Prostitute represented by 90 percent of the bell curve was clandestine. Abolitionists (of prostitution) went as far as to claim that only 1,400 prostitutes were under sanitary control while 30,000 were clandestine. Stated differently, regulated prostitutes fell at the 2.5 percent higher and lower extreme, implying 95 percent of the prostitute population was unregulated.72 By this standard, the medico-police surveillance network had a lot of work to do! Police officials and medical experts now targeted clandestine prostitution. In 1885, authorities reformed the Vagabond Law to tighten police crackdown on clandestine prostitution. The 1885 law that replaced the Vagrancy Act of 1873 especially hardened the links between unemployment, migration, and the morally censorious concept of vagrancy. The law defined a vagrant as a person who wandered without business or employment and who could not prove that he or she was earning a livelihood through honest means.73 Further, §5 of the Vagabond Law taken in conjunction with St.G. §509 forbade prostitutes and public women with venereal diseases from continuing their profession.74 In 1893, the Viennese Dermatological Society set an agenda to curb the spread of venereal disease by targeting all methods of clandestine prostitution. Accordingly, the committee recommended that all unemployed persons should be obliged to register with the sanitary police and that all places susceptible to clandestine prostitution, such as coffeehouses and bars, should be marked for police surveillance. The plenum accepted the report unanimously without debate.75 Since female servants showed up as a significant contingent in police records, they were again the focus of police crackdown on clandestine prostitutes. For instance, the police decree of March 1896—allegedly to deter “wild prostitution”—mandated that: The commissariats should pay more attention to the activities of vagrant female servants than before. Particular caution must be taken to ensure these persons are not unduly vagrant and dissolute for a long time and are not earning their livelihood either wholly or in part through prostitution without being under sanitary police control. In such cases, they must undergo a police medical examination and action should be taken against them in accordance with the applicable laws and ordinances.76

In 1900, the servant class was included under §41 of the measures against clandestine prostitution. The paragraph emphasized that police officials should specify the “vagrant” status of a servant on all registration documents and should

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monitor “vagrant” servants carefully. The clause also permitted police officials to place female “vagrant” servants under medical supervision if they did not perceive a change in lifestyle.77 At the 1908 conference of the Austrian Society for the Fight against Venereal Diseases (ÖGBG), Dr. S. Ehrmann, general secretary and imperial head physician, argued that prostitutes (registered as well as clandestine) were the largest group of women afflicted with sexual illnesses and that servants were the second largest group. In 1907, the data from his hospital section in Vienna revealed that of the 397 women treated for syphilis, 173 were not registered as prostitutes, but, under suspicion of clandestine prostitution, the police had compelled them to undergo examinations. Of these, 105 were domestic servants of various categories. Furthermore, he claimed that these numbers did not include ambulatory care patients. This situation, he stated, was not unique to Vienna. In Stockholm, for example, 40 percent of prostitutes were former servants. According to Ehrmann, maidservants were the principal source of prostitution in most urban centers. Ehrmann suggested that the high number of servants in the hospital data revealed some of the circumstances that made servants “susceptible” to prostitution. Most servant patients showed signs that they had been wandering for a long time. These signs were more common during the summer months, especially among servants of lower ranks. During these months, after having lost their positions and experienced several weeks of unemployment, they wandered the city looking for service positions or traveled to their hometowns. The time between the loss of a service position and finding another one was a time of extreme financial difficulty for these women. In such conditions of subsistence loss, Ehrmann argued, they were vulnerable to “temptations,” and this constituted an important point of infection.78 Physicians noted a similar trend in clinics. The data recorded by Docent Oppenheim in Finger’s clinic in Vienna between January and February revealed that of 119 venereal disease cases, 43 were infected by prostitutes (including registered and clandestine) and 10 by servant girls. Oppenheim remarked that the number of people infected by prostitutes was reduced in private practice since most patients who visited private physicians were wealthy and preferred not to go to common prostitutes. Nonetheless, he concluded, prostitution, both open and clandestine, was the principal mode of distribution of venereal disease.79 Fraulein Eder, a representative from a charity refuge home Catholic Care Association for Girls, Women, and Children, claimed that of the 184 girls housed in the foundation home in Vienna, maidservants constituted the biggest portion. Furthermore, of these 184 girls, only 20 were healthy, 31 had a variety of other diseases, and 120 had venereal diseases. Among all the girls, three were enrolled as prostitutes, three had allegedly been “lured into” brothels, and all others were allegedly involved in clandestine prostitution, many of whom had taken to prostitution only for a short time during an emergency or loss of placement.80

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Such conclusions were not sensational news by any measure. The assumption that servants were an important source of sexual illnesses had increased medical surveillance not only in Vienna but also in other parts of the empire. In a meeting of the Imperial Association of Physicians at Budapest in March 1895, Wilhelm Friedrich, the deputy chief regional physician at Budapest, argued that many transmitters of venereal disease, including “vagrant” servants and waitresses, existed outside brothels. He recommended strict police regulation of “vagrant” servants and waitresses and the eventual revision of servant laws to combat venereal diseases. Similarly, Dr. Marschalko stressed the importance of intensive regulation of servant conditions.81 In another meeting in March 1895, Alois Rózsaffy, police head physician in Budapest, underscored that at least three thousand of the five to six thousand women who practiced clandestine prostitution were “vagrant” servants and a significant pool of venereal disease.82 Between 1901 and 1903, authorities in the Galician capital of Lemberg had issued several regulations that allowed police physicians to administer regulatory medical examinations on almost all working-class women, including maidservants (employed as well as unemployed), seamstresses, waitresses, and factory workers.83 In 1906, of 1,541 female syphilis patients in Galician countryside hospitals, female servants numbered 531 and were the second largest contingent after female farm workers.84 In 1907, Dr. Adolf Havas argued that the percentage of illnesses among servants in Budapest was 12.1 percent as compared to the 5.7 percent in the rest of the population. This apparently was a point of concern for the families who employed these women.85 Therefore, data like Ehrmann’s had been produced in Vienna as well as other regions of the empire well before the 1908 conference. However unoriginal, the police head physician Anton Merta and police high commissioner Dr. Anton Josef Baumgarten backed Ehrmann’s conclusions. Merta’s data was unique because it documented the distribution of former professions of newly registered prostitutes in Vienna between 1898 and 1907. Merta employed a much more specific classification system for the same. Since police officials had collected this data after 1885, the category of servants excluded waitresses, language teachers, female cashiers, and clerks. The dataset went a step further in its specificity and divided the category of servants into maidservants and Bonnen. The latter were housemaids employed in upper-class or aristocratic households. The former was a slightly vaguer category that included most domestics in middle-class households, chambermaids, and lower ranks of cooks who worked in hotels, pubs, inns, and restaurants, and some other servant groups such as charwomen, wet nurses, and washerwomen. While previous datasets had also used some of these categories, they were not always consistent in how they classified the professions of working-class women. Merta’s dataset showed that 55 percent of registered prostitutes had formerly worked as maidservants.86 Baumgarten’s data on “recorded” prostitutes comprised both

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registered and unregistered prostitutes in 1906 in Vienna. His data again reflected the preponderance of maidservants (44.52 percent) among the recorded instances of prostitution.87

Complexity Statistics legitimized preexisting narratives about female servants by masking such diverse phenomena as migration, specialization, diversification, and increased health insurance coverage occurring within the servant occupation in the nineteenth century. When it came to collecting disease data on maidservants, Vienna presented a particularly unique situation. Maidservants were the only category of women on whom the Viennese police could conveniently collect statistical data—data on their medical as well as employment status. Working-class women were already preferential targets of moral policing since the Theresian era. The 1810 Codes only enhanced the process. As detailed earlier, according to the 1810 Codes, servants had to visit the police station often during their period of unemployment, failing which they were arrested. So, maidservant arrests during periods of unemployment were not necessarily on account of her choice to engage in commercial sex. Furthermore, the stipulations in the 1810 Codes also encouraged the police to assume that an unemployed maidservant engaged in commercial sex irrespective of whether she actually did. As a result, police officials detained maidservants, oftentimes, even employed maidservants, on suspicions of clandestine prostitution and subjected them to medical examinations. Many times, the police had no clear proof that a maidservant was in fact engaging in commercial sex.88 The Imperial General Hospital handled most servant patients and their illnesses in Vienna. Physician case history records stored at the Josephinum reveal that the Imperial General Hospital painstakingly followed the strict administrative protocols prescribed for servant patients. When a servant had no relatives to take care of her, the employer was responsible for providing suitable medical care without delay.89 The responsibility to pay for the care fell upon the employer. However, even if he could not afford it, he was obliged to take her to the Imperial General Hospital for care and to ensure that she received free treatment. Those employers who could afford it, irrespective of their desire to do so, had to at least pay the fees for the third-class tier90 of care in the hospital until the cure or demise of the servant. In addition to the care fee, the Viennese employer had to also pay a third-class tier catering fee of eighteen kronen per day. Non-Viennese employers had to pay a higher charge of thirty-two kronen per day. If, after care, fees were leftover, the hospital would not return the sum to the employer but give it to the servant or her heirs. However, the employer was absolved from paying for treatment of venereal diseases. The employer had to specify all such facts in writing to

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the Imperial General Hospital. The hospital sent this information to the regional police office for processing. The police then determined whether the ill servant could remain in service, whether she should be dismissed, whether the employer was truly unable to pay for hospital services, and whether the Dienstbotenzeugniss would be provided by the employer or the hospital administrators (§15 of Allgemeine Krankenhaus protocols).91 Unemployed servants had to prove their unemployment status to the hospital authorities. For this, they had to produce their police registration papers that authorized their absence from service. Upon such servants’ release, hospital authorities provided them with a written confirmation of their stay. Although, the hospital admitted servants who could not provide the requisite materials, they were subjected to police investigation following their treatment (§21). Such police procedures usually involved the regional criminal court (k.k. Landesgerichte für Strafsachen) in Vienna. A judicial order was then sent to the treatment facility.92 Besides the Imperial General Hospital, other public healthcare facilities in Vienna also treated servants, and they followed the same procedures. Further, some private institutions also provided care specifically to poor and ill servants, including three important ones: Das Versorgungshaus für arme weibliche Dienstboten (Care House for Poor Female Servants) at Landstraße, Das Versorgungshaus für arme Dienstboten (Care House for Poor Servants) at Wieden, and Das Versorgungshaus (Care House) at Leopoldstadt.93 Since hospital authorities had to notify and get approval from the police in every instance of illness, police officials often had comprehensive knowledge about the medical status of the female servant population in Vienna. Police intervention only increased after 1865. In that year, the Viennese government introduced the Wiener Dienstboten-Krankenkassa—a servant health insurance—to ensure that ill servants received treatment. With it, physicians and police officials could collect more comprehensive medical data on servants. The insurance was intended to reduce the expenses incurred by the employers for the treatment of an ill servant in their employ.94 Employers who joined the program had to pay a very small premium (less than one kronen per year). When a servant became ill, the employer could admit her free of cost at a local hospital. Otherwise, the overall cost of stay at the hospital would be much more than 13 florins. In the event that a servant left service, the employer had to cancel the registration at one of the regional offices within eight days, and no more payments were expected of him.95 Due to the incredibly low cost, the number of servants insured grew exponentially each year.96 By 1903, of approximately 100,000 servants in Vienna, 74,770 were insured.97 While this coverage meant that servants had access to cost-effective treatment, it also meant that both physicians and police officials could now systematically collect medical data on the city’s servant population. On the other hand, systemic medical data on other sections of the population were incomplete. The Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien (Statistical yearbook

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for the city of Vienna) that carried hospital data was based on the Krankenkassa system,98 whose data represented the working population. Hospital authorities classified patients in the data according to their occupations and not according to the disease they had contracted. Further, they classified those patients who switched insurance companies differently each time. Many patients in outpatient care were not represented in the data at all. Due to these shortcomings in the system, hospital statistics only revealed the infected patients who underwent supervised treatment, failing to provide any useful information on venereal diseases in the rest of the population.99 Furthermore, the collection of medical data on clandestine prostitutes depended on police officials apprehending those on suspicion of prostitution and subjecting them to forced medical examination and, if necessary, treatment. Therefore, official data on this subgroup of prostitutes was incomplete at best and nonexistent at worst. Moreover, a large percentage of women, children, unemployed persons, and those people who had a private means of livelihood, such as a self-owned business, were missing from the Krankenkassa data. This problem was more significant outside Vienna.100 Therefore, the appearance of a high number of maidservants in prostitution data simply reflected the increasing ease with which they could be surveilled with each passing year compared with the rest of the population. The cases involving the police arrests for trading in sex were a complex interplay of agency, autonomy, and control. So, numbers could not possibly represent the situation accurately. The following three case studies best illustrate this complexity. In December 1913, the border police at Pozsony in Hungary detained a fortyone-year-old woman from Germany named Anna Burmeister. Her seventeenyear-old maidservant Mina Wickenhagen was already in the custody of the local police. The police had arrested Wickenhagen under suspicion of clandestine prostitution and interned her at a local hospital. The police believed that Burmeister intended to supply Wickenhagen to a brothel in Pozsony. Burmeister, however, recited the following story: she knew a local family, and on the way to visit them, she lost a note that contained their address. Since she did not have enough money to afford the travel back home, she left Wickenhagen in Pozsony and returned to Vienna to arrange for the required money. She then returned to Pozsony to search for Wickenhagen. The police could not locate the addresses they found in Burmeister’s possession. Since further investigations yielded no results, the police deported Burmeister from the Hungarian Crownlands and transferred her to the custody of the Viennese police. After release from the hospital, they deported Wickenhagen to her homeland.101 The Viennese police discovered from her eldest son Kurt that Burmeister was a widow of a machine worker in Erfurt. She traveled to Vienna with her five children, aged three to eleven. In Vienna, she first stayed at a hotel, then in a house in the second district. In her registration, she specified her place of birth once as

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Eisenach and another time as Thüringen. Wickenhagen was from Abtsbessingen and had traveled with the family as the children’s nanny. The police took the five children into custody and sought information from the Erfurt police on the relationship between Burmeister and Wickenhagen.102 In December 1913, police officials at Erfurt sent information on Burmeister to the Viennese police headquarters. According to the information, Burmeister was a seasoned prostitute born in Herleshausen. Between 1887 and 1913, she came under the German vice police control several times for commercial fornication. Wickenhagen had no existing criminal records.103 The police charged Burmeister with “procurement” in January 1914. Two months later, the regional council of Abtsbessingen informed the Viennese police that Burmeister was convicted of attempting to transport Wickenhagen for prostitution.104 The Wickenhagen case, which the police classified as a case of Kuppelei or “procurement,” demonstrates that the empire’s police detained women on suspicion of clandestine prostitution and “procurement” based upon extremely circumstantial evidence. In the above case, the police suspected Burmeister of “procuring” Wickenhagen based on some lapses in her memory, her own history of prostitution, and the fact that she had left Wickenhagen unaccompanied in Pozsony. Under the pretext of intercepting a “procurement” operation, the police secured the arrest of Burmeister. Furthermore, even though the police found no evidence that the children’s nanny Wickenhagen was a clandestine prostitute, they had placed her under medical regulation and subsequently deported her. The Wickenhagen case was by no means atypical. Many prostitution and “procurement” cases were, in reality, ambiguous, and, rather than devoting resources to finding concrete evidence, the police carried on much of their surveillance, arrests, and deportation activities based upon narratives that had informed habits of policing since the Theresian era. The police records on the case of Marie Zwirner detail the following: between 24 January and 1 February 1909, Zwirner worked as a maidservant in the house of an Irene Brossig in Troppau. On 2 February, she was to begin work at the house of a Klotilde Krobatschek. However, the same day, she was infected with syphilis and admitted to a local hospital where she received treatment till 21 March. After her release from the hospital, she sought work as a waitress in a local Gasthaus owned by a Julius Horzalka. She never showed up for work, even though he had paid her two kronen at the time of engagement. Some days later, she had written to him asking him to send her Dienstbotenbuch to a “Villa Ostende” in Jägerndorf. This was the address of a brothel.105 The local police speculated that a thirty-seven-year-old Richard Beinhauser was responsible for the supply. Beinhauser was a local locksmith, but the police reported that, for over fifteen years, he was involved in unauthorized placements of waiters and waitresses. During this time, he had allegedly gained a reputation as a cheat and a Mädchenhandler and served prison sentences on defamation charges. The police

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expelled him from Troppau in 1910, and thereafter he lived in Ratibor and Bremen. He supposedly had five children from his concubine Marie Klapper. The proprietress of “Villa Ostende,” Fanie Gross, denied that Beinhauser supplied Zwirner. Gross testified that Zwirner joined the brothel on 30 March and that she came alone. After she moved on, Zwirner had stayed at the brothel of Marie Anderka in Troppau between 8 July and 19 July. Following this, she registered at a local hospital in Troppau. Gross had sent Zwirner’s Dienstbotenbuch to her through a girl named Emilie Palzer and paid the latter four kronen for the same. Furthermore, Gross reported that Zwirner was a mendacious person.106 On 10 September 1910, the Troppau police reported that the case was transferred to the local criminal court. However, the court possibly dismissed the case since no further record is available.107 The records of the Zwirner case demonstrate that the empire’s vice police surveilled women who chose to change jobs, especially if they chose to transit from a “respectable” job to commercial sex. Even in instances when the latter provided better economic options, the police attempted to short-circuit agents who expanded the economic choices of working-class women. Beinhauser’s reputation that he arranged for placements for many women attracted police investigation. Even though the testimony of Zwirner’s employers suggested that she had willingly changed jobs, opted to join a brothel of her own accord, and had not used any agent, the police investigated Beinhauser. The case of Magdelene Klima reveals the sheer amount of police effort expended on the surveillance of maidservants who changed jobs. In March 1914, Frau Hermine Kann informed the Vienna regional police that her twenty-oneyear-old maidservant Magdelene Klima left service without notice. Klima had been a maid of all work in Kann’s house for nearly two years. One day, in Kann’s absence, Klima gathered all her belongings and left the house. Kann reported that between late January and early March, Klima visited a Richard Economo in a Hotel Germania. Kann described Economo to be about forty years of age. He was apparently looking for a maidservant to send to Saloniki. She did not know his profession.108 That same month, a police agent reported to the police headquarters in Vienna of a suspicious house in the first district of Vienna. Since 1901, the four-room house had been registered with a Turkish wholesale merchant Georg Economo. The family, except for one of their sons Richard, had relocated to Saloniki five years earlier. The agent reported that in March 1914 one family member was situated in Saloniki and the second in Constantinople. Richard Economo, though he appeared to be forty years old, was about thirty years of age and was involved in several petty crimes in Vienna. The police agent suspected that the family was engaged in Mädchenhandel.109 The police contacted the Austrian consulate in Saloniki about the Economo case,110 and the consulate reported that Richard was the son of a respectable local businessman Dragomans Economo. During his stay in Vienna, he appointed Klima as a cook for his sister

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Figure 4.2 Absolute Numbers of Deported Women in 1897. Source: Hugo Morgenstern, Mittheilungen des K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium 3. Heft: Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1902), 168. Graph made by author.

Frau Kiro Kirtzis. Kirtzis’s family was also rich and respectable. Klima, the consulate reported, was working with the family as a cook. The consulate further requested that Kann send Klima’s Dienstbotenbuch to her new address.111 The case of the mysterious Economo family continued for two more years. In 1916, the police commissariat at Wieden detained a Gasthaus proprietress Therese Rosinak and a caretaker Fredrick Elsner on suspicion of Mädchenhandel. Rosinak reported that Elsner informed her she would receive twenty kronen if she aided him in admitting a fifteen-year-old girl working in the inn to a brothel. Elsner came many times in the following days and finally took the girl with him. Elsner testified that the secretary of a count from Trieste—an Alexander Economo—enlisted his help to procure the girl. Consequently, Elsner wrote an anonymous letter to the girl. The letter, found among the police records of the case, stated that a rich, older man of fifty-five years of age was observing her for some days, found her pretty, and wished to have closer communication with her. Soon after, the police headquarters in Vienna initiated inquiries into the whereabouts of the fifty-five-year-old Count Alexander Economo.112

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Police records of the Economo case suggest the possibility that the family was involved in the transport of women, perhaps even minors, for commercial sex. But the consulate’s letter from Saloniki suggests that Klima’s case was not one of Mädchenhandel at all, instead simply that of an adult maidservant leaving one service position in favor of another. Although the 1810 Codes obligated employers to report their servants’ sudden departure without enough notice, maidservants often left their service positions in this manner. Nevertheless, the vice police suspected that these “flighty” maidservants were clandestine prostitutes and their new employers Mädchenhändler. Thus, the narrative of Mädchenhandel and the centuries-old habits of policing drenched the bulk of cases that the police represented as numerical values in their datasets. As is evident from the above case studies, after 1873 the Viennese police headquarters became the center for coordinating the anti-venereal-disease campaign and the anti-Mädchenhandel movement throughout the empire. Particularly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Viennese police exerted considerable influence on how regional police stations in far reaches of the empire functioned. A dataset from 1897 shows that the police in various regions of the empire had deported significantly more female servants than so-called prostitutes (figure 4.2).113 Numerical representation effectively hid the cause, destination, and other details of these deportations.

Classification Aside from the complexity of the individual cases themselves, the classification of occupations confused matters. Although more specific than the preceding Habsburg codes, the 1810 Codes considered a very broad range of wage-earning people as servants. Further, the population censuses produced in the midnineteenth century were extremely vague. The Imperial Statistical Commission conducted the first official population census in the Habsburg realm in 1857. The official 1857 report included servants in the group referred to as “Other Workers of All Types.” This group comprised all those workers not involved in the agricultural, forestry, hunting, mining, factory, and commercial trade sectors. The group also excluded day-wage laborers. Therefore, this group included those who provided personal or domestic service while having a household of their own. It was also a catchall group for those people whose profession was uncertain, could not be determined, or did not have a preexisting identifiable category. The census of 1869 contained a group labeled as “Workers for Personal Services.” Again, this group included those people who were not officials and workers, thus retaining the catchall quality of the preceding census.114 Other documents and official reports sometimes classified people in more specific ways, such as cook

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(Köchin), maid of all work (Mädchen für alles), and chambermaid (Stubenmädchen), while at other times grouped all these people together in one category. Further, considerable inconsistency existed in many documents about who ought to be classified as servants. For instance, governesses and washerwomen were sometimes included among domestic servants but excluded at other times.115 Census reports from the last two decades of the nineteenth century reveal that determining who was and who was not a servant and classifying them per the type of service they performed was difficult for the imperial government. The census of 1880 specified an entirely different approach, wherein household servants were classified as belonging to the profession of the employer. The label “Domestic Servant” in this census report included all those workers who earned a wage through household or personal services and lived in the house of their employer. The label also included workers who did not fit into any specific professional sector. These workers were considered self-employed and were classified as “Unemployed.” The Imperial Statistical Commission again deployed this system in the census of 1890, which also contained the categories “Household Service as Profession” and “Industrial Assistants.” Following the Trade Order of 1885, the latter category included journeymen, apprentices, auxiliary workers, and footmen, many of whom lived in the same household as their employers. The 1890 census created considerable confusion: often an employer’s apartment and the servants’ apartment were counted as separate, independent residences whether the servants were running their own household or not. Therefore, servants falling into the groups of caretakers, private porters, and gardeners were counted under the label “Domestic Servant” even though they might be running their own households or working as service providers for entire independent buildings. A census in 1895 did not classify caretakers under “Domestic Servant.”116 For most people labeled as servants, little distinction existed between domestic service and other types of personal service provided in farms, sheds, factories, inns, pubs, local restaurants, hotels, and other commercial establishments. The Imperial Statistical Commission’s census reveals this occupational blurring. For instance, the 1890 census counted the number of “Domestic Servants” in the following four categories: Class A: Agriculture and Forestry; Class B: Industry; Class C: Commerce; Class D: Independent Labor and Unemployed. Each of these classes were further divided into labor groups and subgroups. The largest percentage of “Domestic Servants”—33 percent—worked in Class D, that is, they were not involved in any one sector. The industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors contributed to 31 percent, 28 percent, and 8 percent “Domestic Servants” respectively. Eleven subgroups from the four classes contained more than 10,000 “Domestic Servants.” These subgroups constituted 209,451 of the 456,277 “Domestic Servants” and included subgroups such as “Renters and Caretakers,” “Ed-

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ucation,” and “Inn Business.” Only 11,220 “Domestic Servants” belonged to the subgroup “Domestic Service as Profession”; 1,419 males and 10,231 females. This subgroup included diverse types of workers including cooks, maidservants, nannies, and “vagrant servants.”117 Since the subgroup “Domestic Service as Profession” also included unemployed servants, it is impossible to delineate employed people who were truly professional servants from unemployed people who were simply included in the subgroup for the sake of convenience. Further, the contingent of jobless servants was larger in some regions and smaller in others. For instance, Lower Austria may have had more unemployed servants compared with Istria.118 Even if we consider the entire subgroup despite this discrepancy, only 2.5 percent of people counted as “Domestic Servants” identified as professional servants performing domestic work. The rest of the workers classified under the broad term “Domestic Servant” exhibited considerable flexibility in the jobs they undertook in various economic sectors, and these jobs, which may or may not have been associated directly with tasks in a household, provided many opportunities to earn a living. The age distribution of people in the servant occupation also reveals the difficulties of classification. In 1890, one-third of “Domestic Servants” of both genders were between the ages of twenty and thirty years, and the second highest was the age group ten to twenty years, which formed a quarter of all “Domestic Servants.” In other words, 60 percent male and 69.4 percent female “Domestic Servants” were thirty years old or younger. The group aged thirty-one to forty years had about one hundred thousand “Domestic Servants” less than the group aged twenty-one to thirty years. These data indicate that the servant occupation was not a lifelong profession for most people. Rather, it served as a temporary odd job. The occupation helped people tide over times of financial difficulty and provided initial practical training in the workforce for the youngsters who could then transition into other professions or get married as in the case of many women.119 Some job types were extremely transitory. For instance, wet nurses housed in urban foundling institutions were predominantly women between twenty and thirty years of age with illegitimate children. These women could work as wet nurses only so long as they could produce milk for nursing. Moreover, medical prescriptions further contributed to the transitory nature of wet nursing. These prescriptions included that newborns were to be given to a wet nurse who had delivered no later than two months earlier; milk from a wet nurse who had delivered between four to eight months earlier was not suitable for newborns, and milk that was older was bad for a newborn’s health.120 The turnover rate of wet nurses, therefore, was around six months with a maximum stay duration of twentyfour months. Obviously, wet nursing was not a lifelong profession that could yield a regular salary even if a woman had multiple children.

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The Dienstbotenbuch The problem with classification compounded when the collection of disease data entered the mix. The police simply used “servant” as a label of convenience to target migrant women. They assigned this label to people, especially women, whose occupational nature was uncertain. The label was also used for people earning their wages through what we might call temporary odd jobs. The police relied neither on the classification guidelines of the imperial censuses nor the wide-ranging term “servant” indicated in the 1810 Codes. Servants carried ID documents well before the introduction of the Dienstbotenbuch in 1851. However, the issuance of the ID documents as well as the information they contained was uneven throughout the empire. This unevenness caused a lot of confusion for the administrative officials. So, until 1851, the police depended on their experience to determine who was a servant. The moral policing of women during the Theresian and Josephine era formed the basis of this experience. After 1851, the Viennese police considered any woman with a Dienstbotenbuch a servant, and this practice gradually spread to other urban centers in the empire. The Dienstbotenbuch played a huge role in the police’s surveillance efforts, serving not only as a record of the bearer’s biographical details but also as the principal identity and travel document for the servant class. It replaced all other forms of identification, including passports and birth certificates.121 Before 1873, the police had routinely issued the document to almost any woman who wished to work for wages. The police adopted this practice for two reasons. First, most women who migrated to Vienna came there with the intention to join domestic service, even if they eventually chose some other kind of work. Consequently, they registered as servants with the local police who issued them the Dienstbotenbuch. Second, the Gewerbe-Ordnung (Trade Order) of 1859 mandated that most types of female workers—including waitresses, female cashiers, female inn and pub workers, some female shop or business assistants, even some female factory workers—be classified as servants. Consequently, the police had to issue these women the Dienstbotenbuch as well. The police continued this practice until the Trade Order of 1885 and even to a large extent afterward. Since prostitution was not a category of classification in police records until 1873, some women working in brothels registered as maidservants working in a household, an inn, or a pub.122 Stated differently, the police categorized most women who worked for income as servants irrespective of what their job description included. Police data on the profession or former profession of clandestine and registered prostitutes reflected this anomaly in the classification of occupations. After 1873, the Imperial Justice Ministry produced crime statistics that classified people into sixteen labor categories, one of which was “Service Peoples.” This category excluded people involved in the agricultural, industrial, and commercial sectors as well as those people hav-

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ing independent professions or no specific profession. Therefore, “Service Peoples” was a vague group not limited by such things as where the employee lived, be it in the employer’s household or not.123 The term was much vaguer in rural areas where the system of Dienstbotenbücher was absent. Moreover, travel agents for the empire’s commercial sex industry used the Dienstbotenbuch to transport women to desired destinations. The use of the Dienstbotenbuch did not imply that the agent had tricked the woman into believing that he had arranged a domestic service position for her. Rather, the Dienstbotenbuch was simply an evasion tactic to enable the smooth transport of a woman. The Dienstbotenbuch, therefore, confounded the boundaries of so-called “respectable” and “indecent” work. It permitted freer movement across the empire for some women engaged in selling sex under the guise of “respectable” work.124 Further, many maidservants who engaged in selling sex to tide over periods of financial difficulty also carried Dienstbotenbücher. These women might not have viewed themselves as prostitutes but rather their choices as temporary solutions to financial difficulties.125 Many women who had worked in other jobs before entering the commercial sex industry still had the document in their possession. Since the document did not contain photographs or fingerprints, it was easy to use to commit identity fraud. After 1873, the vice police tightened the rules for the issuance of the Dienstbotenbuch and enforced some reforms that increased surveillance of working-class women’s movement. For instance, in 1874, the police headquarters made provisions to ensure that all servants were issued accurate documents and to prevent tampering and misuse of them.126 The police also enforced strict regulations especially for the issuance of duplicate service books.127 In March 1879, a police headquarters mandate emphasized that the addresses of all the homes of the employer should be indicated in the registration documents of servants who accompanied their employers to their summer homes.128 Likewise, a mandate in March 1880 removed certain irregularities in the registration and deregistration of incoming servants.129 Two decrees from the Ministry of the Interior—one issued in April 1879 and the other in July 1888—mandated that the Dienstbotenbuch should be used as a travel document to Bosnia and Herzegovina only if the local government of the servant’s home district permitted it.130 A decree in 1883 mandated that when the police issued a duplicate service book, they should specify as such to prevent problems of misuse and stolen identities.131 Similarly, a police decree in November 1885 highlighted that some police commissariats were issuing the Dienstbotenbuch for servants living in other districts. The decree underscored that such incidents should be avoided, and service books should be issued only to servants domiciled in the commissariat’s jurisdiction.132 A mandate released in June 1893 noted that several servants in Vienna held service positions without a Dienstbotenbuch and underscored that the police had to supply the document to anyone who entered a service position.133 The prob-

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lem was revisited in 1898 when the Ministry of the Interior noted that there had been several cases of underage servants working in households without service books. Following this, a decree was issued in February 1898 that forbade employers from employing servants without service books.134 A decree issued in March 1898 cautioned that many school-age children who did not have Dienstbotenbücher were being employed in Viennese households.135 In 1904, the police headquarters in Vienna claimed that officials encountered several cases of fraud involving servants and auxiliary workers, who made corrections and markings in their Dienstbotenbücher and service books. Accordingly, the Ministry of the Interior issued a mandate that forbade the manipulation the same.136 The police records of a number of cases demonstrate that even though the police routinely used the Dienstbotenbuch to classify the women who possessed it as servants, it was not a faithful indicator of the current or the former profession of a woman. For instance, in April 1899, police agents in Vienna intercepted a telegram sent by a Helene Riegler.137 In the telegram, Riegler wrote that she had sent a certain Pollak in Belgrad “two beautiful statues”—a light blonde and a brunette. She described the two girls as “happy and singing” and having debts of 400 gulden without counting travel passes; they spoke German, “Slavic,” and some Hungarian. One girl had a General-Pass, and the other had a Dienstbotenbuch, so that they could travel to Belgrad. From Belgrad, they required no documentation.138 Upon investigation, the police agents discovered that the thirty-four-yearold Riegler held a Gesundheitsbuch (health book given to prostitutes) between 1886 and 1894 and that, until January 1898, she lived in Vienna. According to the testimony of her landlady, Riegler had traveled to Budapest and returned with a twenty-one-year-old cook from Belgrad named Karolina Poledna. Since December 1898, Poledna worked for an Anna Kostial. However, in February 1899, Poledna disappeared. Kostial testified that before she came to work with her, Poledna was a prostitute.139 In May 1899, police headquarters in Vienna informed the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Belgrad that, under the pretext of entering a service position, Riegler had sent two girls to a brothel owner named Julius Pollak. Of the two, Pollak testified that he received one and paid two hundred florins for her. The other girl, named Anastasia, was yet to arrive and was intended for prostitution.140 Soon after, the Austro-Hungarian consulate at Belgrad reported to the Viennese police headquarters that they had detained an Anastasia Navratil sent from Vienna to Pollak and had seized her Dienstbotenbuch.141 In this case, Riegler had simply used the Dienstbotenbuch to transport one of the two women intended for commercial sex in Pollak’s brothel. Nothing in these records suggest that Riegler had lured the women with false promises about securing them domestic service positions or that they had been servants prior to their transition into sex work. The following two cases reveal much more nuance in the possession and use of the Dienstbotenbuch than can be expressed by police datasets. In December 1910, the Imperial General Hospital reported to the Viennese police headquarters that

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a prostitute from Dresden named Cäcilie Binder had traveled to Vienna to seek treatment for syphilis. Her Dienstbotenbuch stated that she was born in Michelwald and resident in Schlögel in Upper Austria. However, her current residence was in Vienna’s second district. When hospital officials asked her about this discrepancy in her Dienstbotenbuch, Binder revealed the following details: In 1910, a known Viennese Mädchenhandler Josef Wittmann arranged for her travels to Dresden. The law in Dresden forbade the medical regulation of girls under twentyone years. To enable Binder to escape vice-police control during her stay there, Wittmann tampered with her Dienstbotenbuch to change the date 1888 to 1889. As a result, German police officials thought that she was under twenty-one years of age. Wittmann had arranged for her travel to Dresden twice—once, before Easter 1910 to a brothel there. At the time, when she asked for her Dienstbotenbuch, he did not send it to her. Wittmann retained the Dienstbotenbuch and used it to transport another girl to a brothel in Tulln. The false Cäcilie Binder who had traveled to Tulln was a known clandestine prostitute, Katharina Buxbaum. Binder returned to Vienna a few weeks later and learned that Wittman had sent the document with Buxbaum to Tulln. In summer 1910, when Binder was at a brothel in Brünn, he telephoned her to inform her that a place was available at a brothel in Dresden. Shortly after, he arranged for her travel to Dresden again. Once his Tulln operation was complete, Wittmann returned the document to her.142 Police headquarters in Dresden revealed that Binder had worked at two different brothels between April and June 1910. Both brothel proprietors admitted that Wittmann procured Binder. At the same time, the administration at Mistelbach revealed that a person with Binder’s Dienstbotenbuch, that is, Buxbaum, worked as a prostitute at a coffeehouse in Tulln for several weeks in June and July 1910. Buxbaum testified that Wittmann had not arranged for her travel, even though she had traveled with him to Tulln. However, she gave him twenty kronen to use Binder’s Dienstbotenbuch since she had no documents of her own. Further interrogation revealed that Wittmann had enabled the travel of many women involved in selling sex to provincial brothels in Brünn, Agram, and Prague for several years. He testified that he principally handled streetwalkers. He also admitted to transporting women to brothels in Dresden in 1909 and 1910. In March 1911, Baumgartner, in his report, charged Wittmann on transgression of §5, §12, and §320 of the Penal Code for falsifying documents.143 The story of Wittmann did not end as a travel agent for Viennese streetwalkers but as a brothel waiter in Mährisch-Ostrau. According to records, Wittmann’s imprisonment ended in September 1911.144 Soon after his release, he chose to travel to Mährisch-Ostrau and join a brothel as a waiter.145 Records also suggest that Wittmann continued to enable the transport of women to brothels.146 In July 1914, at the local railway station, authorities in Marienbad detained a prostitute on her way to Brünn. She informed the local police agent that an unknown man had procured her. Upon investigation, the proprietor of the prostitution house informed the police that a certain Uhl had supplied her. The Vi-

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ennese police headquarters was immediately notified of this procurement.147 The police at Znaim also informed the Viennese police headquarters that Uhl had supplied two women from Vienna to a local brothel. He had also procured a twenty-year-old Marie Czerny for the brothel.148 The Viennese police intercepted and placed Czerny under sanitary control. Czerny had lost her Dienstbotenbuch several months earlier. The police suspected that Uhl had used Czerny’s Dienstbotenbuch to transport an unidentified girl from Vienna to the brothel in Znaim.149 Shortly thereafter, the police authorities in Brünn intercepted Margarethe Welser, a twenty-seven-year-old female cashier from Vienna, and put her under sanitary control. Welser testified that she had worked at the brothel in Znaim for some days. An unemployed artist who “operated” from a Café Steierhof in Vienna had offered her a good post in Znaim. Welser’s statement indicated that the artist had supplied at least five other women to the brothel in Znaim and another woman to a brothel in Marienbad.150 Based on her statement and descriptions, police officials apprehended twenty-five-year-old Viennese resident Hieronymus Uhl. The police charged him with transgression of §512 of the Penal Code and sent him to the regional court at Leopoldstadt for sentencing.151 The case of Whitmann and Uhl highlights three key issues in the connection between the servant occupation and the sex trade in Austria-Hungary. First, the empire’s commercial sex industry offered alternative economic opportunities to women such as Margarethe Welser. This was pertinent at a time when there was severe antagonism toward female service in Viennese hospitality establishments. Agents such as Wittmann and Uhl who supplied women to brothels in other parts of the empire marketed these opportunities to potential new recruits in Vienna. New recruits could appraise these opportunities and choose whether they wished to pursue these prospects. Welser, for instance, had not stayed at the brothel in Znaim. She had worked there for a few days and then left. Second, for agents who arranged the travels of women involved in commercial sex as well as for the women in the trade themselves, the Dienstbotenbuch was just a tool to enable a woman’s mobility within and outside the empire and a mechanism to evade police surveillance of the movement. Third, the document in no way suggested that the women traveling to brothels were naïve, victimized, or duped into believing they were intended for domestic service positions. The possession of the document simply enabled the mobility of many women within the sex industry and allowed them to seek positions in different locations inside as well as outside the empire, thus refreshing their economic opportunities.

Conclusion The changes in police structure and function in the second half of the nineteenth century aided the persistence of the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant. Statistics supplied the legitimacy to a preexisting construct and its

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confluent habits of policing. The expression of this construct as numbers simply justified the entrenchment of a medico-police surveillance system in fin de siècle Austria-Hungary. The obsession with numbers masked several underlying changes triggered by urbanization in the late nineteenth century. The occupational specialization in hospitality establishments that compounded the demographic feminization of the servant occupation detailed in chapter 3 was one such change. The increasing encroachment of the medical establishment into state structures contributed to “Othering” vast swaths of the population. Thus, structural changes made to the Habsburg state between the 1848 revolution and the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the subsequent entrenchment of the medical establishment in state structures were deeply implicated in the persistence of the culture of “Othering” migrant women. But the medical establishment of the nineteenth century did not give rise to this culture.

Notes 1. M. A. Quetelet, Letters Addressed to H.R.H. the Grand Duke of Saxe Coburg and Gotha on the Theory of Probabilities, as Applied to the Moral and Political Sciences, trans. Olinthus Gregory Downes (London, 1849), 198. Parts of this chapter have been published as an article: see Ambika Natarajan, “Vagrant Servants as Disease Vectors: Regulation of Migrant Maidservants in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 51 (2020): 152–72. 2. Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000), 28–29. 3. Frank H. Hankins, “Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1908), 39–44, 67–70. 4. Nico Randeraad, States and Statistics in the Nineteenth Century: Europe by Numbers (Manchester, 2010), 60–79; Prokop Závodský and Ondřej Šimpach, “Karl Czoernig and the State Statistics of the Habsburg Monarchy,” in 20th International Scientific Conference AMSE Applications of Mathematics and Statistics in Economics (2017), 483–94. 5. “Quackery” and traditional forms of medical knowledge in peripheral lands of the empire were replaced by the enlightened rationalism developed at the Habsburg capital of Vienna. In 1749, Swieten founded the First Vienna Medical School. See Emma C. Spary, “Introduction: Centre and Periphery in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg ‘Medical Empire,’” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 684–90. Mark Kidd and Irvin M. Modlin, “Van Swieten and the Renaissance of the Vienna Medical School,” World Journal of Surgery 25 (2001): 444–50. 6. The Josephinum or the medicinisch-chirurgischen Josephs-Akademie was established in 1784 by Joseph II to train physicians and surgeons for the military. The Josephinum has a large library of medical literature. In the nineteenth century, between the two, the Josephinum and the Gesellschaft der Ärzte (GdÄ) contained the largest collection of medical literature in the world. See Johann Isfordink, Rede zur Feyer der Wiedereröffnung der medicinisch-chirurgischen Josephs Akademie: Gehalten den 6ten November 1824 (Vienna, 1824), 2–11. See also Helmut Wyklicky, Das Josephinum: Biographie eines Hauses; die medicinisch-chirurgische Josephs-Akademie seit 1785; das Institut für Geschichte der

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Medizin seit 1920 (Vienna, 1985). Special thanks to Dr. Hermann Zeitlhofer for his guidance on medical knowledge networks in Vienna. R. E. Batt, “Intellectual Development of Carl Von Rokitansky,” in A History of Endometriosis (London, 2011), 13–38. Universities and medical schools were established in different parts of the Habsburg Empire, and the knowledge developed in these spaces mirrored ethnic and cultural tensions. Further, the Vienna Medical School began to attract physicians from different regions of the empire. On the one hand, Viennese physicians and journalists propounded the superiority of German culture and the German model of medical education. At the same time, new hires from different parts of the empire portrayed inclusiveness and support for the Habsburg civilizing mission in occupied lands of Southeastern Europe. While in the previous century, great prestige was associated with hiring professors from outside the Habsburg domain, in the post-1848 period, the Ministry of the Interior hired fewer foreign professors and encouraged the hiring of returning graduates from foreign universities as well as physicians from other parts within the realm. See Jan Jakub Surman, “Habsburg Universities 1848–1918: Biography of a Space” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 2012), 7; Tatijana Buklijas, “The Politics of Fin-de-Siècle Anatomy,” in The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918, ed. Mitchell Ash and Jan Surman (New York, 2012), 209–44. Key among these reforms were the differentiation between the faculty of the medical school and other physicians. Since 1365, an association of medical faculty, graduates, and physicians in Vienna existed in the form of the Collegium of Doctors. The reforms of 1849 split this association into two units: an autonomous association of medical faculty, the Collegium of Professors, and the highly influential unit of physicians that retained the name Collegium of Doctors, which remained associated with the medical faculty until 1873. The reforms afforded medical professors the autonomy to reorganize the functioning of the medical faculty as well as the opportunity to be elected to high offices in the medical school, and more broadly at Vienna University. See “Provisorisches Gesetz: Über die Organisation der akademischen Behörden,” Wiener Zeitung, 6 October 1849, 2–3; Erna Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century (Baltimore and London, 1976), 102–5. Lesky, Vienna Medical School, 112–13, 128–40. For information on how physicians and economists developed population demography in interwar Austria, see Gundrun Exner, Josef Kytir, and Alexander Pinwinkler, Bevölkerungswissenschaft in Österreich in der Zwischenkriegzeit (1918–1938): Personen, Institutionen, Diskurse (Vienna, Köln, und Weimar, 2004). See also, McEwen, Sexual Knowledge, 26–55. Despite the intense campaigns in these regions, more than 10 percent of patients in the empire’s hospitals were reported to be infected with venereal diseases. Brigitte Fuchs, “Orientalizing Disease: Austro-Hungarian Policies of ‘Race,’ Gender, and Hygiene in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1874–1914,” in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda (Budapest and New York, 2011), 57–86. For a discussion on degeneration theories with respect to race in Austria-Hungary, see Brigitte Fuchs, “Rasse,” “Volk,” “Geschlecht”: Anthropologische Diskurse in Österreich 1850–1960 (Frankfurt and New York, 2003). Carl Sigmund Ritter von Ilanor, Die Wiener Klinik für Syphilis (Vienna, 1878), 32–33.

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14. Brigitte Fuchs, “Zur Geschichte und Statistik der venerischen Erkrankungen in den österreichischen Ländern der Habsburgermonarchie, 1815–1914,” in Übergänge und Schnittmengen: Arbeit, Migration, Bevölkerung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Diskussion, ed. Annemarie Steidl, Thomas Buckner, Werner Lausecker, Alexander Pinwinkler, Sigrid Wadauer, and Hermann Zeitlhofer (Vienna, 2008), 429–55. 15. Lesky, Vienna Medical School, 135. In fact, Sigmund’s population hygiene interest extended beyond syphilis to the containment of all diseases. Moreover, his suggestions for the containment of infection in quarantine facilities as well as defense against invasion of epidemics in Europe and for the establishment of a Permanent International Sanitary Commission in Vienna were adopted in the International Sanitary Conferences in Vienna and Washington. See also Heinz Flamm, “Carl Ludwig Sigmund Ritter von Ilanor, the founder of venerology, an early Hospital Hygienist and Austrian Epidemiologist in the Service of the European Public Health: The 200th Anniversary of His Birth in August 1810,” Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 122, nos. 15–16 (2010): 494–507. 16. von Ilanor, Die Wiener Klinik für Syphilis, 27–33. 17. “Feuillton: 1. Zur Prostitutionsfrage,” Jahrganges der österreichischen Zeitschrift für praktische Heilkunde 7, no. 20 (1861): 327–28. 18. Karin J. Jušek, “Sexual Morality and the Meaning of Prostitution in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” in From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality, ed. Jan Bremmer (New York, 1991), 123–42. 19. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Die Administration, 20–21. Jušek indicates that the police report was composed in 1851; however, my reading of Schrank reveals that the police report was issued in 1861. See, Jušek, “Sexual Morality,” 132–33. 20. In the fifty years between 1835 and 1875, the population of Vienna had doubled. The construction of buildings and public facilities, however, had not kept pace with the population growth. Shortage of living spaces and poor hygienic conditions resulted in infectious disease epidemics. See Erna Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century (Baltimore, 1976), 248–54; “Sterblichkeit an epidemischen Krankheiten 1831–1873” and “Verteilung der Cholera- und Durchfall-Sterbefälle 1855,” in Historischer Atlas von Wien 8. Lieferung (Vienna, 2002). See also, Ernst Visser, “Urban Developments in the Time of Cholera: Vienna 1830–1850” (master’s thesis, Central European University, 2011). 21. BGdÄW. Ernst Finger, “Zur Prophylaxe der Geschlechtskrankheiten in Österreich,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 5, no. 12 (1906), in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten V. Band, ed. A. Blaschko, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1906), 441–67; Ernst Finger, “Der neue österreichische Strafgesetzentwurf und die Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Zeitschrift für Bekaämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 10, no. 12 (1909/10), in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten X. Band, ed. A. Blaschko, S. Ehrmann, E. Finger, J. Jadassohn, K. Kreibich, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1910), 401–33. 22. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, I. Band: Die Geschichte, 318. 23. Franz Seraph Hügel, Zur Geschichte, Statistik und Regelung der Prostitution: Social-medicinische Studien in ihrer praktischen Behandlung und Anwendung auf Wien und andere Grossstädte (Vienna, 1865). The front cover lists his qualification. 24. JBW. Franz Seraph Hügel, Die Prostitution und deren Regulirung in Wien (Vienna, 1863), 55–58. Signatur: 40.308.

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25. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 34. 26. Ibid., 43. 27. Ibid., 27–29. See specifically page 29, where building of special hostels for homeless servants is recommended. 28. Ibid., 43. 29. Ibid., 44. 30. Ibid., 44–50. 31. Even though government authorities and police officials did not recognize prostitution as a distinct profession in 1863, physicians had already started using the terms “prostitute” and “prostitution.” These terms appear often in medical journals and articles written by medical professionals pertaining to the idea of prostitution regulation. 32. “Zur Prostitutionsfrage,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 13, no. 46 (1863), 731–32, in Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift Dreizehnter Jahrgang, ed. Dr. L. Wittelshöfer (Vienna, 1863). 33. Franz Hügel, Ueber die Quästionirung und Lösung der Prostitutionsfrage (Vienna, 1867), 8–9. 34. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 47–48. 35. Ibid., 53–55. 36. Ibid., 55. 37. Ibid. “Der erste und erfolgreichste Schritt zur Regelung der Prostitution in Wien wird die Regelung des Dienstbotenwesens sein.” 38. Ibid. 39. Wilhelm Schlesinger, Die Prostitution in Wien und Paris (Vienna, 1868), 4–10. 40. Ibid., 8. 41. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 58–59. 42. Dr. Bittmann, “Die Prostitution vom Standpunkte der Physiologie, Anthropologie und Pathologie,” Allgemeine Wiener medizinische Zeitung, 17, no. 33 (1872), in Allgemeine Wiener medizinische Zeitung 17 Jahrgang, ed. Bernard Kraus (Vienna, 1872), 342–43. 43. “Eingabe des Wiener Gemeinderathes an das Ministerium des Innern wegen Regelung des öffentlichen Sanitätsdienstes,” in Wochenblatt der k.k. Gesellschaft der Aerzte in Wien XXV, 14, 7 April 1869, 168–69. 44. “Die commissionellen Verhandlungen wegen Reorganisirung des Sanitätsdienstes in Wien,” Wochenblatt der k.k. Gesellschaft der Aerzte in Wien XXV, 31, 4 August 1869, 336–37. Engelbert Steinwender, Von Stadtguardia zur Sicherheitswache: Wiener Polizeiwachen und ihre Zeit, Band I: Von der Frühzeit bis 1932 (Graz, 1992), 126–27. 45. “Wiens erster ‘Polizeipäsident,’” Öffentliche Sicherheit, 1 February 2012, 41–45; Hermann Oberhummer, Die Angehörigen der Wiener Polizeidirektion (Vienna, 1939), 13; Steinwender, Von Stadtguardia zur Sicherheitswache, 122–32. See also, Hermann Oberhummer, Die Wiener Polizei: 200 Jahre Sicherheit in Österreich (Vienna, 1938). 46. Steinwender, Von Stadtguardia zur Sicherheitswache, 136. 47. Landespolizeidirektion-Wien Archiv (hereafter, LPDW), Karton: Prostitution 1875– 1883, Akte: Prostitution, Mädchenhandel, Gesundheitswesen, Verzeichnis 1881; Amtsbibliothek der LPDW (ALPDW), Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1876, compiled and edited by August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 29. 48. Dr. Hoffmann, Medizinischer Führer durch Wien, dessen Unterrichts-, Sanitäts- und Humanitäts-Anstalten, nebst allen einschlägigen Gesetzen und einem vollstäntigen Verzeichnisse

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49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

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des medicinischen Lehrkörpers und sämmlicher Sanitätspersonen nach neuesten, authentischen Quellen bearbeitet (Vienna, 1874), 13–14. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 101–2. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 105–6. See also, Jušek, Auf der Suche, 122–23. Arthur Schnitzler, Reigen: Zehn Dialoge (Vienna and Leipzig, 1903). Domenico Jacono, “Der Sexmarkt im Wien des Fin de Siècle,” Kakanien Revisited (12 October 2009), 1–14. See also, Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in NineteenthCentury Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, 2000), 135–47. Josef Schrank, Die amtlichen Vorschriften betreffend die Prostitution in Wien in ihrer administrativen, sanitären und strafgerichtlichen Anwendung (Vienna, 1899), 43. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1875, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 46. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1877, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 4. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1876, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 2–3. Schrank, Die amtlichen Vorschriften, 43. The registration process for the issuance of a health book to a prostitute involved an eighteen-point questionnaire and the production of several documents. The questionnaire required personal details such as name, family name, date and place of birth, religion, level of education, previous occupation, residence, and previous residence. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 52. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1876, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 30. “Von Seite der Commissariate ist bei Ausfolgung von Gesundheitsbüchern in hinkunft mit grösster Rigorosität vorzugehen. Dies gilt inbesondere bei solchen Frauenpersonen, welche noch minderjährige oder kaum aus dem Alter der Unmündigkeit getreten sind. Uberhaupt aber sind nicht hieher zuständige Personen, hauptsächlich vazirende Dienstboten, anläßlich ihrer Bewerbung um Gesundheitsbücher der eindringlichsten Perlustrirung zu unterziehen und erforderlichen Falles unnachsichtlich von hiesigen Platze zu entfernen. Dieses Letzere hat übrigens auch stets bei in Evidenz stehenden, nicht einheimischen Prostituirten Platz zu greifen, sobald diese durch ihr Treiben wiederholt zu polizeilichem Einschreiten Anlass bieten.” 226 maidservants, 2 chambermaids, and 1 Bonne. The record also showed 3 female cashiers who prior to 1885 were also considered servants. Even if the 3 cashiers were not included in the category of servants, 229 out of 410 prostitutes were formerly servants. See, Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 207. Occupation distribution of 393 new recruits to prostitution in Vienna in 1894: 240 maidservants, 85 factory workers, 31 waitresses and saleswomen, 1 flower girl, 3 actresses, 5 governesses/Bonnen, 29 unemployed. See “Ueber die Untersuchung der Prostituirten,” Zeitschrift für Nahrungsmittel-Untersuchung, Hygiene und Waarenkunde 9, no. 24 (1895), in Zeitschrift der Nahrungsmittel-Untersuchung, Hygiene und Waarenkunde, Achter Jahrgang, ed. Hans Heger (Vienna, 1895), 399. For source data of figure 4.1 see, Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administrativen, 244. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 137–70.

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64. von Ilanor, Die Wiener Klinik, 27–33; Lesky, Vienna Medical School, 135–36; Heinz Flamm, “Carl Ludwig Sigmund Ritter von Ilanor, der Begründer der Venerologie, ein früher Krankenhaus-Hygieniker und österreichischer Epidemiologe im Dienste der europäischen Volksgesundheit: Zur 200. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages im August 1810,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 122 (2010): 494–507. 65. Finger, who received his habilitation from the dermatology department in University of Vienna Medical School in 1889, was appointed as titular professor at Vienna University, and in 1901 he became the full professor of dermatology. Between 1904 and 1927, Finger served as the director of the Zweiten Universitäts-Klinik für Haut- und Geschlechtskrankheiten (Second University Clinic for Dermatology and Venereal Diseases). From 1906 to 1919, Finger was the president of the Wiener Ärztekammer (Vienna Medical Board), and from 1925 to 1931, he served as the president of the Oberste Sanitätsrat. By 1927, Finger had published more than a hundred articles on syphilis and venereal diseases. His two volumes, Lehrbuch der Haut- und Geschlechtskrankheiten für Studierende und Praktische Ärzte: Die Hautkrankheiten (1907) and Lehrbuch der Haut- und Geschlechtskrankheiten für Studierende und Praktische Ärzte: Die Geschlechtskrankheiten (1908), became the standards in venereal and dermatological education throughout the German-speaking world. During his tenure at Vienna University, Finger trained an entire generation of venereal disease physicians, many of whom played pivotal roles in the venereal disease debate of the twentieth century. Key among his students was Josef Kyrle (1880–1926). 66. BGdÄW. “Tagesgeschichte: VI. Internationaler Congress für Hygiene und Demographie zu Wien 1887,” Zeitschrift für Nahrungsmittel-Untersuchung und Hygiene Nr. 1, Jahrgang 1, January 1887, 15–17; “The International Congress of Hygiene and Demography,” Nature, 15 January 1891, 241–42. 67. Dr. Telke, “Ueber die Organisation des Medizinalwesens und die wichtigeren sanitären und medizinal-technischen Einrichtungen in Oesterreich-Ungarn,” Vierteljahrschrift für gerichtliche Medizin und öffentliches Sanitätswesen, ed. A. Schmidtmann and F. Strassmann (1907), 34:4–6; Transactions of the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Demography: London, August 10th–17th, 1891, ed. C. E. Shelley (London, 1893), 13:23–25. 68. “Schrank Josef (Karl), Mediziner,” Österreichisches biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, ed. der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band 11, Lfg. 52 (Vienna, 1997), 176; “Merta Anton, Mediziner,” Österreichisches biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, ed. der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band 6, Lfg. 28 (Vienna, 1974), 235. 69. Josef Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien in historischer, administrativer und hygienischer Beziehung II. Band: Die Administration und Hygiene der Prostitution in Wien (Vienna, 1886), 176. 70. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 60. 71. Jušek, Auf der Suche, 114. 72. BGdÄW. “Tagesgeschichte Aus Österreich,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 6, no. 1 (1907) in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten VI. Band, eds. A. Blaschko, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1906), 24–36. 73. Wadauer, “Establishing Distinctions,” 31–70 74. BGdÄW. Finger, “Zur Prophylaxe,” 5, 12 (1906), 461, 464; Susan Zimmerman argues that the effects of class divide and poverty were highly gendered in Central European urban centers and that the problems of poverty and prostitution were interconnected.

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76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

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See, Susan Zimmermann, “Making a Living from Disgrace: The Politics of Prostitution, Female Poverty and Urban Gender Codes in Budapest and Vienna, 1860–1920,” in The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present, ed. Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward (Aldershot, 1999), 175–96. BGdÄW. Oskar Scheuer, “Zur Bekämpfung der geheimen Prostitution in Wien,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 11, no. 6 (1910), in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten XI. Band, eds. A. Blaschko, S. Ehrmann, E. Finger, J. Jadassohn, K. Kreibich, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1910), 240. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1896 (Vienna, 1896), 19. “Auch dem Treiben der vacirenden weiblichen Dienstboten ist seitens der Commissariate mehr Aufmerksamkeit zuzuwenden, als dies bischer geschehen ist. Es ist hiebei insbesondere darauf Rücksicht zu nehmen, ob diese Personen nicht etwa ungebührlich lang vacirend, dem liederlichen Wandel ergeben sind und sich ihren Lebensunterhalt etweder ganz oder mindestens zum Theile aus der Ausübung der Prostitution verschaffen, ohne dass sie unter sanitätspolizeilicher Controle stehen. In diesem Falle sind sie der polizeiärztlichen Untersuchung zu unterziehen und ist gegen dieselben in Sinne der diesfalls bestehenden Gesetze un Verorddnungen Amts zu handeln.” By change in lifestyle, they meant the servant should have found “respectable” employment. See, ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1900 (Vienna, 1900), 12. S. Ehrmann, “Zweiter Abend: Die Verbreitung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” in Die Enquete, 46–47. “Zweiter Abend: Diskussion,” in Die Enquete, 72. “Fünfter Abend: Diskussion,” in Die Enquete, 219. Marschalko did not suggest these measures during the meeting, but his suggestions were discussed by other physicians there. See, “Königlicher Verein der Aerzte zu Budapest: Sitzung vom 16 März 1895,” Wiener Klinische Rundschau 9, no. 23 (1895) in Wiener Klinische Rundschau: Organ Für Gesammte Praktische Heilkunde sowie für die Interessen des ärtzlichen Standes IX. Jahrgang, ed. Heinrich Paschkis (Vienna, 1895), 361. “Königlicher Verein der Aerzte zu Budapest: Sitzung vom 23 März 1895,” Wiener Klinische Rundschau 9, no. 24 (1895) in Wiener Klinische Rundschau: Organ Für Gesammte Praktische Heilkunde sowie für die Interessen des ärtzlichen Standes IX. Jahrgang, ed. Heinrich Paschkis (Vienna, 1895), 377. Keely Stauter-Halsted, “The Physician and the Fallen Woman: Medicalizing Prostitution in the Polish Lands,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (2011): 270–90. BGdÄW. Sofer, “Die Bekämpfung,” 346. BGdÄW. “Tagesgeschichte: Aus Österreich,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 6, no. 1 (1907) in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten VI. Band, eds. A. Blaschko, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1907), 32. “Vierter Abend: Diskussion,” Die Enquete, 189–90. Baumgarten’s data suggested that of the 2,275 recorded prostitutes in Vienna, 44.52 percent were servants, 15.76 percent auxiliary workers, 4.79 percent handworkers, 4.79 percent female cashiers, 1.37 percent waitresses, 0.69 percent language teachers, 4.12 percent saleswomen, 1.37 percent flower girls, 3.40 percent tailors, 0.69 percent travel companions, 1.37 percent Bonnen, 0.69 percent singers, and 16 percent unemployed. See, Anton Baumgarten, “Vierter Abend: Öffentliche und geheime Prostitution: Die Prostitution,” in Die Enquete, 135.

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88. See, for instance, the case of Mina Wickenhagen later in the chapter. 89. The 1810 Codes held employers responsible for taking care of servants during illness and old age. Employers had to pay hospital bills as well as provide a space in their homes for housing ill servants who did not require hospital stays (G.O. §80–§82). However, the code also provided employers with an escape route. Employers did not have pay for physicians (G.O. §83 and §84) or treatment beyond a certain period (G.O. §85), and they did not have to provide for a servant at all if they did not have the resources. In the last case, they could appeal to the poor district, but they had to prove the poverty status of the servant (G.O. §86). See, Gesindeordnung für die Stadt Wien, 22–25. 90. “Third-class tier” refers to the tiers of care in Viennese hospitals. First, second, and thirdclass care depended on the payment made and facilities provided. See, Anselm Martin, Kranken- und Versorgungs-Anstalten zu Wien, Baaden, Linz und Salzburg in medizinischadministrativer Hinsicht nebst eine Vorrede von F.X.V. Mäberl (München, 1832), 57–59. 91. For instance, in November 1898, the Imperial General Hospital admitted a twenty-fiveyear-old cook from Moravia named Regina Huth. A Dr. Brünner diagnosed and treated her successfully for a uterine ailment called parametritis. Since she was employed in Vienna, the hospital followed strict protocols. See Andreas Haidinger, Das wohlthätige und gemeinnüssige Wien oder: Ausführliche Beschreibung der in der k.k. Haupt- und Residenzstadt zum allgemeinen Besten bestehenden öffentlichen und Privat-Anstalten mit Angabe der Erfordernisse, um zur Theilnahme an denselben zu gelangen, und der Vortheile, welche sie gewähren; Ein nützliches Auskunfts- un Nachschlagebuch für Haus und Familienväter, Einheimische und Fremde, Stadt- und Landbeamte, Gemeinden und Grundobrigkeiten, Ärzte und Seelsorger, insbesondere aber, ein unentbehrlicher Anhang zu all Beschreibungen von Wien (Vienna, 1842), 413–14; Die Dienstboten-Ordnung für Wien und die im Wien PolizeiBezirke gelegen Ortschaften, 97. JS, Regina Huth, MUW-AS-003473–0001–0001 to MUW-AS-003473–0001–0004. Parametritis is an inflammatory disease of the uterus. The causes of this disease are numerous, including a wound or a perforation of the stomach during accidents, sepsis during child delivery or a genital operation, fallopian infections, ovarian cysts, and so on. In the late nineteenth century, the treatment procedure included administration of laxatives, hot douches, electrotherapy, and operations depending on the stage of the disease. See George Ernest Herman, Diseases of Women: A Clinical Guide to Their Diagnosis and Treatment (New York, 1902), 189–284. 92. This was the case for a twenty-nine-year-old single maidservant from Moravia named Rosia Matula. In January 1904, the Klinik Chrobak, the gynecology and obstetrics clinic in the Imperial General Hospital, admitted Matula, where physicians diagnosed and treated her for parametritis. Simultaneously, officials investigated her case and in March 1904, the k.k. Landesgerichte für Strafsachen approved her treatment under Krankenprotokoll 26. The treatment prescribed for some female ailments were brutal. In 1892, at the gynecology clinic of Rudolf Chrobak (1843–1919) in Vienna, for instance, physicians tried intrauterine galvanization on ninety-four female patients suffering from a variety of uterine inflammatory diseases such as endometritis, perimetritis, dysmenorrhea, and amenorrhea. The procedure involved sending an electric current of about 250 milliamperes for fifteen to twenty minutes through the abdominal skin to the uterus. See, “Electricity in Gynecology,” Archives of Gynecology, Obstetrics and Pediatrics, no. 9 (1892); Drs. Mandl and Winter, “Electro-Therapeutics in Gynecology,” Archives of Gynecology, Obstetrics and Pediatrics, no. 11 (1892), in The Archives of Gynecology, Obstetrics and Pediatrics, ed. Augustin H. Goelet (New York, 1892), 389, 491–92. JS, Rosia Mat-

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93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98.

99. 100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

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ula, MUW-AS-003473-0004-0001 to MUW-AS-003473-0004-0007. Krankenprotokoll were procedures enforced in a specific health facility for the admission and treatment of patients. These involved rounds conducted by physicians, nurses, and directors. They also involved procedures such as whether a patient would be allowed to retain her clothes or whether they have to be disposed on account of infection, etc. See, Martin, Krankenund Versorgungs-Anstalten zu Wien, 283–84, 291. Haidinger, Das wohlthätige, 510. See also ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1865, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1883), 1; Andreas Belinka, Administrazions-Bericht des Bürgermeisters der k.k. Reichshaupt- und Residenzstadt Wien für die Jahr 1865 und 1866 Vorgelegt in der Sitzung des Gemeinderathes vom 26. April 1867 (Vienna, 1867), 8–9, 151, 226–27. WStLA, Dokumentensammlung, A4—Gewerbedokumente: 6.173.3—Krankenkassabuch: Luntz Amalia, Dienstboten-Krankenkasse-Büchlein 1868–1880, 13–14. For instance, in 1870, 10,484 the Krankenkassa insured servants; in 1871, 12,003; 1872, 16,662; and in 1873, 19,148 servants were insured. See Bericht des Bürgermeisters Dr. Cajetan Felder, Die Gemeinde-Verwaltung der Reichshaupt- und Residenzstadt Wien in den Jahren 1871–1873 (Vienna, 1875), 703. There were some glitches to the system. The government gradually increased the premiums between 1865 and 1914. In 1903, for example, the premium was two kronen with an additional charge of twenty hellers for the issuance of insurance booklets. Further, the Krankenkassa was not obligatory, and some employers failed to register and pay for it. See, Bericht des Bürgermeisters Dr. Karl Lueger, Der Gemeinde-Verwaltung der k.k. Reichtshaupt- und Residenzstadt Wien im Jahre 1903 (Vienna, 1905), 56. This number exceeded the previous year’s statistic by 3,261 servants. See Bericht des Bürgermeisters Dr. Karl Lueger, Der Gemeinde-Verwaltung Jahr 1903, 56. The Krankenkassa system was a system of insurance in Vienna. For details on how the system worked, see Stefan Wedrac, Die Allgemeine Arbeiter-Kranken- und Invalidenkasse in Wien 1868–1880: Die Wurzeln der Wiener Gebietskrankenkasse; Entstehung, Umfeld und Erfolg (Vienna, 2013). S. Ehrmann, “Zweiter Abend: Die Verbreitung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” Die Enquete, 39–40. Ibid., 39. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from M. Kir. Határszéli Rendörkapitányság Pozsony to Polizeidirektion in Wien, 28 December 1913. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter to the Polizeidiektion in Erfurt, 26 December 1913. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from Kriminal Pol. Agent in Erfurt, 29 December 1913. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from Gemeindevorstand in Abtsbessingen to k.k. Polizeiamt Wien, 23 March 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Relation and Letter from the Stadt Polizeiamt in Troppau to the k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien, 10 September 1910. Ibid.

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107. Ibid. 108. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Police Incident Report of Herminne Kann produced at k.k. Bezirks-Polizei-Commisariat Innere Stadt Wien, 5 March 1914. 109. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Relation k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 4 March 1914. 110. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Meldung der k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 5 March 1914. 111. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from the k.u.k Vizekonsul und Gerent in Salonich to the k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien, 14 March 1914. 112. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Protokoll of the k.k. Polizei-Kommissariat Wieden in Wien, 3 August 1916; Letter dated 24 April 1916, Wien; Anfrage Graf Alexander Economo. 113. For source data of figure 4.2, see Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 168. 114. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 76–77. 115. Lumila Fialová, “Domestic Staff in the Czech Lands at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries in the Light of Statistical Figures,” in Domestic Servants and the Formation of European Identity, ed. Antoinnette Fauve-Chamoux (New York, 2004), 141–59. 116. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 76–80. 117. Ibid., 78–87. 118. Ibid., 141. 119. Ibid., 102–3. 120. Alois Monti, Kinderheilkunde in Einzeldarstellungen, Erster Band (Berlin and Vienna, 1899), 23. 121. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1871, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1883), 20–21. Ehrenfreund and Mráz, Wiener Dienstrecht, 36–37, 69, 370–71. 122. Some contemporary news articles refer to this problem while prescribing prostitution regulation. See Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, II. Band: Der Administration, 34. 123. Morgenstern, Gesindewesen, 80. 124. Servant newspapers, women’s organizations and socialists raised several other problems with the Dienstbotenbuch as well. See, Richter, “Die Produktion,” 52–63. 125. Wingfield argues that some women perhaps considered themselves as participating in a traditional barter of sex for goods. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 139–40. See also, Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980), 15. In the context of nineteenth-century Paris, Harsin argues that prostitution was just a passing stage in the lives of many poor women. See Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ, 1985). Similarly, in the context of polish lands, Keely Stauter-Halsted contends that “many poor women found ways to exercise limited agency in times of personal hardship, material shortage, or family crisis. Selling sex was but one among a range of difficult options available to them.” See Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 5.

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126. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1874, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 17–18, 24. 127. Ibid., 43. 128. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1879, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1881), 26. 129. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1880, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1881), 16. 130. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1879, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1881), 29; Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung vom Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883 Jahrgang 1888, assembled by Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1894), 66. 131. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Jahrgang 1883, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1885), 115. 132. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung vom Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883 Jahrgang 1885, assembled by Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 143. 133. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1893 (Vienna, 1893), 74. 134. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1898 (Vienna, 1898), 29. 135. Ibid. 136. ALPDW, Amtsblatt der k.k Polizei-Direktion in Wien für das Jahr 1904 (Vienna, 1904), 62. 137. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899 Navratil, Pollak, Riegler, k.k Polizei-Direktion in Wien Meldung: Alois Seblitz und Theodor Strabl. 138. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899 Navratil, Pollak, Riegler, Abscrift from Helene Riegler in Wien to Herr Pollak in Belgrad. 139. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899 Navratil, Pollak, Riegler, k.k Polizei-Direktion in Wien Meldung: Alois Seblitz und Theodor Strabl. 140. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899 Navratil, Pollak, Riegler, Letter to the k.u.k. österr. ung. Consulat in Belgrad, 24 May 1899. 141. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899 Navratil, Pollak, Riegler, Letter from the k.u.k ÖsterreichUngarisches Cosulat für Serbien in Belgrad to the k.k Polizei-Direktion Wien, 24 June 1899; Letter from k.u.k Vice-Consul & Interim Gerent, k.u.k Österreich-Ungarisches Cosulat für Serbien in Belgrad to the k.k Polizei-Direktion Wien, 5 July 1899. 142. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen Erhebungsakte 1911 S. Schachtel Prostitution 1911, Letter from Dr. Baumgartner to Herrn staatsanwaltschaftlichen Funktionär beim k.k. Bezirksgerichte at Josefstadt Wien, 31 March 1911. 143. Ibid. 144. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen Erhebungsakte 1911 S. Schachtel Prostitution 1911, Letter from the k.k. Landesgerichtsrat of the k.k. Bezirks-

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146.

147.

148. 149. 150.

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gericht-Leopoldstadt I in Wien to the k.k. Bezirkspolizei-Kommissariat in Prater, 5 September 1911. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen Erhebungsakte 1911 S. Schachtel Prostitution 1911, Letter from the k.k. Polizeirat in Mäh.-Ostrau to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 4 October 1911; Letter from G.H. Hempel to Josef Wittmann, 1 September 1911; Letter from k.k Polizeirat in Mäh.-Ostrau to k.k PolizeiDirektion in Wien, 18 September 1911. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen Erhebungsakte 1911 S. Schachtel Prostitution 1911, Fragendes Amt: Josef Fritsch, 18 September 1911; Nach Abgang k.k. Polizei Dion in Wien, 2 October 1911; Letter from Stadtpolizeiamt M. Ostrau to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 29 March 1912; Letter from the k.k. Polizeirat in Mäh.-Ostrau to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 4 October 1911. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution & Mädchenhandel 1912, Akte: Mädchenhandel u. Prostitution 1912, Letter from H. Rauschner, für den Bürgermeister, Stadtrat Marienbad Polizeiamt to k.k. Bezirksgericht in Marienbad, 2 July 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution & Mädchenhandel 1912, Akte: Mädchenhandel .u. Prostitution 1912, Letter from Polizeiamt Znaim to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 4 July 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution & Mädchenhandel 1912, Akte: Mädchenhandel .u. Prostitution 1912, Letter to Polizeiamt in Znaim, 7 July 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution & Mädchenhandel 1912, Akte: Mädchenhandel .u. Prostitution 1912, Letter from der erste Bürgermeister-Stellvertreter, Stadtrat als Sicherheitsbehörde in Brunn to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 16 June 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution & Mädchenhandel 1912, Akte: Mädchenhandel .u. Prostitution 1912, Letter from Gemeindeamt Seefeld to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 20 August 1914; Letter to k.k. Bezirksgericht Leopoldstadt I, 24 August 1914.

Chapter 5

THE SERVANT QUESTION

d “E

qual Rights for All,” was the title of an article that appeared in the Viennese Social Democratic newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung in 1901. This was not an article about workers’ unions with an enumerated list of demands. This was an article about the gastric problems of a maidservant in Innsbruck named Aloisia Veronesi. According to the article, Veronesi’s physician determined that abuse was the cause of her gastric problems and had reported this to the public prosecutor’s office. Allegedly, the maidservant’s employer had mistreated her. The article asserted that the employer had grabbed Veronesi by her arms and flung her against a glass door with such force that she had cried out in pain. The regional court at Innsbruck judged this case as one of fraud and sentenced Veronesi to six weeks of imprisonment. According to the court, the article reported, the event could never have happened since the door against which Veronesi claimed she was pushed was made of glass and remained unbroken. Furthermore, in her testimony, Veronesi had claimed that she had never had any prior gastric problems and had never suffered from any kind of nausea or vomiting during her tenure at her employer’s service. But the investigations revealed that Veronesi had suffered gastric problems as early as 1898 and she had spit up blood. The article claimed that it was uncertain whether she was aware that she was spitting up blood. On the contrary, she claimed that her physician—who had died during the investigation—had told her that the red substance was red dust that had been inhaled in the factory. The court underscored that Veronesi had known about her illness and sentenced her to six weeks in prison for making false accusations against her employer. According to the Arbeiter Zeitung, the readers of the article raised questions about the investigation. One reader, it continued, called for an urgent reform of the Innsbruck courts. He allegedly argued that the many contradictions in the testimonies of the forensic physicians, the attending physician, the

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employer couple in question, and attempts to portray the maidservant as hysterical indicated a biased investigation. It is uncertain whether the maidservant was making false claims. However, the alleged case of employer abuse that the Arbeiter Zeitung publicized as “highly characteristic” of the “life of slavery” many maidservants endured reached the floor of the Austrian Reichsrat on 22 November 1901.1 Engelbert Pernerstorfer, the Catholic leader of the German Nationalist segment in the Social Democratic Party and a member of the house of representatives, submitted an interpellation to the justice minister demanding justice for the “unlucky maidservant.” At this time, the movement for the reform of the 1810 Codes was already in full swing. Spearheaded by the Austrian socialist and feminist movements, the issue of the ghastly condition of urban maidservants was raised in almost every meeting of the Austrian Reichsrat since 1883 and continued on until 1912 when a new code finally came into place.2 For the Social Democrats, the Veronesi case proved yet again that the 1810 Codes required urgent reform.3 While their calls for reform appeared to be a noble endeavor, the conversation was riddled with conspiracy theories. In the same meeting of the Austrian Reichsrat on 22 November 1901, the Social Democrat Franz Schuhmeier argued that Jews were involved in the white slave trade of Christian girls and their operation involved employing Christian girls as maidservants in Jewish households.4 Schuhmeier also happened to be a proponent of universal suffrage and an opponent of clerical control of schools, and, for his antisemitic leanings, he attracted great admiration from the Christian Social mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger.5 This chapter argues that much of the dialogue about the condition of maidservants was saturated with the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant that the Austrian feminist and populist movements had inherited. These inherited myths did little to forward the interests of the female servants themselves but rather served to propagate the vested interests and ideologies of specific sociopolitical groups.

The Anti-Mädchenhandel Squad After 1850, the large-scale migration of women6 from the countryside to big urban centers created widespread moral panics about Mädchenhandel.7 The movement against Mädchenhandel in the Habsburg Empire included physicians, feminists, abolitionists, populists, and the vice police. The campaign deployed the victim narrative to impose categories of “respectability” versus “indecency” on women’s choices. Confined to a domestic space and under the paternalistic control of the employer’s family, domestic service represented what anti-Mädchenhandel campaigners considered “respectable” and “appropriate” work for women. Along the same lines, waitressing and trading in sex was “indecent” and “inappropriate” work. Anti-Mädchenhandel narratives suggested that female migrants were

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young girls, often minors. Wily agents involved in Mädchenhandel trapped and groomed these girls into prostitution once they left the guardianship of their fathers or the safety of their hometowns.8 Antisemitic prostitution expert Josef Schrank’s book provided many examples of how anti-Mädchenhandel campaigners deployed the categories of respectability and indecency to frame women’s choices. Schrank told a story about Jeanne B. who was a nineteen-year-old Bonne9 from Geneva and employed in an aristocratic house in Pressburg. Her Hungarian mistress treated her so badly that Jeanne ran away from the house in the middle of the night. She arrived in Vienna with only a few kreuzers in her pocket. Here, she fell into the hands of an agent involved in Mädchenhandel. The agent brought her to a “gallant” woman living in an elegant house. Despite the girl’s reluctance, she was initiated into the “mysteries of fornication,” receiving beautiful toiletries, a carriage for traveling, and other comforts. One evening, Jeanne wanted to leave the house, but the woman detained her under the pretext that she had to pay 2,300 florins for clothes and maintenance. A few days later, another woman purchased her, and in a span of one year she passed through the hands of countless buyers. By chance, she came under police control, and her torment became known to the police.10 Schrank’s tale reveals three important aspects of how the victim narrative was deployed to explain a woman’s transition from “respectable” to “depraved” work. First, by highlighting Jeanne B.’s young age, Schrank underscores her virginal innocence and inability to make prudent choices. Second, Schrank does not frame Jeanne B.’s choice to leave a “respectable” occupation as an act of self-determination. Rather, he frames the incident as the only means to escape a cruel employer. Third, the narrative underscores Jeanne B.’s complete ignorance of her situation once she is “trapped” by a “Mädchenhandel agent.” Further, by highlighting her reluctance to enter prostitution, the narrative also emphasizes her innocence. The narrative frames Jeanne B. as reluctant, unaware, and enticed by the luxuries in the brothel so much so that she did not understand the “disrespectful” profession she had entered. Only when she wished to leave did she realize that she was trapped in the brothel. Schrank’s narration therefore highlighted that a woman’s transition from a “respectable” occupation (domestic service in a household) to a “indecent” one (selling sex) was not an act of choice. Rather, it was the coincidence of an unfortunate circumstance beyond the woman’s control (bad treatment by a cruel employer) that led to an unwise decision (escaping at night), an unavoidable encounter with a depraved opportunist (a wily agent involved in Mädchenhandel) and her “fall into” prostitution despite her reluctance. Antisemites like Schrank especially implicated Jews of being involved in Mädchenhandel. They linked Jews with overt sexuality, monetary greed, procurement and pandering, victimization of women, and venereal diseases.11 Especially after 1873, copious articles on Mädchenhandel inundated the empire’s newspapers. Mädchenhändler allegedly targeted girls from respectable fam-

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ilies to smuggle them to Hungary. From there, these agents apparently sold the girls to procurers in the Ottoman Empire and in South America.12 In all these reports, the “vulnerable” person was always a young, especially underage, woman either traveling away from home in search of a job opportunity or experiencing some sexual liberation away from the watchful eye of her guardians.13 Other articles underscored the susceptibility of working women to Mädchenhandel.14 Schrank argued that placement agencies allegedly flourished near coffeehouses where it was possible to recruit servant girls and female factory workers for export.15 Placement agencies faced intense criticism and frequent police surveillance since they enabled the movement of female job seekers within and across borders. By framing placement agencies as “exploitative” centers of Mädchenhandel operations, the police justified directing their “precautions” against Mädchenhandel at placement agencies. Between 1867 and 1873, the regional governor’s office issued edicts that directed police officials to monitor placement agencies making job placements in foreign destinations such as Egypt. It also directed officials to exercise caution while issuing passports to minors traveling to certain regions outside the empire, such as Turkey, Romania, Egypt, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Galaţi.16 In 1877, the Ministry of the Interior increased passport checks on servants traveling to foreign destinations.17 In 1885, the Foreign Ministry reported that the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Geneva received several complaints on the behavior of unauthorized local placement agents. These agents, apparently, misappropriated the funds for travel expenses of the Austro-Hungarian servants who were taking up service positions in Geneva.18 A police decree in June 1888 announced that many employers mistreated Viennese maidservants working in Bulgaria and did not pay them wages. These servants had entered a service contract with employers there. However, once they arrived at their destination, they were stuck. The decree ordered officials to exercise caution while issuing travel authorizations to servants traveling to Bulgaria. The decree also instructed the monitoring of placement agencies that were sending servants to Bulgaria.19 In March 1890, the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Botoschan (Botoșani), Romania, informed the Viennese police of incidents involving the employment of governesses. Local employers apparently hired educators from Vienna for their children. Viennese information bureaus conducted the placements. However, the educators left their positions due to bad treatment. Following such incidents, the consulate at Botoschan exchanged some unsavory correspondences with the local offices. Finally, the consulate decided not to issue any more passes to governesses traveling to Botoschan. Soon after, the police headquarters at Vienna cautioned police commissariats about issuing passes to governesses traveling to Romania.20 Just as in the intricate cases of Dienstbotenbuch use and misuse, the interaction between maidservants and placement agents was a complex one. Private place-

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ment agencies certainly increased the financial difficulties of servants, and they were extremely exploitative. But they were relatively indifferent to the personal choices of their servant clients so long as they paid their fees. The following case demonstrates the complexity involved. In February 1884, a supervisor at the Rohatetz Bisenzer Sugar Factory notified the Viennese police that he had discovered a suspicious letter and railway tickets containing the name of twenty-eight-year-old Marie Jeremias. Marie was the daughter of Adam Jeremias, a worker at the factory, and had allegedly been missing from Vienna for five weeks.21 The letter was written on 19 February 1884 and was addressed to Frau Jeremias by an Adolf Diamand. In the letter, Diamand detailed the transport of Marie to Trieste via railway with the aid of an accomplice, a Frau Stun. He demanded a payment of sixty kronen for the operation, which included the clothes, furniture, and water for Marie’s use.22 The ticket indicated that Marie Jeremias had used the train on 2 March 1884.23 In April 1884, the Vienna police apprehended Adolf Diamand. The latter testified that Marie’s stepmother had contacted him to arrange a position for her.24 He met Marie Jeremias in Café National. She had been a governess for four to five years. After about two to three days, he took Marie to a Julie Stun, with whom she stayed under the false name Maria Tuřena. In January, she brought Marie Jeremias to a Café Lafferl. From there, she was sent to a hotel in Wieden. There, they met with a Louis Darrego from America who accepted her as a governess and transported her to Trieste in the following three to four days. She then traveled to South America.25 Diamand also admitted to his involvement in arranging for the travel of another woman—twenty-three-year-old Anna Biedermann—to Rio de Janeiro in May 1882.26 The details of the “suspicious” case of Marie Jeremias comprised a stepmother approaching a travel agent to arrange a position for her adult stepdaughter, then the travel agent meeting her, arranging for an interview with a prospective employer abroad, making all the necessary travel arrangements after the employer accepted her, and requesting money from the stepmother for mediating all these arrangements. The woman (Marie Jeremias) had voluntarily traveled to the job location to avail the position.27 The police arrested Diamand on suspicions of transporting Marie to South America for prostitution. From the records, it is unclear whether Diamand had recruited Marie for a position as a governess or as an inmate in a brothel. However, there is no indication that the twenty-eight-yearold Marie was in any way coerced or unaware of the details of the arrangements. Placement agents served as important contact points for working women such as waitresses and female cashiers. The anti-Mädchenbedienung campaign had made Vienna’s hospitality industry inhospitable to women. This forced many young women to travel to other regions within and outside the empire in search of economic opportunities. Vice police records indicate that the surveillance of working women did not cease at the borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

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The empire’s consulates often surveilled women working in hospitality establishments abroad. In March 1886, the Austro-Hungarian Consulate at Galaţi reported to the Viennese police that a proprietor of some well-known hotels in St. Petersburg, Moses Rothenstrauch—known by the name Moses Silber—recruited girls from Vienna for his establishment. Apparently, his hotels hosted music concerts and cabarets and also functioned as brothels. Allegedly, in January 1885, the local government in Buchach had granted Silber documents that were valid throughout Europe for three years. The Romanian government had granted him a certificate specifying that he was the proprietor of the establishments in St. Petersburg. The consulate also notified the police in Budapest of this “operation.”28 Thus, by framing Buchach’s establishment as a brothel, the consulate’s report had encouraged the vice police to surveil women who sought to travel to Silber’s establishment to avail economic opportunities there. Vice police surveillance made it cumbersome for travel agents to market economic opportunities to women.29 The cases detailed above indicate that the campaign against Mädchenhandel had acquired an international character in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Until 1902, there was no organization in the Habsburg Empire dedicated specifically to the combat of the so-called white slave trade. Private women’s associations and Catholic organizations were at the forefront of this combat. By providing free boarding and placements for women, especially female servants, these organizations curtailed the alleged exploitation of these women by private placement agencies.30 In 1902, the French foreign minister invited delegations from fifteen European nations to an international congress in Paris to resolve the discrepancies in national laws and to create administrative structures and legal frameworks to combat the white slave trade.31 Soon after, the Austrian League for the Fight Against White Slave Trade (ÖLBM) emerged with Schrank as its president.32 Schrank, in his 1904 antisemitic manuscript Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung, strengthened the preexisting rhetorical link between alleged Mädchenhandel operations and maidservants. Schrank’s antisemitic work on the history of prostitution in Vienna also provided examples of how placement agencies played a role in allegedly pushing maidservants into prostitution. He noted that in 1884, placement agencies recruited Viennese cooks and maidservants to Bulgaria and Romania under the promise of good service positions. There, these servants signed contracts without properly understanding the details. At a certain point, a breach of contract occurred, and the local employers fired the servants from their positions. The employers apparently retained all their possessions to the extent that they did not even have enough money to return home. According to Schrank, without a means of subsistence, these girls allegedly “fell into the arms of ” prostitution.33 Schrank’s report on Mädchenhandel was emphatic in implicating the role of placement agencies in the sex trade. He claimed that many placement agencies in

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Bohemia had a “system of catching girls” and that their agents were spread out all throughout Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia, and Poland. Allegedly these agents manipulated job-seeking girls and induced them into prostitution. Many Bohemian girls were apparently transported to foreign brothels in Germany and Russia with stopping points in Prague. Additionally, Mädchenhändler used the Prague State Railway to transport girls, especially Polish servant girls, from Galicia to America. Similarly, Mädchenhändler in Constantinople and Cairo allegedly purchased Galician girls under twenty-four years of age, brought them to Udine, and transported them via Genoa to South America.34 Procurers would recruit these girls under pretenses that they would be engaged as servant girls and female cashiers in South America.35 Schrank’s narrative used the maidservant to forge a link between several disparate social issues: rising anxieties over female work and migration, placement agency swindles, antisemitism, and the alleged international white slave trade. He linked the idea of Mädchenhandel of underage girls with the phenomenon of many women migrating away from their hometowns to seek jobs in Vienna and other urban centers. In doing so, he synthesized a narrative of how Mädchenhändler supplied respectable young girls to brothels without their parents’ knowledge. Schrank underscored the loss of respectability and victimization that a naïve, young woman migrating away from her hometown would encounter at the hands of copious pimps and Mädchenhändler. He connected Mädchenhandel operations with the common Rautenstrauchian trope of frivolous servant girls who loved dance balls and visits to the Prater. Schrank also linked antisemitic conspiracy theories to the victim narrative highlighting the childlike innocence and the lack of agency of the women involved. Furthermore, in his accounts, the transport of a “respectable” woman (a domestic servant) was criminal, while transporting a prostitute was not.36 Female domestic service, therefore, served as the link that held together a chain of images in one coherent narrative: the anxiety over a job-seeking woman, the young naïve girl, the wily Mädchenhändler, corrupt placement agencies, the unacceptable porosity of the boundary that separated “respectable” and “indecent” work, and the international sex trade. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Schrank was of the view that the fight against Mädchenhandel ought to be based on the principles of regulation and not abolition of prostitution. He argued that prostitution should not be viewed as an evil to be eliminated.37 While the 1903 meeting of the ÖLBM attracted some female audience members, including Marianne Hainisch, a leader of the Austrian feminist movement, and Frau Obermayer, a well-known philanthropistwidow of a former Viennese council member, they were denied participation in the functioning of the association. In the same year, due to the transgressions of the general secretary, the fledgling association was on the brink of closing its doors. This was the time when Austria-Hungary, the United States, and Brazil

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acceded to the 1904 Paris Agreement,38 which required signature states to erect national centers that assembled information on the white slave trade. Further, it also necessitated intensification of police activity at important nodes such as railway stations and ports to intercept the transport of girls. Additionally, the agreement enabled the immigration and transport of deported women to their respective homelands.39 As a result of these international changes, Obermayer and Celestina Truxa rehabilitated the ÖLBM. This time, however, the association adopted feminist abolitionism as its philosophy.40 In June 1905, the Minister of the Interior created a central office dedicated to the combat of Mädchenhandel at the Viennese police headquarters and a corresponding panel in the Habsburg government.41 The task to monitor Mädchenhandel fell to the Viennese vice police headed by Anton Baumgarten. Following these changes, the ÖLBM started to function as a central node for several similar societies erected in other regions of the empire.42 The cluster of organizations—with its headquarters in Vienna and branches in Czernowitz, Lemberg, and Trieste—formed a national committee called Zentralkomitees der Österreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels (ZÖLBM).43 These associations assisted the police in their activities, such as their railway missions.44 The victim narrative was a potent tool to justify surveillance efforts. Police officials admitted that they did not know the specific role that Vienna played in the alleged international white slave trade.45 However, they claimed that some Mädchenhändler hailed from Galicia and Bukovina and that they held their victims at Vienna before they abducted them to prostitution houses in Argentina and Brazil. Victims of such Mädchenhändler apparently included female minors, itinerant servants, and female workers.46 Between 1907 and 1908, the trade minister in conjunction with the Ministry of the Interior introduced a series of reforms and amendments to the Trade Order to circumvent Mädchenhandel through placement agencies.47 As per a reform introduced in August 1907, placement agencies came under increased police control. Any agency that placed women under twenty-four years of age in service positions had to specify the biographical information of the service seeker as well as that of the employer in a special directory. This directory had to be made available to the regional police and certain private humanitarian organizations.48 An amendment in 1908 issued in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice introduced stricter norms for the issuance of placement agency licenses. Further, the center authorized the police to monitor how placement agencies used their licenses.49 An edict in May 1908 from the Ministry of Commerce increased regulation of agencies that dealt with international placements. The edict mandated that any foreign placement for people under eighteen years of age should have court authorization even if the placement had parental consent. The edict claimed to protect the minor children of poor, working-class parents who often consented to engagements in foreign lands.50

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Unlike pro-regulation physicians, the ZÖLBM was feminist and abolitionist in its tendencies. After 1907, the ZÖLBM received considerable attention from officials in the upper tiers of the Habsburg government.51 The 1909 international conference against Mädchenhandel was held in Vienna. At this time, the ZÖLBM boasted of having as their president a member of one of the most prominent noble families in Austria-Hungary and a man who held the honorary imperial title of “Geheimen Rat,” or member of the emperor’s privy council: Count Franz von Harrach (1870–1937). Further, the organization counted among its functionaries Dr. Ludwig Karell, who held the honorary imperial title “Kaiserlicher Rat,” or member of the emperor’s imperial council; also Dr. Ludwig Schex another “Kaiserlicher Rat” who worked with the branch office in Czernowitz.52 In 1910, the ZÖLBM sent a delegation to the International Congress against White Slave Trade held at Madrid. Among the several reforms to allegedly ensure the protection of young women, the congress recommended setting a fixed minimum age of employment. Further for underage persons, no written contracts between employer and employee were to be conducted without official intervention.53 The ZÖLBM’s report to the emperor in 191054 made the following remarks about Ernst Finger and Anton Baumgarten’s suggestions that prescribed supervision of the widest circles of clandestine prostitutes: while the association favored abolition, it recognized the importance of public health and sanitation. This, apparently, created the following dilemma: on the one hand, sanitation could be achieved through regulation of prostitutes. However, this entailed subjecting prostitutes to invasive medical examinations and a series of special police regulations. As a result, many prostitutes avoided regulation, which resulted in the spread of clandestine prostitution. On the other hand, sterner action against clandestine prostitution could lead to increased fear of incarceration among prostitutes that could in turn force them to submit to awkward regulation.55 To circumvent this dilemma, the association recommended the appointment of female physicians in the police forces. According to the report, a female physician could examine the prostitute without inculcating the feelings of shame and awkwardness that the latter faced with male physicians. Therefore, the female physician could act as a safeguard between the prostitute and bourgeois society.56 Thus, the report continued, the practical application of regulation should be increasingly entrusted to women.57 The report was submitted through the newly elected president of the ZBM, Count Josef Thun-Hohenstein, who offered considerable financial and administrative support to the ZÖLBM.58 The report revealed that feminists in the ranks of the ZÖLBM tempered their outcry against police control of women’s bodies in one profession (sex work) if it meant forwarding women’s causes in another “more respectable” profession (medicine). It also suggested that the ZÖLBM had specific ideas about what constituted respectable female work. Respectable work, in the minds of the ZÖLBM’s members, meant those occupations that did not require women to engage in sex out-

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side the confines of marriage irrespective of how degrading and economically constraining some of these professions could be for working-class women. Domestic service, despite its limited economic prospects and harsh work conditions, was clearly a respectable occupation, and commercial sex work, despite the assortment of economic alternatives it offered, was not.59

Populists In the 1890s, Johann Herrdegen,60 the inspector of the Viennese Aspangbahn and the council representative for the sixth district, severely criticized private placement agencies for their role in exacerbating the poor condition of maidservants in Vienna. He remarked on the condition of servants first in September 1891 at the meeting of the Viennese city council61 and again in 1893 when he published a study titled Über Dienstvermittlungsanstalten und deren Einfluss auf die weiblichen Dienstboten (About service placement agencies and their influence on Female Servants).62 By 1895, Herrdegen had made three interpellations proposing improved regulations of placement agencies in his yearly reports to the city council. In all these reports and discussions, he recommended that the government abolish concessions to placement agencies and decline any further approvals to establish new agencies. He also prescribed harsher punishments for agencies that committed fraud, exhibited negligence, or lacked care in dealing with their servant clients.63 Herrdegen’s reports were a part of a steady stream of publications and news items on the condition of urban maidservants that circulated in fin de siècle urban centers. In 1880, on occasion of the marriage of the Crown Prince Rudolf, the director of a Jewish boarding school M. Leidesdorf drafted a manuscript titled Die Dienstbotenfrage und deren Lösung (The servant question and its solution). In it, he proposed the erection of an association for better regulations for servant affairs and the introduction of old-age insurance for servants.64 The numbers of these proposals increased following the notorious cases of Hugo Schenk (1884) and of Franz and Rosalia Schneider (1892). In both cases, the criminals had assaulted, murdered, and robbed several maidservants. In 1894, the writer Alexander Schmitz published his work Zur Lösung der Dienstbotenfrage: Ein Studie für Frauen, Gemeinderäthe, Landtags und Reichsrathsabgeordnete (On the solution to the servant question: A study for women, town councils, state legislators, and senate councilors). He argued for the institution of a new Servant Order to ensure a more humane treatment of servants.65 Herrdegen received support from the influential middle-class woman’s association Allgemeine Österreichischer Frauenverein (General Austrian Women’s Association, AÖF). At the AÖF’s society meeting in March 1895,66 the invited speakers Herrdegen and attorney Dr. Julius Ofner underscored the importance

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of framing the Servant Question as part of the Woman Question and the Worker Question. In all other jobs, Ofner argued, an unskilled person had little chance of success unless he received an appropriate form of education or training. The servant occupation alone was an exception to this. Most girls who entered service had no practical experience. In addition, middle-class housewives who were principal employers of servant girls had no knowledge of how to handle employees. The attitudes of such women compounded the problem. Middle-class women, he pointed out, had no idea how poor women who took up service positions lived or the difficulties they faced; they treated servant girls as a different class of people altogether—not quite human. Herrdegen corroborated Ofner’s views and argued that the solution to the Servant Question had to come from women.67 Along these lines, Ofner emphasized that there had to be a recognition in Viennese women’s circles and an awareness among housewives that a servant was a human being.68 Ofner proposed that servants should be treated like any other member of the working class. The workplace of the servant, that is, the domestic space, posed a unique challenge. Even though all the subtleties of domestic work could not be controlled, he suggested that some protections were necessary. These protections should include eight-hour sleep, leisure time, breaks, appropriate wages, clean food, water, and healthy living conditions. He argued that the living provisions for maidservants should be subject to regular health inspections. In addition, provisions had to be made for the servants in the event of illness and old age.69 However, the Servant Question could not be resolved without undercutting the core of the problem, which, both Herrdegen and Ofner pointed out, lay the 1810 Codes. The outdated set of laws created unequal circumstances for servants: “[T]he existing orders have been written in a very hard-hearted manner. The fundamental issue of the servant question is that he is still seen from the point of view the year 1810, which assigns the servant the status of homo inferior for the police.”70 Herrdegen highlighted how placement agencies were implicated in exploiting their servant clients and compounding the situation. Upon placement, he argued, a servant had to pay 10 percent of her first month’s wages to the agency as fees.71 Such agencies accepted over a thousand applications at a time even though they would receive at most ten orders from employers. To increase their profits, agencies often placed multiple servants in one household. Such placements would be temporary, and the employer often terminated the service contract within a few weeks. The result was unemployment and re-registration with the placement agency. The cycle continued in this manner.72 In 1895, he estimated that 240 agencies handled 90,000 servants and 50,000 employers.73 The members of the AÖF discussed the need for an attitudinal change among the urban middle classes. The 1810 Codes, they argued, expressed an older attitude toward servants among the bourgeoisie—one that paralleled a master-slave

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relationship.74 As a result, intolerance for minor errors, inhumane treatment, and untimely termination of servants were rampant. Bourgeois women, they argued, seldom understood the difficulties of their servants and often thought of them as inferior beings.75 Further, they cultivated similar views in their children: “The smallest children behave with their servants as if they are higher beings . . . such a wrong relationship has just as much bad consequences for the education of children as for the status of the servant.”76 Because servants depended so much on the employer’s references, such behaviors considerably damaged their prospects. To circumvent the disadvantages incurred by such behavior, the AÖF suggested increasing literacy among and erecting training schools for servants. Trainees would have to complete an exam at the end of their instruction, and a successful examinee would be provided a good reference.77 Following the meeting, the AÖF drafted two petitions. One, to the Lower Austrian government, demanded the enactment of a new Servant Order that contained five changes: (1) the repeal of police oversight and punishment; (2) greater protections for minors; (3) the equal distribution of rights and responsibilities for employers and servants, including eight-hour sleep time, leisure time in the afternoons and evenings, clean living conditions, healthy food, competitive wages, and humane treatment; (4) health and old-age insurance; and (5) the erection of a house inspectorate to ensure that the standards of servant living conditions would be met. In addition, the association reasserted the recommendations Herrdegen had made in his interpellations to the city council. The second petition, to the Viennese city council, demanded the administrative centralization and appropriate registration procedures for all private placement agencies in the city.78 The AÖF’s position on this issue was surprising in lieu of the fact that nearly forty years earlier, many middle-class women had supported the establishment of placement agencies.79 But the AÖF’s reversal of its position on the matter reflected the rise of the Austrian feminist and socialist movements in fin de siècle Vienna. In the Josephine era, the maidservant had defended herself against Rautenstrauch. But, in fin de siècle Vienna, the liberated bourgeois woman rose to rescue the maidservant from her wretched state. The Viennese City Council accepted the draft of a new Servant Order in January 1896. The draft incorporated prescriptions for standardized living and working conditions of servants and attempted to remove some harsher aspects of police control of the master-servant relationship. However, the draft required the sanction of the Lower Austrian Assembly and the emperor.80 The Lower Austrian government conducted a systematic inquiry on the judicial regulations of servant matters in the empire. The Viennese attorney Dr. Hugo Morgenstern headed this inquiry. In 1903, the statistical office of the imperial Commerce Department (K.K. Arbeitsstatistischen Amtes im Handelsministerium) issued the results of Morgenstern’s inquiry in the form of a special report, titled Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Österreich (Servant conditions and servant rights in Austria).81 The

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report revealed that there was an absence of theoretical framework in the history of Habsburg law with respect to servant rights. The lack had caused considerable gaps in the handling of legal matters concerning servants in the Habsburg Empire.82 Morgenstern provided several historical reasons for this absence. The most important was the problem with the legal definition of the term “servant,” which was too broad and too vague. One crucial question arose from the interactions between women’s organizations and the Habsburg state: who was a “servant”? While it was certainly tricky for legal reformers and judges to resolve, the problem of definition that Morgenstern indicated posed no challenge whatsoever to the bourgeois feminist movement. There was no doubt to whom they referred when using the term “servant”: the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant. It was also clear who would set the parameters of the new laws they were demanding: bourgeois women. Herrdegen and Ofner, who were undoubtedly influenced by socialist ideas, argued for the importance of viewing the servant’s occupation as work. Like any paid work, then, the occupation needed legal regulations.83 But, on the issue of servants, both men were not swayed by the rising populist spirit. Since this occupation came under the purview of household work, they emphasized, the solution for the servant situation lay with middleclass women, that is, housewives, women’s organizations, and other women’s groups. Therefore, the onus fell upon bourgeois women’s organizations to open training institutes, servant hostels, and other facilities and to draft petitions to governmental authorities to alleviate the condition of servants. These efforts sought the contribution and participation of middle-class women. When populist movements emerged in the 1890s, their focus was the Servant Question.84 The right-wing populist party Christian Socials—the antisemitic party of Karl Lueger—were the first to take up the issue. However, left-wing populist Social Democratic Workers Party became much more influential in the debate. In 1892, upon the demands of the female members of the Social Democratic Party, the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung emerged as a separate newspaper rather than a supplement to the socialist newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung.85 In October of that year, the prominent socialist leader Adelheid Popp became the editor in chief of the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung. Under Popp’s editorship, the newspaper fast became the loudest critic of the status of servants in fin de siècle Vienna. Nearly every issue of the newspaper contained articles on servant problems. The newspaper provided a platform for servants to narrate their experiences. Following her lead, several articles about servant issues appeared in other socialist and feminist publications between 1899 and 1912. In 1900, the Austrian feminist magazine Dokumente der Frauen dedicated an entire issue to servant matters.86 Similarly, the prominent legal scholar Dr. Fritz Winter published articles on the legal situation of servants in the Social Democratic periodical Der Kampf.87 Populist movements differed considerably from bourgeois feminists in their approach to the Servant Question. Populist movements sought to organize and

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recruit the servants themselves rather than appeal to middle-class women. Until 1900, very few servant associations existed in the empire. After the 1850s, some associations that included certain high-level servants such as butlers emerged in Vienna.88 From 1900 onward, the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats encouraged the formation of servant organizations. The Christian Socials made efforts to create servant associations under the auspices of Christian Unions in 1903.89 P. T. Leser attempted to create an association in Vienna that comprised both male and female servants.90 In 1906, the Christian Socials started a newspaper for service peoples, Der herrschaftlich Angestellte, in Vienna’s first district. The weekly periodical circulated for about a year and had the distinction of being the first newspaper in Vienna dedicated to publishing articles about servant problems, claiming to cater to both male and female servants of all categories.91 The newspaper reported the efforts of the WHV in finding a solution to the Servant Question. In its 22 December 1906 issue, the newspaper first offered suggestions on how a group as undefined as servants could be organized. The article argued that the servant class should form an association that aligned politically with Christian Socials rather than with Social Democrats.92 In 1909, the Christian Socials founded the servant organization Reichsverband der Christlichen Hausgehilfinnen Österreichs (Association for Christian Housemaids in Austria, RHÖ).93 The organization drew inspiration from Ludwig Auer’s work in Donauwörth, Bavaria.94 The RHÖ, however, could not gather enough members from the servant class until the 1920s. In the matter of the Servant Question, the Social Democrats were more influential than Christian Socials in the years before World War I. In March 1902, the Social Democrats in Vienna created a pension fund for servants in case of emergency, unemployment, or marriage.95 Further, in 1910, they also formed the influential association Zentralvereins für das Hauspersonal Österreichs (ZHÖ) in Vienna. In May 1911, under the leadership of Popp, the stronger Social Democratic organization Einigkeit (Unity), emerged from the merger of two smaller maidservant associations: Verbandes der Hausgehilfinnen (Association for Housemaids) and Vereines der Heimarbeiterinnen (Association for Home Workers).96 The ZHÖ published the first issue of its newspaper the Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung in October 1910. In its first issue, the association argued that servants were the most disorganized group yet the ones that needed the most organized effort. Servants had a false notion, it claimed, that servant placement agencies precluded the necessity for servant organizations. The association declared its major aims to be the introduction of better qualified servants, regular work and leisure hours, security during summertime,97 and health and old-age insurance. To do this, the association resolved to erect training schools for household servants and refuge homes for unemployed servants, as well as to offer free placement services.98 Between 1910 and 1911,

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the ZHÖ organized cheap food supplies and free stitching and service courses for servants in different districts of Vienna. By January 1911, the organization claimed to have placed thirty-five hundred of its four thousand members in service positions free of cost.99 In February 1911, the association proposed the opening of a servant hostel in Vienna by collecting donations of one krone100 each from the hundred thousand resident servants in the city.101 By January 1912, the Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung claimed to have made more than five thousand placements and have trained over one hundred members in stitching, serving, and cooking.102 Before World War I, the Social Democratic newspaper Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung advertised the activities of Einigkeit.103 This periodical ran between 1911 and 1912, and members created the newspaper for “the protection of the material and social interest and the legal protection of the servant class.”104 The newspaper published articles on a variety of servant problems within the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as the rest of Europe. The Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung ran throughout the year, including the summer months.105 Like the ZHÖ, it offered free placement services and courses. Servants could approach the administrative offices of the newspaper in Vienna’s fourth district to use their placement services. Further, each issue of the newspaper had a dedicated space where servants and housewives could advertise free of cost.106 The role of populist movements in undercutting the autonomy of servant-class women and propagating antisemitic conspiracy theories cannot be underestimated. These movements took for granted the paternalistic Leopoldine model as the governing framework of the master-servant relationship. The paternalism inherent in the language of the 1810 Codes, however, was mostly gender neutral. The preferential targeting of female servants was due to the legacy of policing since the eighteenth century. Populists who entered this debate after 1890 weaponized the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant. As seen in chapter 3, right-wing populists were particularly successful in recruiting the support of waiter associations by portraying female servants as susceptible to prostitution. Left-wing populists offered up a much more aggressive brand of maternalism in place of the paternalism of the 1810 Codes. The former was a derivative of paternalism based upon the notion that the maidservant was in the protective custody, authority, and control of the mistress—her female employer. What is crucial here is that populists on both ends of the spectrum portrayed female servants as victims. Right-wing populists portrayed female servants as contagions, spreading sexual diseases among the population after having been “seduced” into a dissolute lifestyle by Jewish liberals, pimps, and procurers. Leftwing populists portrayed female servants as victims of police brutality, bourgeois employers, and private placement establishments. Thus, the victim narrative drew upon the age-old precept that the employer-servant relationship was modeled on a parent-child relationship, and therefore servants, like children, ought to

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be guided in the “correct” moral direction. The victim narrative depicted female servants as ignorant and naïve, in need of “protection” and “rescue” from prostitution through police intervention and legal measures. They drew upon multiple ideas for this purpose. The following sections analyze three such ideas inherent in the victim narrative, demonstrating how populists mixed factual aspects of the servant occupation with faulty assumptions and fictional literary themes.

The Fallen Maidservant The “fallen maidservant” is one of the most common themes in nineteenth-century French and English literature.107 The theme appeared prominently in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s 1865 novel Germinie Lacerteux. The story follows the life of a poor country girl who migrated to Paris to become a maidservant in a middle-class household. The authors describe her downfall, sexual depravity, and subsequent death in a hospital cot—all this following the loss of her innocence after her first sexual encounter. Thirty-one years later, when the Servant Question debate attracted the attention of the left-wing Social Democrats, one of its female leaders Emma Adler published the German translation of the novel.108 Although the theme of the fallen woman contained religious and moral undertones, many feminist and Social Democratic leaders framed several social issues plaguing the servant class along these lines. For example, at the 1908 conference of the ÖGBG, Popp introduced the idea of the fallen woman by linking three aspects of female work in Vienna: low wages, poor treatment, and urban prostitution.109 She argued that many servants were young, uneducated girls from the countryside about eighteen years of age. They had barely finished school. The wage of an average servant in Vienna was ten to twelve florins per month, and many families who hired servants could not afford to pay such an income. During summer, Popp continued, when the employers went to the countryside, they dismissed their maidservants. At this time, some women accepted jobs in spas and hotels as chambermaids or waitresses in restaurants. Working in such establishments, Popp claimed, was the first step toward “the end” in the big city for many of the most decent girls.110 Popp bolstered her argument with firsthand accounts from maidservants. A Frau Koller testified that she had been a maidservant for thirteen years, having initially worked in the city of Steyr in Lower Austria. Her first job did not pay a salary but provided only food, then she received a salary of three florins per month with food and board. Later, her salary rose to four to five gulden. She claimed that the average salary of a servant was six to seven florins per month which was a good enough income to afford a decent standard of living in Steyr. She came to Vienna with hopes of a better life. However, she found the situation unbearable. She claimed that when things got so bad that they could not even afford food, many servants made “male acquaintances” to supplement their meager

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wages. Further, many women, she alleged, suffered sexual harassment from their masters. She herself had frequently left positions to escape sexual harassment. Her last flight resulted in police arrest and lockup for twenty-four hours. She claimed that she no longer worked and that the highest salary she had earned in Vienna was ten florins per month.111 Popp’s argument and the narrations of her firsthand witnesses suggested two things. First, she did not consider maidservants entering the sex trade as an act of conscious economic choice. Rather, she thought it resulted from youthful innocence being ruined in the face of harsh living and working conditions, economic necessity, and the challenges of urban life. Second, denying choice allowed her to frame maidservants as victims of their circumstances, that is, victims of poor employer treatment, poor police treatment, low wages, and unemployment. Popp also suggested that working in certain places such as restaurants allegedly “ruined” innocent girls and induced them to enter prostitution. This argument is reminiscent of Hügel’s suggestion that certain jobs such as waitressing were unsuitable for young girls, as they allegedly increased their susceptibility to prostitution. Popp underscored the similarities in the situations of female factory workers and female servants.112 By drawing comparisons between domestic work and factory work, Popp framed the Servant Question as part of the Worker Question.

The Dearth of Servants Social Democrats like Popp were instrumental in injecting into the narrative about servants the idea of dearth of servants, or what they termed Dienstbotennot.113 In 1911, she published an article in Der Kampf titled “Lebensschicksal der Arbeiter (Fate of the workers).” According to Popp’s article, the steady migration of domestic servants toward factory work was evidence of the terrible working conditions of servants.114 She substantiated her argument with the following statistics: 70 percent of female weavers, 72 percent of ring spinners, 64 percent of chute tillers, and 63 percent or reel spinners stayed in the same profession throughout their working lives. Against this, 20 percent of semiskilled coil workers had formerly worked as maidservants and unskilled factory workers, and 26.6 percent had only worked as maidservants. Similarly, 31 percent of yarn workers had been maidservants, and 10.3 percent had performed housework as well as field work. The figures, she argued, indicated the gradual flow of female work from domestic service toward the textile industry.115 Again Popp adopted the tactic of introducing firsthand testimony to substantiate her argument. When a female textile factory worker was asked why she preferred factory work to domestic service, she replied, “The factory head is not as rude as a house mistress.”116 The dearth-of-servants idea117 that Popp forwarded is based upon some faulty assumptions about the servant occupation and an erroneous interpretation of statistical data. Popp’s arguments stemmed from her subjective experiences as a

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woman from a working-class background. She was born to poor, working-class parents in Inzerdorf, Vienna. To support her family income, Popp began to work at ten years of age. The range of jobs she held included domestic service, seamstering, and factory work. In 1889, Popp joined the working-class movement in Vienna. Within a few years, she emerged as one of the loudest voices for the rights of female workers.118 While Popp’s working-class background informed much of her activism for female servants, it was, at best, an incomplete description of the state of the servant occupation. Popp’s argument was based upon proportions rather than absolute numbers of servants. As discussed in the earlier chapters, the term “servant” was a catchall phrase for a wide range of tasks. This occupational category comprised migrant unskilled people who took up odd jobs to sustain themselves. Furthermore, a considerable number of employed persons categorized as servants worked in commercial establishments. So, for many servants, the distinction between commercial work and domestic work was blurred. At the turn of the century, while the construction industry, glass industry, and several other industries were male dominated and provided women with at most temporary positions, the textile industry exhibited a tendency to provide unskilled women with a stable career. It is impossible that new work opportunities in factories had absolutely no effect on women’s choices, especially when so many servants were already performing some form of unskilled commercial labor. The proportion of servants to the total population in Vienna decreased between 1848 and 1910 from fifteen to five.119 Within the female working population, the proportion of factory workers to servants increased.120 But proportions provide an incomplete picture. Even though the proportions of female servants decreased, the total absolute numbers of servants in Vienna continued to increase from 40,000 in 1848 to 101,364 in 1910.121 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the servant population of Vienna rose by 45 percent. Within the working female population in Vienna between 1869 and 1902, 67 percent were factory workers and 33 percent were servants. Between 1913 and 1914, it was 75 percent of factory workers versus 25 percent servants.122 In the first decade of the twentieth century, about a thousand women migrated from the countryside to Vienna each year. According to the Viennese service placement bureau, in 1910 there were 112,617 persons seeking service in Vienna.123 If the statistics cited by Social Democrats are to be believed, servant unemployment due to a surplus of servants was a major problem in Vienna—not the dearth of servants.124 Finally, the idea of shortage of servants that the Social Democrats often claimed to be a widespread phenomenon, could not possibly apply to all parts of the empire. In Hungary, industrialization and urbanization lagged considerably as compared with the Austrian half of the monarchy. Industrialization in Hungary gathered momentum in 1870s and 1880s; and reached its peak only in the 1890s. Budapest experienced a dramatic increase in its pop-

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ulation in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the numbers of servants also rose. In 1890, 25 percent of servants were urban, while 75 percent of servants were rural; in 1910, 33 percent were urban; during the interwar years, it was 45 percent and on the eve of World War II, and 52 percent of servants worked in urban areas.125 In fact, the apparent dearth of servants reflects the narrowing of the definition of “servant” as the century progressed. An increasing number of male workers who were formerly classified as servants attempted to distance themselves from an occupation that had, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, come to represent an excessively policed group of unskilled migrant women. Fin de siècle feminist and populist movements were deeply implicated in this process. By framing the Servant Question simultaneously as part of the Woman Question and Worker Question, these movements contributed to transforming an otherwise gender-neutral occupation into one predominated by working-class migrant women. Indeed, Catholic and women’s organizations focused their efforts exclusively on female servants. Their interest in recruiting the working classes more generally prompted the Social Democrats to exhibit gender neutrality at times. Einigkeit and the ZHÖ supported the rights of both male and female servants.126 The ZHÖ especially argued for the unity of all servants irrespective of gender and religion. In 1910, there were eighty-six thousand servants in Vienna, of which twenty thousand were male. Of the four thousand ZHÖ members, six hundred to a thousand were male servants.127 Furthermore, in rural areas of the empire, male servants spearheaded many Social Democratic protests. The firsthand testimonies of the women Popp introduced into the conversation reveal a turning away of the servant class from the bourgeoisie. In other words, many members of the servant class were no longer willing or even interested in propping up the bourgeois lifestyle. Yet, the Social Democrats used a narrative focused on the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant to describe the situation of servants within the empire. Indeed, they encouraged the formation of servant associations that comprised mostly women. Often, such associations also catered to some other form of partisanship, such as national identity. For instance, in January 1911, Czech maidservants had a meeting in Vienna’s second district and formed an association.128

Employer-Perpetrated Abuse A report around 1900 noted that the victims of employer maltreatment were often children. In one case, fourteen-year-old maidservant Maria K. committed suicide due to bad treatment by her employer. Further, the report argued that in 1900, suicides among maidservants occurred at a rate of five reported cases every fourteen days.129 Popp’s argument at the ÖGBG also presented maidservants as

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victims of abuse at the hands of their employers and the police. To substantiate this, she presented the testimonies of several working women. One maidservant testified that the city bureau had found her a position at a woman’s house with a wage of twenty kronen with supper. Her duties were to clean all the rooms, wash and feed twelve dogs and seven goats, including their stalls and crates, and clean the yard every day. She shared her duties with another servant. Their employer was verbally and physically abusive. Once, after a beating, she went to the police covered in blood, but the police commissioner threatened to confine her in prison.130 The idea of the servant’s life resembling that of a slave in olden times especially gained traction with Social Democrats such as Popp and Winter, who argued that the Servant Orders in Austria imposed slavery on household servants. Servanthood in Austria, they emphasized, was not unlike the system of robot in olden times.131 Social Democrats endlessly pointed to how the 1810 Codes kept servants in a state of continued dependence on their employers. In this regard, the word Gnädige soon emerged as a talking point for Social Democrats. Servants in German-speaking lands of Central Europe, especially within the Habsburg realm, attached the word, Gnädige132—Gnädige Herr, Gnädige Frau, or Euer Gnädige—when referring to their employers. Gnädige, Social Democrats argued, was a word of deference used by serfs and slaves to refer to their masters in previous centuries. Such words, they insisted, infused the master-slave model onto the employer-servant relationship.133 Social Democrats preferred the words Dienstpersonal and Hauspersonal (domestic workers) to Dienstmädchen (maidservant) when underscoring the professionalism of service people. In 1912, Popp published the essay “Haussklavinnen: Ein Beitrag zur Lage der Dienstmädchen” (House slaves: A contribution about the situation of maidservants), which highlighted the difficulties that servants faced in Austria-Hungary due to outdated laws and poor middle-class attitudes toward domestic labor. She argued that the condition of servants was like the condition of female workers in factories. Unlike factory workers, however, servants had not unionized in the last decade of the nineteenth century. While individual servants sought help from charitable institutes and women’s organizations, they did not present a united front in voicing their concerns. Popp urged servants to organize and voice their common concerns: Maidservants! Do not any longer stay alone, join together, organize, and fight for higher human rights. Do not let yourself be intimidated or held back by the notion that what the organization is doing is against the law. Every human being has the right to organize and belong to clubs, so do you. Rise up and remove the chains you wear, fight together for a better future for the household girls.134

While many female servants faced considerable problems, exploitation and abuse was not absolute. A frugal servant could potentially gather considerable

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savings and assets. At the time of her death in 1878, the sixty-two-year-old chambermaid Anna Strotzenberger had approximately 3,700 florins in her savings and about 5,500 florins worth of valuables.135 Other case studies show that even though domestic service was fraught with difficulties, it opened new opportunities for the women who entered it. The well-documented life story of Helene Gasser, a cook who joined the service of a bourgeois Viennese woman Frau Ida Fleischl in 1864 and stayed in her service for thirty-five years, is a case to point.136 Many employers left money and other assets for their servants in their wills.137 The attempt to unionize female servants based upon claims of bad treatment reveals the lack of understanding of the occupation. Scholars such as Edward Higgs have pointed out that the exact social standing of people in the servant occupation was impossible to determine since many people performed functions such as cooking, cleaning, or taking care of the children but were in fact relatives of the family whom they served.138 Not only was there incredible diversity in terms of position, gender, and social standing in the servant occupation, the situation was very diverse within the female segment of the occupation itself. Some positions such as wet nurse had extremely specific job descriptions. Many wet nurses did not wish to be classified as servants. Therefore, they organized not along with other diverse ranks of maidservants but against them. In May 1894, for instance, wet nurses in Vienna threatened to go on strike to demand the improvement of their working conditions. Key among their demands were increased wages, the right to reject doing any household work unconnected with their nursing duties, and recognition of theirs as a separate profession, that is, to not be classified as servants by the police. It is uncertain whether the strike materialized. But the demands of wet nurses in Vienna reveal something of the situations that these women faced. Even though they were hired for breastfeeding infants, being primarily considered as servants under the law, employers frequently asked them to perform household chores.139 In other words, wet nurses formed their own associations to resist being classified as servants and to demand better treatment. Servant positions such as teaching in private homes and public schools had undergone considerable specialization by the late eighteenth century. Depending on the place and circumstances of their work, teachers were often governed by different sets of regulations. The specific regulations and codes that governed the behavior of a governess working for a noble family in Prague were extremely different from those of a teacher in a primary village school.140 Such teaching positions, as the centuries progressed, were occupied by women with increasingly higher levels of education. Further, if caught, these women were often recorded in separate categories in police prostitution data. Teachers, governesses, educators, and Bonnen—that is, maidservants employed in aristocratic households— were some of the categories often used by the police. By the 1870s, teachers already had their own associations that were active in promoting their specific interests. When the feminist movement took hold in

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the Habsburg realm, improving women’s education became a key focus. School reforms in 1868 and 1870 increased employment of women in primary education.141 Around this time, several associations and newspapers emerged to support the interests of governesses and teachers. In 1867, the First Association of Catholic Female Teachers and Educators in Austria emerged and several Viennese teachers founded the Association of Female Teachers and Educators in 1870.142 By 1890, specialized associations had sprouted all over the empire. An association for the specific purpose of providing aid to poor private teachers, educators, and Bonnen emerged in Graz; Catholic female teachers associations emerged in Krakau and Lemberg with the mission to provide free placement services.143 Furthermore, the newspapers Monika, Die Mädchenschule, and Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Lehrerinnen, which published articles on female education and female teachers, also appeared in the 1880s. Naturally, these associations were not interested in integrating female educators into the larger umbrella of the servant occupation. Rather these associations sought to professionalize female teachers to create equality between men and women. Feminist and left-wing populist movements exhibited varying levels of maternalism, ignorance, and downright hypocrisy when confronted with the diversity within the servant occupation. While on the one hand they called for the unionization of all female servants, on the other they often denigrated one category of women—those they considered less “fine”—within the occupation for the benefit of another “finer” category. In April 1900, an article titled “Die Gouvernante” appeared in the prominent feminist magazine Dokumente der Frauen. The author of this article argued: “The finer governess has not and must not do any physical work, partly so that she does not sink to the level of a chambermaid, partly because her dignity sinks in the eyes of the children when she arranges the room or performs other services.”144 Complaints against the classification of many female educators as servants came neither from the feminists nor from female educators themselves; rather, they came from private placement agencies. In 1910, the Cooperative of Licensed Employment Agencies submitted a complaint to the Viennese Magistrate against one of its members on how she exercised her employment agency license. The cooperative asserted that female educators, English and French kindergarten teachers, and others were employees with higher qualifications. License holders for the placement of servants were not authorized to place female teachers. To place teachers, they insisted, a special license was required. The basis of this complaint was that as per the 1885 Trade Order, persons with special academic training or scientific preparation were excluded from the category of servants. Therefore, placement agencies were issued different types of licenses depending on the type of people they served. The placement agent in question argued that female educators carried the Dienstbotenbuch and also registered as servants with the police. Therefore, fe-

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male teachers themselves accepted their classification as servants. Moreover, the agent argued, female educators were not excluded from the purview of the 1810 Codes since they did not fall into a separate category of “academically educated teachers.” The knowledge of foreign language could not be considered special education since these languages were mother tongues for many of these women. The Viennese magistrate consulted the Viennese Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the question of whether licenses granted to agencies for the placement of male and female servants included finding positions for female educators and kindergarten teachers. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry responded that the 1810 Servant Order classified people of both sexes who provided personal services to members of a household as servants. Therefore, female educators would also fall into this category. Furthermore, no special license was required so long as the women being placed held Dienstbotenbücher and did not have any special academic training certificate or scientific preparation.145 Such cases indicate that the idea that the servant occupation was overflowing with hapless maidservants performing menial household tasks was an oversimplification. The occupation itself contained different groups of people in a wide range of circumstances. Some of these groups evolved to be more specialized and therefore contradicted the construct, while others sought to distance themselves from the construct to better their social and economic status. The projection of an oversimplified image of the lowly maidservant with a broomstick in her hand on these highly disparate groups—disparate in terms of gender, duration, and specialization of work—had less to do with their actual occupational experience and more to do with constructing an identity for the people in the occupation. By projecting such an image onto this diverse group of people, feminist and popular movements constructed the Servant Question as an issue emerging at the intersection of women’s rights and workers’ rights. Habsburg culture readily provided a highly feminized cultural construct—that of an itinerant maidservant—for this purpose. The identity that several fin de siècle movements in the Habsburg realm imposed on the servant occupation was this cultural construct. This essentially false identity imposed upon servants was often in opposition to the very objective these movements claimed to espouse: that of improving servant conditions. In April 1911, the Dienstpersonal-Zeitung reported that some newspaper stands in the Prater would not carry any reading materials for servants on the grounds that “servants do not need to read. They should keep a broom in their hands.”146 The very next month in May 1911, the same newspaper published the image of a maidservant with a broom in one hand and a placard inviting other maidservants to contribute to the newspaper in another.147 In other words, the newspaper had appropriated the very derogatory stereotype they claimed they wished to dispel by using that image as a front cover of several issues. Groups within the occupation—many of whom simply did not wish to

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be identified as servants with broomsticks in her hands but rather wanted to escape that association—sought to distance themselves from it. These images of the maidservant—either overtly aggressive or the haplessly victimized148—circulated in the first decade of the twentieth century and represented a culture deeply deranged by a construct that had very little to do with reality.

Case Studies In reality, the relationship between the commercial sex industry and maidservants deviated considerably from the narrative of a naïve victim whom Mädchenhändler duped into the trap of prostitution. Section §512 of the Austrian Penal Code prescribed punishments for both Mädchenhandel (trading in girls) and Kuppelei (pandering). There was considerable slippage between the two terms in vice police records and in press reports. The legal system penalized only those acts of procurement and transport that violated §512. This included the act of transporting “respectable” women and minors. Sentences for such transgressions were comparatively light, ranging from a few days to six months.149 Vice police case studies reveal an extremely complex interaction between servant women and the commercial sex industry. Under the pretext of rescuing girls and preventing their Mädchenhandel into forced prostitution, the vice police monitored many able-minded adult women who traveled to new locations with potentially better work opportunities and used people akin to travel agents to mediate the arrangements for the same.150 The following cases at the turn of the century demonstrate the dissonance in the rhetorical insinuations of Mädchenhandel and social reality of the fin de siècle. While the press and the antiMädchenhandel squad argued that wily agents and brothel madams involved in the sex trade coerced innocent “girls,” the details of the cases themselves cast considerable doubt on the gullible victim tale. Most “girls” in the following case studies were far older than fourteen years151 and could not be considered children even by current-day standards.

Neumann, the Notorious Mädchenhändler of Servant Girls In July 1908, the vice police in Vienna asked the police office at Budapest to confirm a news item.152 The Neuen Wiener Journal had published a news article titled “Ein Hausbesitzer als Mädchenhändler: Der Budapester Generalagent des argentinischen Mädchenhändlerkonsortiums (A landlord as a Mädchenhändler: The Budapest agent for the Argentinian Mädchenhandel Consortium).”153 The article reported the arrest of a “feared” Mädchenhändler Moritz Neumann for transporting girls to Sarajevo. According to the article, the police had received an anonymous tip on Neumann’s behavior. Neumann allegedly had been transport-

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ing girls for several years. Upon investigation, the article claimed, officials discovered that he was an agent of an Argentinian Mädchenhandel syndicate headed by one Abraham Dickerfaden. Apparently, Neumann received his “merchandise” from his agents in Budapest, and from there he transported them to the Balkans. The article continued as follows: Before his involvement in the syndicate, Neumann was a poor day-wage earner. After he started acting as an agent for the syndicate, he grew rich and had several houses—a large one in Budapest and many more in Sarajevo. He leased one of his houses in Sarajevo to his brother-inlaw, a certain Hoffmann who converted it into a brothel. In his Budapest house, he hired many women who worked mainly as maidservants and transported them to the brothel in Sarajevo. Following a tip-off, police agents monitored his movements and arrested him while he was transporting one such unemployed maidservant by train. The intended destination was Sarajevo. A subsequent house search revealed several incriminating letters. The “victim” allegedly confessed that a woman accosted her on the street and persuaded her to enter a brothel. She was then advised to approach Neumann who prepared to send her to Sarajevo. While Neumann denied his involvement, the testimony of the “victim” and the incriminating letters were enough to press charges of Mädchenhandel. The local court apparently sentenced Neumann to a fine of six hundred kronen and three months of imprisonment.154 The police headquarters at Budapest noted that the news item completely distorted the details of the case. The police revealed the details to be as follows: Neumann was a married, forty-eight-year-old resident of Budapest who had owned a brothel in Sarajevo for sixteen years. In 1906, he sold the brothel to a Hoffmann Zsigmond and returned to Budapest. Police officials questioned Neumann concerning the case of a Bella Karolin, who was apparently sent to Sarajevo by railway. During the questioning, the police got the impression that Neumann was “hiding something.” His neighbors believed that he was still in the brothel business. The police charged him for some crimes already committed, and he was sentenced to a six hundred kronen fine with two months of imprisonment. However, Neumann went underground before the police could capture him. The Budapest police claimed that there was no Abraham Dickerfaden in their records.155 The fabricated news report of the arrest of the notorious Mädchenhändler of maidservants spread all the way to Hamburg. In August 1908, the Hamburg police headquarters asked the vice police in Vienna to confirm the news and sought photographs of Neumann for their records.156 This story of the notorious “Mädchenhändler of servant girls” Neumann did not end with his disappearance from Budapest in 1908. In 1911, the commissioner at Sarajevo reported that a procuress named Johanna Stany, the wife of a laborer in Graz, was engaged in the “procurement” of girls for brothels. The local government intercepted three “prostitutes” that she had sent to Sarajevo. The women testified that Stany sent them to Neumann’s brothel there. One of the

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women, a Theresia Röstner, argued that Stany had transported another prostitute she used to work with to the brothel in Sarajevo and had pestered her to accept the proposition to join the brothel as well. Röstner eventually accepted, and Stany had arranged for her transport. Apparently, Stany was engaged in aiding the transport of “prostitutes” to supplement the household income since her husband was unemployed. She allegedly instructed the women to tell anyone who questioned them about their travels that they were joining a private service in Sarajevo.157 Neumann himself testified to the commissariat at Sarajevo. Apparently, Stany wrote to him stating that she had sent one woman to his brothel and he had paid her for the same. The other girls, he claimed, were not destined to serve in his brothel, and therefore he had not paid Stany for them.158 Following these testimonies, the commissariat returned the women to their home districts.159 The regional criminal court in Graz sentenced Stany to the one-week arrest, and upon further appeal by the prosecution in Graz, she was sentenced to a three-month imprisonment.160 Vice police officials had tracked the activities of Neumann and his “suppliers” for over two years. Even though the news report portrayed Neumann as a notorious Mädchenhändler of hapless servant girls, vice police records reveal that the “victims,” in this case, the three “prostitutes,” were willing participants of what was essentially a female agent (Stany) arranging for the travel and placement of women involved in a specific occupation. The records suggest that the women were aware of where they were headed and for what purpose. In Röstner’s instance, the woman’s choice to undertake the travel and change of job location is explicit. Stany had persuaded Röstner to join Neumann’s brothel and had paid her travel money for the same. There is no evidence that any of these women were or had ever been maidservants. Moreover, the case also demonstrates that regional courts did not issue criminal sentences for “procurement” based upon whether the “victim” was willing or coerced. The regional courts issued sentences against the act of transporting a woman for the purposes of commercial sex irrespective of the choice of the woman in question.

“Open” Recruitment of Waitresses In May 1910, a Catholic railway mission at the North Railway in Vienna informed the police of two women—twenty-seven-year-old Germine Schatz and twenty-six-year-old Marianne Biller—traveling alone to Riga. Upon inquiry, the police discovered that a Josef Baüer, the manager of a Restaurant Volkskeller in Vienna, was acquainted with a Friedrich Mathias Jansohn, a restaurant owner in Riga. Jansohn had requested Baüer to send him two waitresses for his restaurant in Riga. Baüer had very few waitresses in his restaurant, so he approached a placement agency. Through them, he posted an announcement in the paper. Several girls allegedly applied for the position, and the interview of the girls took place

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“quite openly in front of the staff” and the guests. Schatz and Biller were selected for the positions. Baüer claimed that he was sending the two girls to Riga only as a favor to his acquaintance there. Jansohn had promised that the job would earn them two to three hundred rubles in wages and tips.161 The Viennese police wrote to the police chief in Riga inquiring about the reputation of the establishment.162 The case continued for another year. In 1911, the police were investigating the whereabouts of a nineteen-year-old Holonie Estmeister who had also traveled to join Jansohn’s establishment in Riga.163 Police records end at this point, and it is uncertain how the case concluded. The case demonstrates that under suspicion of prostitution, police officials detained and interrogated waitresses who traveled from Vienna to other places for work. Further, any person who interviewed and arranged for waitressing jobs for women came under police scrutiny. Therefore, the vice police’s surveillance not only made Vienna hostile for waitresses but it also made traveling outside Vienna for jobs a cumbersome undertaking for both the waitresses and the agents who arranged for such placements.

Adult and Reasonable In September 1910, a twenty-six-year-old maidservant named Elisabet Sauer was on her way to register at a placement agency in Troppau when she encountered an unknown man who offered her a service position with his wife in Vienna. She accepted the offer and left Troppau with him via the Northern Railway. After traveling for a night and a day, she felt that the trip to Vienna was taking too long. From a conversation with a fellow passenger, Sauer discovered that they were traveling to Switzerland. Realizing that the man was not taking her to Vienna, she deboarded at the next station Bregenz and sought help from a security guard. Her Dienstbotenbuch was left with the unknown man with whom she was traveling. In Bregenz, the owner of a candy shop offered her a job so that she could earn enough money for her return journey to Troppau. During this time, she remained in contact with her mother, who eventually consented to her traveling to Vienna and finding a service position. In October, Sauer described the unknown man to the Viennese police as a stout, forty-year-old, German-speaking man with a black moustache and goatee, wearing a checkered suit. She speculated that he could be Jewish.164 The case, which the police referred to as “suspicion of Mädchenhandel,” demonstrates that many maidservants were adult women capable of exercising the choice to leave suspicious circumstances and obtain help when needed. It also indicates that the loss of a Dienstbotenbuch did not “trap” a maidservant into prostitution. Further, the case suggests that people immediately connected suspicious experiences with antisemitic assumptions about Jews and their alleged involvement in Mädchenhandel operations.

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Suspicious Impression In January 1910, the police expelled a twenty-eight-year-old man named Andreas Patek from Lower Austria for a period of ten years for “security reasons.”165 Patek was a professional burglar and had served prison sentences for theft in Vienna. The following year, in 1911, the Viennese police arrested him on charges of Mädchenhandel. The police headquarters in Vienna sent out reports to police offices in the Habsburg Empire and Germany seeking further information. The report noted that the police found in Patek’s possession many addresses of brothels located in the empire’s peripheral crownlands and in Germany. The Vienna police argued that Patek was part of a “band of procurers in Vienna,” and the correspondences indicated that he sent many girls to brothel proprietors within and outside the empire.166 In the following months, the Vienna police headquarters received information from police agents within and outside the empire. Officials in Dresden reported that Patek had sent local brothel proprietors a woman from Vienna in 1909.167 It was also reported from within the empire that Patek had sent women to local brothels from Vienna. In fact, in June 1911, he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in Teschen for transporting a nineteen-year-old named Pauline Kloucek. The report noted that Kloucek chose to stay willingly in the brothel as she did not have travel money to return to Vienna.168 Similarly, police officials in Mährisch-Ostrau had arrested Patek in October 1911. According to this report, a police agent there received information that a man who had brought a girl from Vienna was making a “suspicious impression” (verdächtigen Eindruck) on her. The pair were to meet in the coffeehouse Ostravis. Upon investigation, the police found a local brothel proprietor, Max Hempel, sitting at a table with a girl, Marie Giefer. Giefer claimed that Patek promised to obtain a lucrative position for her in a Gasthaus and persuaded her to travel to Mährisch-Ostrau with him.169 During the trip, he left her alone under the pretext of fetching her new employer. Upon his return, Giefer reported, Patek introduced her to Hempel who then urged her to join his brothel. The police sent Giefer back to Vienna.170 The regional court in Mährisch-Ostrau sentenced Patek to four months’ imprisonment.171 Brünn police reports from March 1912 identified five women who had arrived in local brothels between February 1911 and 1912. The police questioned two of these women, and they insisted that they had traveled to Brünn of their own accord and decided to enter the local brothel. In fact, one of the women, a Marie Olejnik, registered herself to be put under police control. Both women argued that they would stay with the brothel only for a short period before they left Brünn. The other three women, who had already departed for Vienna, had also stayed at local brothels for a short time. According to the testimony of one brothel inmate, Patek had transported those three women. A local brothel owner confessed to knowing Patek and that he had sent the women to her brothel.172

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The Vienna police intercepted one of the women, eighteen-year-old Katharina Eisele, who had departed Brünn to return to Vienna.173 Eisele testified that Patek intended to transport her to a brothel in Troppau, and for this purpose he took away her Dienstbotenbuch.174 In 1913, police officials discovered that Patek was residing in Vienna despite the ten-year expulsion from Lower Austria and operating from a local coffeehouse to procure women for outside brothels.175 However, it is uncertain whether he was ever caught. The Patek case reveals that travel agents in the commercial sex industry routinely recruited and supplied women to brothels around the empire. However, it is less certain to what extent these women were duped. In fact, records suggest these were adult women per the 1852 Penal Code (all above fourteen years of age) who were part of the commercial sex trade that involved moving to new locations to avail job positions, and they entered, stayed, and left brothels of their own free will. For instance, Olejnik registered to be put under sanitary control of her own will. Similarly, the other women left their brothels after brief stays. Even Kloucek, who chose to stay due to her economic situation, was not forced to remain at the brothel. Men like Patek enabled the travel for women in the commercial sex industry to new locations. Moreover, the vice police did not “rescue” these women in any way. They simply arrested them and put them under regulation. Some instances certainly indicate that Patek had deployed some deception tactic. For example, Eisele’s testimony suggests that Patek took away her Dienstbotenbuch with the intention of supplying her to the brothel. However, the extent to which she knew of Patek’s intentions and her own willingness to join a brothel is uncertain. Despite the possession of a Dienstbotenbuch, records refer to Eisele as a prostitute, not a maidservant, and the police certainly did not “rescue” her. They arrested her and put her under sanitary control. Records certainly indicate that Patek tricked Giefer into believing that he was securing a service position for her. However, from Giefer’s testimony, the act of “coercion” that the vice police labeled as Mädchenhandel or “procuring” was Patek arranging for an interview with a brothel owner and providing Hempel an opportunity to market commercial sex as a viable economic choice to Giefer. At no point do the records indicate that Giefer was held against her will, that she could not escape her situation, or that she could seek help. In fact, Patek even left her alone at one point. Further, her testimony seems to indicate that the “impressionable” Giefer was not convinced of the idea to join a brothel. The ruse of arranging for a lucrative service position, in this context, was just a tactic to capture Giefer’s attention. Acts of coercion meant that agents in the commercial sex industry arranged for interviews between people in the industry and potential new recruits so that they could market the opportunity to them. Like in any other industry, marketing commercial sex as a viable economic opportunity was a crucial part of recruiting new talent.176

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Disapproving Parents In some cases, wherein the police allegedly “rescued” servants from prostitution, it was not the servant herself who wished to discontinue her way of life but an external mediator who disapproved of it. In July 1910, for instance, the police office at Brünn reported the case of a maidservant, Sophie Gressl, to the Vienna police headquarters. The gendarmerie in Senftenberg, Krems, had detained Gressl in 1908 for clandestine prostitution and sent her back home. However, two years later, in January 1910, the vice police in Brünn again had detained the eighteenyear-old Gressl. Upon questioning, she testified that another girl, who now worked in the same establishment, first recommended joining the brothel. She also revealed that her lover, a confectioner named Josef Köck, lived in Vienna. Following her arrest and testimony, she was treated at a local hospital until February. After her release from the hospital, her father who disapproved of her lifestyle enrolled her at a local charity home St. Josephs-Frauenverein (Women’s Association of St. Joseph). She went missing from that institution. A local brothel proprietress, Margarete Roch, claimed to not know whether an agent had arranged for Gressl’s travels and reported that she had come to Roch’s brothel alone.177 Gressl’s case demonstrates that some “procurement” cases were simply that of a parent attempting to restrict their daughter’s determination to be independent. Other Mädchenhandel cases centered on parents disapproving of their children’s romantic choices. The following case suggests that parents went to the police with suspicions of men trying to trap their daughters into “sham marriages” when they did not approve of their adult daughter’s love life.178 In February 1914, the district administration at Steyr asked the Vienna police headquarters whether a Heinrich Benz was suspected of Mädchenhandel.179 Steyr officials detailed the facts of the case as follows. A twenty-two-year-old maidservant, Katharina Baumberger met Benz during her service at the local Hotel Krebs. Benz had traveled from France and was staying at the hotel. A love-affair ensued. As the affair progressed, Benz convinced Baumberger to leave her job at the hotel. He promised to provide her a finer education if she traveled with him and to change her life so that she never had to perform menial jobs again. He also promised to marry her. The education comprised learning typewriting and fine manners. Further, Benz bought her beautiful clothes. The education, which would take place during a trip through Graz, France, and America, was to begin in March 1914. Baumberger left her job on 10 February 1914 and went to her parents’ home. She did not tell them of the journey. The following day, Benz visited them escorted by a man named “Jodler” whom the report described as a “Negro” and who produced artwork for schools and inns. Benz assured the parents that Baumberger would have no worries. Further, Benz informed them that he was a first lieutenant in the army and earned a lot of money. In addition, his mother was very rich. He promised her a lush life and opportunities to travel the world.

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Her parents found the whole program suspicious and told the police that their daughter was preparing to leave with Benz. However, Baumberger denied this and claimed that he was unwilling to travel with her without parental consent. While Baumberger did not know much more about Benz, the police discovered that Benz was an agent of a publication house in Vienna called, “Am stillen Herd-Verlag.” They suspected that he operated a Mädchenhandel operation under the cover of publishing colporteur works and that he planned to kidnap Baumberger and several other girls in the vicinity.180 In March 1914, Steyr officials reported that they had initiated criminal proceedings against Benz.181 It is uncertain how the proceedings ended. From the records, Benz certainly appears to be a suspicious character. However, the case reveals how easily the Mädchenhandel rhetoric enabled the empire’s vice police to intervene in the private lives of the populace to enforce parental authority over adult women’s choices.

Coercion? In March 1914, the Vienna police apprehended a Veronika Bradl (her real name later discovered as Marie Bradl), under suspicion of transporting a Marie Samek to a brothel in Brünn and having received fifty kronen for it.182 The police at Brünn informed the Vienna police that in February 1911, a Samek came under sanitation police control, but she departed soon after. In the meantime, a letter arrived in Mährisch-Ostrau for her. The letter was written and signed by Bradl. A local brothel proprietress, Wilhelmine Schwepesch, confessed that she wrote the two letters in February to Bradl regarding the supply of a girl to her brothel. Bradl then personally brought Samek to the brothel, and, under the pretext of clearing Samek’s pending debt, Schwepesch paid her one hundred kronen for the same. The two letters she left in the possession of Samek. Samek stayed at the brothel for only four days. The police suspected that there were two other procuresses who had supplied another two prostitutes to Schwepesch’s brothel. Both these prostitutes also departed to Vienna.183 Upon further investigation, the police at Brünn reported in July 1911 they had discovered a prostitute called “Emma” in Schwepesch’s brothel. Emma’s real name was Marie Styblik, a seventeen-year-old Catholic girl from Vienna. She was the daughter of a Leopoldine Styblik, an unwed woman resident in Vienna, and joined the brothel in April 1910. In her statement, Styblik clarified, “It is false that she was held in the brothel against her will.”184 According to the police report, her debt to Schwepesch, including laundry and other utilities, amounted to seventy-seven kronen. She received Schwepesch’s address from a prostitute resident in Vienna, a Marianne Pollak. At the time, Styblik was searching for a post as a chambermaid, and Pollak asked her if she would want to enter a brothel. When she answered in the affirmative, Pollak gave her travel money, which she had yet to repay. Pollak also stayed in the brothel before returning to Vienna.

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Styblik did not know whether Pollak received the travel money from Schwepesch during this time. The police reported that Pollak recommended another prostitute from Vienna, a Cäilie Šila, for Schwepesch’s brothel in Brünn, while an unknown man had supplied a Viennese prostitute named Lucia Rinösl to the brothel.185 While the police sent Bradl to the district court at Leopoldstadt for sentencing, it is uncertain from the records if they apprehended other procurers related to this case.186 Marie Styblik’s testimony demonstrates that she viewed prostitution as a viable alternative to domestic service.187 She chose prostitution as opposed to finding a post as a chambermaid in Vienna. She chose to stay in the brothel to work off her debts and other financial obligations. While Styblik had some financial constraints, no one had coerced or duped her in any way to enter or continue prostitution. The case also reveals the kind of people the police were surveilling and arresting on suspicion of Mädchenhandel. Bradl was essentially a travel agent who had arranged for the transport of willing women to brothels for commercial sex. There is no indication in the records that the women had been “coerced” in any way and that the police had “rescued” or “freed” them from forced prostitution. Similarly, in June 1910, the police headquarters at Dresden requested confirmation on a news item, that the Vienna police had arrested a Mädchenhändler named Karl Weber from Teplitz-Schönau. The news also reported that Weber transported two girls to a prostitution house in North Bohemia. One of the girls, the news continued, was promised a profitable job as a waitress in a local café and was instead transported to a brothel in Teplitz; the other was sent to a brothel in Aussig. The Dresden police reported that a large portion of Austro-Hungarian prostitutes in Germany hailed from Teplitz and wanted to know whether Weber was involved in the transport of girls to Germany.188 The Vienna police had, in fact, arrested a laborer named Karl Weber in May 1910.189 In mid-March 1909, he had procured a young woman from Prague for the local brothel.190 In the same year, he procured a Josefine Marek for the brothel in Teplitz, whom he transported to Teplitz as a coffeehouse waitress. He had also transported his lover, a Marie Blazěk, to Teplitz as a coffeehouse waitress but intended to admit her to the same brothel.191 However, she did not stay at the brothel for long. Weber claimed that both women wanted to enter a brothel. The police headquarters at Vienna sent him to a regional court in Josefstadt for trial.192 The trial judge sentenced him to two months’ imprisonment.193 There is no indication in the records that the women in question were unaware that they were joining a brothel, were coerced in any way, or were promised waitressing jobs. Weber’s lover even left the brothel after a short stay. Under §512 of the Penal Code, a person could be punished for the act of transporting a woman for commercial sex. The willingness of the woman in question had little to do with the conviction. The Weber Mädchenhandel case was simply an instance of a travel agent using the ruse of waitressing to evade the police and

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enable the transport of two women who wanted to join a brothel in Teplitz. But newspapers often reported this evasion mechanism as an act of victimization and forwarded the narrative that women traveling for waitressing jobs were being transported for commercial sex.

The “Rescue” of the Purchased Maidservant In October 1913, a day laborer in Vienna, Johann Zobel, informed the Vienna police that a lady at a coffeehouse allegedly purchased his sixteen-year-old daughter, a maidservant named Barbara Zobel, for fifty kronen. On the same day, a Barbara Zobel who fit the description appeared in a police station in Aussig. Upon interrogation, she informed them that a man named Moser cajoled her into traveling to a brothel in Aussig. When she went to the stated house, a woman there told her that they had informed Moser she could not be accommodated in the brothel. The police investigated the address that Zobel provided, arrested a Barbara Mojziz, and imprisoned her for eight days on charges of Kuppelei. On the same day, the police arrested her husband, who was sentenced to three months of imprisonment. However, they had no leads on Moser.194 A few weeks later, in November 1913, sources informed Vienna police that a seventeen-year-old-cleaning woman, Anna Schneller, was procured for a brothel in Aussig. Schneller was brought in for interrogation. She informed the police that she spoke with a man in a Café Tegetthof at Praterstern in Vienna. A few days later, he sent her to a woman in Vienna’s tenth district. The latter then arranged for her travel to the brothel in Aussig. Schneller wanted to leave the brothel a few days later. While the brothel owner initially stopped her, she later allowed Schneller to leave, but only after taking away her savings book of seven hundred kronen under the pretext of having to pay the procuress sixty kronen. The police were certain that the alleged procuress involved in the case was Barbara Mojziz. They did not find her at her residence, but an investigation of her personal documents revealed that she was with a laborer named Josef Moser. Officials arrested Moser and accused him of sending girls to Barbara Mojziz. Moser argued that Zobel herself desired to enter a brothel, so he had directed her to the procuress, Mojziz. The same was the case with Schneller. The police sent Moser and Mojziz to the regional court at Leopoldstadt for sentencing on charges of violation of §512 of the Penal Code.195 Schneller was retained in custody for repeated commercial fornication. While it is uncertain whether they also filed charges against Zobel, the Wiener Extrablatt reported that they arrested both girls on repeat offences.196 The Vienna police attempted to discover whether Moser and Mojziz were involved in the transport of other girls to Aussig. They had not encountered the names of Moser and Mojziz prior to the Zobel incident.197 However, in February 1914, the police commissariat at Aussig reported that they discovered a prostitute in the same brothel, a Theresia Krajcir, who was sent there by Moser. Krajcir

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reported that she had been a prostitute in Vienna for a long time and that the police had repeatedly charged her with the practice of unregulated prostitution. Therefore, she could not remain in Vienna. She knew that Moser was a procurer, and in January 1913 she met with him in a Restaurant Friedmann in Vienna. She asked him to find a foreign brothel for her as she could no longer stay in Vienna. Moser promised to find her something, took two kronen for sending a telegram, and soon, two days later, he informed her that she could join a brothel in Aussig. Krajcir traveled to Aussig with her own money to render her services at the brothel. She had not heard from Moser since her arrival at the brothel. The brothel owner also knew Moser through personal correspondence; however, she claimed that he never contacted her about Krajcir, and she did not use Moser in any way or receive any honorarium from him.198 While the police arrested Moser and Mojziz for transporting the women, this was not a case of “rescuing girls” from Mädchenhandel. In Krajcir’s case, the woman herself sought Moser’s help to enter a brothel. Although there is no explicit confession of this sort on Zobel’s or Schneller’s part, if Moser’s words are to be believed, both showed interest in joining a brothel. Neither Zobel’s nor Schneller’s statements contain any indication that they were coerced into prostitution. The point of dispute was the initial unavailability of a brothel in Zobel’s case and the unsuitability of the brothel in Schneller’s confession. Moreover, the police did not “rescue” either Zobel or Schneller. Rather, they arrested them on charges of commercial fornication.

The “Rescue” of the Itinerant Maidservant In March 1914, the police commissariat at Ottakring, Vienna, arrested a waiter, Gottlieb Svejda, for theft. Following his arrest, his landlady turned over letters addressed to Svejda to the police. These letters were from brothel proprietors in Mährische-Weißkirchen, Brünn, and Turcoz Marton in Hungary and referred to Svejda’s attempt to send them girls. Further investigations revealed that Svejda wrote to a brothel proprietress in Szolna, proposing to send two girls, and that he had several accomplices.199 For the next several months, the police sought to identify Svejda’s accomplices and “rescue” the two women who were allegedly being transported. One of his suspected accomplices was a Hugo Zuckerbäcker, whom the police arrested at a local coffeehouse in Vienna in the same year. The local court at Leopoldstadt sentenced Zuckerbäcker to three months of imprisonment for attempting to transport two girls, Katarina Eitelpös and Margarethe Welser. The police suspected Zuckerbäcker for also transporting Luise Twrz, a twenty-one-year-old servant whose whereabouts were unknown. She was last employed at a student dormitory in June 1914 before her disappearance. The Vienna police had questioned Zuckerbächer on the matter; however, the investigation yielded no results.200

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The border police at Turcoz Marton informed the Vienna police about three other accomplices suspected of corresponding with Svejda, a Paul König and a Rudolf Niemetz, each with a previous criminal record,201 and a known Mädchenhandel agent, Josef Karl.202 Among the correspondences to König that the police seized, Karl referred to a Luise Twrz, while Niemetz wrote about procuring two girls. The police sent Niemetz, Karl, and König to the regional criminal court at Besztercebanya on suspicion of Kuppelei. The prosecution’s office sought clarifications from the Vienna police for the case against König. The letter inquired in what capacity Twrz was employed in König’s brothel at Turcoz Marton—as a prostitute or a housekeeper—and whether Twrz was a “respectable” person or a prostitute. Further, the letter inquired which two women Zuckerbächer had sent to König, whether they were truly prostitutes, and whether they willingly wished to go to Turcoz Marton.203 The Vienna police responded that the whereabouts of Twrz was unknown. Welser was a prostitute from Brünn and was placed under Vienna police control. Eitelpös, on the other hand, was an itinerant, jobless maidservant who was interned and treated for a venereal disease in Kaiser Franz Josef Jubiläum Hospital in Vienna. Both women testified at the time of Zuckerbäcker’s hearing that he offered to send them to a brothel in Hungary. The report also admitted that it was possible that Zuckerbächer, Niemetz, and Karl were König’s accomplices. However, the police remarked that while Niemetz was known to be a “wicked individual,” there was no concrete evidence that connected Niemetz and Karl to supplying the girls. The letters, the report claimed, could just as easily have been a ruse to swindle some money. König was also in correspondence with Svejda who was awaiting his sentence at Leopoldstadt. The Vienna police argued that the evidence connecting König with Mädchenhandel was circumstantial.204 The three men were sentenced in July 1914; however, it is uncertain from the police records what sentence they received. The case files suggest that only Zucherbächer served a sentence of three months in connection with arranging for the travels of Welser and Eitelpös. The others were fingerprinted but perhaps served a much shorter sentence.205 The case of Svejda and his accomplices suggests that “victims” of Mädchenhandel operations were not in need of “rescue.” Welser’s and Eitelpös’s testimonies indicate that Zukerbächer offered to send them to a brothel in Hungary and that they had accepted his services. Even though Twrz’s testimony is missing, it is possible that she left service without informing her employer, as maidservants often did. The vice police’s anti-Mädchenhandel efforts therefore involved intercepting agents arranging for travel and new positions for women involved in commercial sex and punishing them for it with short periods of imprisonment under §512 of the Austrian Penal Code. Further, it also entailed bringing the supposed “victims” (e.g., Eitelpös) under medical regulation. The case also demonstrates that the “respectability” of the women involved in the transport was an important factor for

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obtaining Mädchenhandel convictions. In the course of their investigations, the police actively weighed women’s choices on a character scale of “respectability” to obtain Mädchenhandel convictions for their arrests.

Rescue Missions The ZÖLBM’s “rescue” missions involved pulling women out of the commercial sex trade and pushing them into domestic service positions. The vice police transferred charge of their many “rescued” victims to the offices of the ZÖLBM. Between 1907 and 1913, the head office at Vienna, the ÖLBM, claimed to have aided 5,672 girls, of which 2,663 were housed in its charity home.206 Apart from the vice police, the women who came under their charge were “rescued” by various agencies. The ÖLBM’s reports suggest that maidservants comprised the largest contingent of “rescued” women housed in ÖLBM’s centers.207 Figures 5.1 and 5.2 illustrate the occupational distribution of the “rescued” women each year between 1908 and 1913 as well as the rescue organizations that conducted these “rescues.” As seen in figure 5.1, the largest contingent of rescued women came from the ranks of female servants, that is, cooks, maids of all work, chambermaids, nannies, educators, and Bonnen. The numbers of female servants who were “rescued” increased between 1908 and 1913, the largest number of “rescues” occurring in 1911. Also note that the category of “unemployed” may or may not have included servants. Moreover, there may have been considerable variation in data classification from year to year. The number of chambermaids “rescued” in 1911 seems unusually high, and the number of maids of all work “rescued” appear to be unusually low in the same year; also no unemployed women were apparently “rescued” in 1911. While a sudden spike in the number of “rescued” chambermaids and the dip in the numbers of maids of all work and unemployed women is possible, the more likely scenario is that there was a lack of uniformity in classifying the data from year to year. Figure 5.2 suggests that “rescues” conducted by vice police agents decreased at the same time. The increase in the number of women “rescued” by other sources, such as the district police commissariats, philanthropic catholic organizations, as well as initiatives by the victims themselves, compensated for the decline.208 The ÖLBM considered this a positive sign, as it indicated that the organization’s care activities had become known to many more people. Like many charitable women’s clubs and Catholic organizations, the ÖLBM stepped in to offer free homes and placements for the “rescued” victims of many police operations.209 Unlike private placement agencies, these “rescue” centers were not so indifferent to servants’ private choices and often included a program of religious and moral education to orient them toward a “respectable” life.210

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Figure 5.1 Occupational Distribution of Rescued Women. Source: Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 13; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 18; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 18; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchenund Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 14; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 22; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 11–12. Graph made by author.

The ZÖLBM’s branches outside Vienna also reported “rescuing” many women. In 1909, for instance, the local office in Trieste claimed to have provided asylum to approximately 600 women per month, housing 200–300 women completely free of cost. The largest contingent among these women allegedly comprised unemployed servants or female factory workers.211 In 1910, their placement agency allegedly received 2,500 requests from employers, coordinated 1,500 deals, mostly for household servants and factory workers, and successfully mediated 1,106 placements.212

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Figure 5.2 Rescues Conducted by Various Organizations by Year. Source: Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 12; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 6; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 15; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchenund Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 11; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels); Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 16–17; Bericht des Vereines: über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 9. Graph made by author.

The ÖLBM sought to not only “rescue” women from prostitution but also reform professions in which women were allegedly susceptible to prostitution. One of the ÖLBM’s informants, the Budapest private detective Moritz Fischer, argued that private placement agencies and proprietors were responsible for “leading” many girls into prostitution. He reported in 1910 that the local police had identified several notorious Mädchenhandel agents and had arrested over forty-six persons from this connection. He suggested that placement agencies needed to be “cleaned up,” that the Dienstbotenbuch should contain the photographs of their proprietresses, and that these documents should be officially verified.213 In Lem-

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berg, the association, through its railway missions, reported to have intervened in 358 cases of Mädchenhandel in 1912.214 In the same year, the ZÖLBM created a new care center in Sarajevo. The association claimed that while Mädchenhandel agents mostly sourced their victims from Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia, strict measures in these regions had caused them to search for new sites. In this regard, Bosnia and Herzegovina was not only a stopover for agents but also a direct export station for white slaves to the Orient.215 The ÖLBM program to cleanse “respectable” female professions of their susceptibility to prostitution included proposing legal reforms. While the design for a new Servant Order for Vienna that the ÖLBM had sent to the Lower Austrian Assembly in 1910 was ignored,216 the league was successful in the case of Animiermädchen.217 The imperial minister of commerce released an edict in August 1910 that reformed the Trade Order. The new code increased regulations of inns and taverns to ensure that female help, such as waitresses, were not retained for the purposes of direct or indirect prostitution. The Trade Order forbade utilization of female employees in such establishments for the purposes of prostitution. The order also forbade use of any female employee in taverns and inns for purposes of commercial sex. This, however, excluded the household of the innkeepers and tenants, including any family servants. Further, the prohibition applied to the business itself, not just the owners of the business. Thus, if the establishment was to transfer from the hands of an innkeeper to that of the tenant, or the transfer occurred after the guest-tenant relationship expired, the code forbade the new owner from prostituting or transporting his female employees for commercial sex. The punishment for such transgressions varied from a fine of up to 1,000 kronen to imprisonment for three months. Repeat offenders were also liable to have their licenses revoked, and their hospitality locale could be shut down.218 Furthermore, the overzealous ÖLBM spurred on more surveillance of women who sought positions in the hospitality industry outside the empire’s borders and the men who provided them these opportunities abroad on the part of the Austro-Hungarian consulates. Therefore, their efforts made the movement of women for work in hospitality establishments hostile both within and outside the empire. Further, these efforts often resulted in wasteful use of resources in tracking women who had no cause to be surveilled other than the fact that they had chosen to travel to another place to earn a living. Records reveal instances where the ÖLBM’s interference caused the consulates to survey women who, as per the consulate’s own admittance, had no cause to be surveyed. For instance, in March 1911, the Austro-Hungarian consulate at Piräus sent a harshly worded report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the ÖLBM’s wasteful behavior. The report noted that in February 1911, the ÖLBM requested the consulate to initiate inquiries on the location and “moral conduct” of five “underage” girls of Austrian parents and to induce them to return to their hometowns. The consulate remarked that despite the difficulties inherent in tracking the girls, their officials

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had expended copious resources and time in conducting surveys to “fulfill all the wishes of the league” (alle Wünsch der eingangs gedachten Liga zu erfüllen). The report asserted that the interference of the association cost the consulate unnecessary effort. Most of the girls, the report argued, had no reason to be surveyed. Perhaps, the report argued, two of the girls could be sent back, but the Gemeinde of their hometown where they had Heimrecht had to bear the costs. Further, their fathers informed the consulate that they had nothing against the girls’ stay in Greece since they were earning well. 219 In other instances, Austro-Hungarian consulates encouraged tightening restrictions of women seeking jobs in hospitality establishments outside the empire based upon the possible financial difficulties incurred that might “force” these women to undertake prostitution. For instance, in March 1911, the AustroHungarian consulate in Santa Fe, Argentina, reported that many young girls from respectable families within the empire, especially from Vienna, were recruited as musicians in female bands employed in hotels and cafés. When they arrived in Santa Fe, they apparently could not procure jobs and found themselves in financial predicament. Often, the report argued, they fell into bad company and entered the sex trade. This was the case, suggested the report, of the “underage” daughters of a postal official in Vienna: Paula, Teresa, and Josefa Konvalinka. Through newspaper announcements, the girls had allegedly found positions in music bands in Argentina. They approached an agent, Frau Karoline Hofbauer, who sent them to Argentina. After the end of the contract, they were then recruited by a Frau Anni Schwender in Santa Fe. The consulate officials apparently intervened to ensure that the girls did not fall in “bad hands.” The report requested Viennese police officials to exercise caution while issuing passports to female persons.220 The consulate’s cautions about issuing passports to all women seeking travel to Argentina for jobs was therefore based upon a preemptive intervention to allegedly save the three “minor” girls from a “respectable” Viennese family from “bad hands” who could potentially secure them jobs in Santa Fe’s hospitality establishments. Newspaper reportages incited the anti-Mädchenhandel squad in these matters. For instance, in February 1911, a local Viennese newspaper published an article titled “Böhmische Kuppel-Lokale: Neuerlicher Wink an die ‘Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels’” (Bohemian procurement locales: A new task for the “Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels”). The report suggested that apart from the surveillance of placement agencies, the ÖLBM should also survey wine locales in cities of northern Bohemia. These locales apparently hired female employees, and many of these girls were previously “uncorrupted.” Allegedly, they were brought to these “wine brothels” by Mädchenhändler and subsequently “pushed into” prostitution.221 The report then went on to detail one such incident: A girl from a decent house went for a walk with her aunt. A “traveler,” Josef Dub, whom the aunt had

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met in a coffeehouse, approached them. The aunt told him that she was searching for a good post for her niece, and Dub informed her of a wine retailer in Trautenau, Bohemia, that had a post available for office work in the morning and serving a few famous men wine in the afternoon. The girl accepted the offer, and Dub wrote to his contact in Trautenau. The following day, Dub came to the girl’s house with a letter that she was accepted for the post and requested a retainer. Upon her arrival at the business in Trautenau, she noticed some irregularities. However, since she did not have money to travel back home, she stayed. She soon realized that the establishment was not a retail shop but a cover for Kuppelei, and the owner employed the girls as Animiermädchen. Through the help of a guest who gave her some money to travel back home, the girl escaped. The report concluded that Dub had transported many girls in this manner.222 The empire’s vice police network spent two months’ worth of effort and resources in investigating this news report. In February 1911, the Vienna police wrote to the mayor’s office at Trautenau to confirm the truth of the report.223 They also stated in the letter that Dub, who had a residence in Vienna, had been traveling for several years, and the police could not track him. Finally, in April 1911, after pursuing the matter for two months, the police tracked down the proprietress of a wine locale in Trautenau named Regine Melnik. Melnik claimed that she knew Dub. In 1910, Dub had brought a saleswoman from Vienna, twenty-one-year-old Lilly Hirsch. Hirsch worked as a waitress in Melnik’s locale between May and August 1910 before traveling back to Vienna.224 In April 1911, Dub told the police that he had given Hirsch an address of a wine locale in Trautenau where a waitress post was available. Since there are no further records on the case, it is likely that the police simply closed it.225 The facts of the Josef Dub Mädchenhandel case consisted of a man informing an adult woman about a job vacancy for a waitress in Trautenau. The woman voluntarily traveled to the job location with the man, worked there for some time, and returned to Vienna. Under the pretext of investigating an incident of Mädchenhandel, therefore, the police surveilled and detained a man who had arranged for a waitressing job outside Vienna for a woman. The ÖLBM’s narrative presented women in certain professions as naïve and gullible, and this angle was an echo of the European-wide movement against the white slave trade. For instance, at the Fifth International Congress held at London in 1913, Paul Kampffmeyer, a German publicist, claimed that the apparent vulnerability of working-class women to prostitution and Mädchenhandel in urban centers was connected with their financial situations.226 He claimed that for young female workers and domestics, the lack of financial security through poor pay or loss of job led to their isolation from familiar social networks, and, at such times, they came under the influence of classes of people who were involved in buying and selling goods and services to meet their financial needs. He claimed that dance halls, night cafés, inns, and bars encouraged planned networks of the prostitution.227

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By the turn of the century, the hysteria over the “white slave trade” was so great that members of the population often approached the vice police to initiate investigations about the whereabouts of their female relatives who traveled away from home for the purposes of work. For instance, in June 1914, the police headquarters in Vienna requested the regional headquarters at Rumburg to locate the whereabouts of a Johanna Minich. The thirty-one-year-old Minich, a Viennese seamstress, traveled to Rumburg to fill the post of a female cashier offered by a F. Reinisch at Hotel Union. Following her departure, her mother, Aloisia Lehminger, received a postcard from her at the end of May relating her happy arrival at her destination. However, in a subsequent letter that her mother received in early June, Minich informed that she was awaiting discharge from a local hospital after treatment for a lung injury. Lehminger followed up with a telegram inquiry. When it was left unanswered, she approached the police with fears that her daughter had fallen in “bad hands.”228 Less than ten days later, an “alert” Lehminger informed the police that her daughter was in “good hands.”229 The case reveals how the Mädchenhandel and Mädchenbedienung discourses worked in tandem to increase police surveillance of women. While many fin de siècle movements claimed to desire reform or the deplorable condition of servants, and indeed their intentions may have been to do so, their attempts accomplished the opposite. By espousing and imposing paternalism on an occupation that encompassed extremely diverse groups of people, their attempts converted a vague occupational category of servant into a monolithic identity of servanthood—a state of being that was predominantly menial, female, and domestic. For the people in the occupation, this identity politics increased constraints on their choices, as in the cases of many working-class women; increased indignation, as in the cases of waiters who sought to professionalize their occupation; increased police suspicion, as in the cases of many mobile women who traveled away from their hometowns in search of jobs; increased deterioration of their social status, as in the cases of wet nurses and governesses; and increased the shrinkage of financial opportunities, as in the cases of female service personnel. Furthermore, the identity politics that such discourses promoted increasingly fragmented the occupation of “servant” into smaller groups of people who sought to distance themselves from “servanthood” by subscribing to identity groups that was less crippling to their interests. Nationalist identity groups such as Czech, Hungarian, and German were the most common. An association for Czech maidservants that emerged in Vienna in 1911230 was unimaginable before 1873, not least because the Viennese maidservant was a prototype before the emergence of large-scale surveillance of workingclass women, but by the turn of the century servanthood was an identity—and an extremely detrimental one at that. Servanthood attracted police suspicion, medical detention, and bourgeois maternalistic heavy-handedness among other restrictions that thwarted a person’s self-determination. It is evident from police

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case reports that the identifying factor of a woman detained on suspicion of prostitution was not the woman’s Heimat or her religious affiliation but her current or former occupation. If she had performed tasks that fell under the purview of the servant occupation at any point in her lifetime, the police fixed her identity as a maidservant. This may have been a matter of convenience for the police officials involved in the case; however, for the various fin de siècle sociopolitical movements it was a talking point, and for the people within the servant occupation it was cause to distance themselves from the occupation by turning to alternative identities.

Conclusion For many populist movements of the fin de siècle, the Servant Question was at the core of their concerns. The Servant Question in fin de siècle Vienna—the imperial capital of a vast empire—was about “free” people. Industrialization and urbanization mobilized large swaths of highly heterogenous populations within the Habsburg Empire. How would a state that had thus far depended on the servitude of these people survive when much of the Leopoldine cameralist structures were still intact in many parts of the empire? The bourgeois feminist, left-wing, and right-wing populist movements of the fin de siècle emerged in response to this question. The various right-wing and left-wing populists involved in the anti-Mädchenhandel movement within the Habsburg Empire were very much bedfellows. None of these groups granted that the servant-class women in question were capable of choice. Indeed, more so than pro-regulation physicians and police officials, the anti-Mädchenhandel movement increasingly incorporated extraordinarily sweeping arguments. These arguments frequently deployed the idea of forced prostitution and female victimization to express an underlying anxiety about women migrating to urban centers away from their families and availing work opportunities in commercial sectors outside the context of domestic settings. The campaign also encouraged parents to seek police intervention and impose limits on their adult female children’s sexual and financial independence. Despite their rhetorical insinuations, these movements did little to prevent the victimization of women. These were movements that enabled the surveillance and restriction of women’s work and mobility. For different groups of women in the servant occupation, these movements only served to reinforce the paternalism of the 1810 Codes and magnify the effects of its more aggressive derivative maternalism. By imposing bourgeois notions of “respectability” and “indecency” on working-class women and weighing their economic and personal choices on such a character scale, maternalism only served to curb opportunities for working-class women in already difficult financial circumstances. Under the pretext of curb-

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ing Mädchenhandel, the vice police actively restricted the expansion of women’s economic choices by intercepting, arresting, and castigating travel agents who marketed different opportunities to working-class women and arranged for them to avail themselves of these prospects. The vice police’s catch-and-release tactic of travel agents and “rescues” of their hapless clients only served to bring an increasing number of maidservants such as Gressl, Eisele, Eitelpös, Wickenhagen, and Zobel under medical regulation based upon circumstantial evidence.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

“Der Prozess eines Dienstmädchens,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 9 November 1901, 1–2. Richter, “Die Produktion,” 69. “Ein Dienstboten-Matyrium,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, 26 September 1901, 4–5. Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Hauses der Abgeordeneten des österreichischen Reichsrathes im Jahre 1901: XVII. Session, VIII. Band. 69 bis 75 Sitzung (S. 6457 bis 7368.) (Vienna, 1902), 6971–73. William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 1983), 100–101. Annemarie Steidl, Engelbert Stockhammer, and Hermann Zeitlhofer, “Relations among Internal, Continental, and Transatlantic Migration in Late Imperial Austria,” Social Science History 31, no. 1 (2007): 61–92. Panic over the white slave trade was a widespread phenomenon throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century. Doezema argues that present-day concerns about the fate of prostitutes abroad is related to the myth of white slavery and details the various sociopolitical narratives that surround this myth, including the idea to “prevent, protect and punish” encoded in trafficking laws. See Jo Doctor Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (New York, 2010). Stauter-Halsted argues that the panic over prostitution in late nineteenth-century Poland relates to the increased visibility of working-class women and prostitutes. See Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain. For an analysis of the Mädchenhandel scare in late imperial Austria, see Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 171–208. Wilcox argues that in Britain there was a belief that domestic service was a cure for or solution to drinking and immorality. See Penelope Wilcox, “Marriage, Mobility and Domestic Service,” Annales de démographie historique (1981): 195–206. Bonne is a French word that was sometimes used in the Habsburg Empire to refer to a handmaid or a chambermaid in aristocratic households. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 313. The literature on antisemitism and the “white slave trade” scare is enormous. While, on the one hand, antisemites accused Jews of sexual aggression, they also, on the other hand, characterized Jews as effeminate and associated them with homosexuality. See Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989), 188–205; Alison Rose, Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Austin, 2008), 77–78; 142–43; Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, 1983). On the antisemitic rhetoric connecting Jews to the international white slave trade, see Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family,

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

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20.

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and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln, 1991); Keeley Stauter-Halsted, “‘A Generation of Monsters’: Jews, Prostitution, and Racial Purity in the 1892 L’viv White Slavery Trial,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 25–35; Daniel M. Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895–1914 (New York, 2012); Nancy M. Wingfield, “Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople; ‘White Slavers’ in Late Imperial Austria,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (2011): 291–311. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 171– 208. Many German-Jewish women joined the morality campaign against prostitution and slave trade. See Marion Kaplan, “Prostitution, Morality Crusades and Feminism: German-Jewish Feminists and the Campaign against White Slavery,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 6 (1982): 619–27. Latin American countries especially attracted much attention as being hubs of white slave trade. In this regard, Guy’s work explores how the anxieties over white slavery impacted women’s citizenship in Argentina in pre- and postwar periods. See, Donna J. Guy, “‘White Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Nationality in Argentina,” in White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health and Progress in Latin America (Lincoln, 2000), 72–85. For an account of colonial rhetoric connecting the white slave trade to the Orient, see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003); Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, 2010). “Der Schul-Fortschritt vieler Wiener Töchterin,” Neuigkeits Welt-Blatt, 27 April 1876, 11. “Zwei Mädchenhändler,” Grazer Tagblatt, 16 July 1892, 14. Josef Schrank, Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung (Vienna, 1904), 46–47. In this manuscript, Schrank draws upon various newspaper articles on alleged Mädchenhandel cases to forward his antisemitic arguments. He reproduces the text of some of these sensational press reports as is. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1869, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1883), 29. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Jahrgang 1877, ed. August Rauscher (Vienna, 1882), 44; Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 314. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung. Fortletzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung vom Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883 Jahrgang 1886, assembled by Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1893), 8. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung. Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung vom Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883 Jahrgang 1888, assembled by August Rauscher, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1894), 53–54. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung. Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung vom Jahre 1884 bis incl. 1892 Jahrgang 1890, assembled by Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion (Vienna, 1895), 11. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Letter from Broda at Rohatetz-Bisenzer Zuckerfabriken to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 29 February 1884.

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22. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Letter from Adolf Diamant to Frau Jeremias, Wien, 19 February 1884. 23. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Enclosed tickets and Bericht, k.k. Polizei-Amt Landstrasse Expositor Simmering, 15 March 1884. 24. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Note of Sicherheits Bureau der k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 17 April 1884. 25. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Protokoll of Sicherheits Bureau der k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 4 April 1884. 26. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1875–1883, Akte: Jhrg 1880 S.D. G.M. Prostitution Berichte über Erkrankungen. Statistische Übersicht für Wien, Jeremias Marie, Diamand Adolf, Biedermann Anna, Protokoll of Sicherheits Bureau der k.k. Polizei-Direktion, 15 April 1884. Walkowitz refers to similar such cases where adult women’s choices were framed as victimization of innocent maidens. See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 81–134. 27. Family members often enabled a woman to choose prostitution as a viable economic option. In the context of Spanish viceroyalties, for instance, von Germeten shows the complexity of cases involving family members pandering their female relatives, including women consenting to enter prostitution at times of extreme poverty to support the family as well as what amounted to parents enabling the rape of their minor daughters. In all such cases, von Germeten shows how playing the victim gained the sympathy of court officials. See, von Germeten, “Selling Sex, Saving the Family,” in Profit and Passion, 130–52. 28. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution and Mädchenhandel 1886, Akte: Prostitution .u. Mädchenhandel 1886 Silber Moses, Rothwenstrauch, Letter from the K.u.K. Oesterr-Ung Consulat at Galatz to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 5 March 1886. 29. See, for instance, the case of Jakob Hirsch. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution and Mädchenhandel 1897–1899, Akte: Prostitution u. Mädchenhandel 1899, Jakob Hirsch, Abschrift & Note. 30. The Herz-Marien-Kloster claimed to have placed 1,551 servants free of cost since 1898; the Wiener Hausfrauenverein, which offered free placement services to servants since 1876, ran servant asylums and homes, and even established a servant school in 1883, claimed to have handled 5,120 service-seekers in 1898; and the Austro-Hungarian emigration home in New York, which offered placement services for emigrants from the empire and handled half of all girls emigrating from the empire seeking service placements, was credited by Schrank for saving many of the 4,567 domestic servants from Austria-Hungary in New York from falling victims to the white slave trade. See, Schrank, Der Mädchenhandel, 240–41. 31. Jürgen Nautz, “Der Kampf gegen den Frauenhandel in Österreich vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” SIAK-Journal—Zeitschrift für Polizeiwissenschaft und polizeiliche Praxis, no. 2 (2011): 47–60, esp. 51.

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32. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913 (Vienna, 1914), 6–7. 33. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, Band I: Die Geschichte, 315. 34. Constantinople was described as the center of Mädchenhandel that connected trading in women from the European world to the Ottoman Empire and South America. See Malte Fuhrmann, “‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata-Pera (1870–1915),” History and Anthropology 21, no. 2 (2010): 159–72. 35. Schrank, Der Mädchenhandel, 38–40. 36. Even before 1889, while the Penal Code of 1852 permitted punishments as much as five years, most cases received short sentences such as three weeks to one year. Section 512 of the Austrian Penal Code of 1889 sentenced Mädchenhandel and Kuppelei (procurement or pandering) only when it violated police regulations of enabling the travel of “respectable” girls and virgins. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 178–79. 37. Schrank, Der Mädchenhandel, iv. 38. Delegations from twelve European countries met in Paris to sign the International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Trade. See Nautz, “Der Kampf,” SIAK-Journal, 52. 39. Ibid., 51. While Austria-Hungary was not one among the original signature states, it was included in the agreement soon afterward. 40. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913 (Vienna, 1914), 6–7. 41. Called the Zentrale zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels, also referred to as Zentralstelle für Überwachung des Mädchenhandels and Zentralkomittees zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels (ZBM), respectively. 42. These societies included the Società d’assistenza e protezione femminile in Trieste; the Liga für Frauen- und Kinderschutz in Lemberg; the Frauenschutz, a Jewish women’s organization in Cracow; a local committee in Czernowitz; and a care center in Prague, along with information offices on Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Russia, and the Orient as well as a care centers for Sarajevo at Budapest and Vienna. See Nautz, “Der Kampf,” SIAK-Journal, 54. 43. “Die Internationale Konferenz zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels,” Der Bund: Zentralblatt des Bundes österr. Frauenvereine 4, no. 7 (November 1909): 10–12. 44. Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 25. 45. In different parts of Europe, organizations to combat the white slave trade emerged. In Germany, for instance, the Deutschen Nationalkomitee zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels was established in 1899. See Christina Klausmann, Politik und Kultur der Frauenbewegung im Kaiserreich: Das Beispiel Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 153. This organization argued that there was a ring of girl traffickers in the world and the head of the ring lived in Buenos Aires. The officials in this committee, therefore, concentrated on breaking the supply of European girls to brothels in Brazil and Argentina. Further, the committee claimed to have found several girls from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the pleasure houses of the German port city of Bremerhaven. The committee reported that the Habsburg police forces were lax on Galician and Hungarian girl traffickers. These traffickers were concentrated principally in Budapest, Prague, Lemberg, and Agram. See, for instance, a contemporary report on white slave trade: BGdÄW. “Tagesgeschichte: Der Internationale Mädchenhandel,” Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten 5, no. 10 (1906) in Zeitschrift für Bekämpfung

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52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

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der Geschlechtskrankheiten V. Band, ed. A. Blaschko, E. Lesser, and A. Neisser (Leipzig, 1906), 378–82. In May 1904, the delegations from twelve European countries met at Paris to sign the International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Trade. Among other things, the agreement intensified police activity in railway stations and ports and enabled the immigration of deported women to their respective homelands. See Nautz, “Der Kampf,” 47–60. Vice police officers in Vienna collaborated with police agents within and outside the Habsburg Empire to combat Mädchenhandel. ÖLBM reports show that between 1910 and 1913 the Vienna police headquarters participated in several international police operations against Mädchenhandel. In 1910, it was involved in 320 “anti-Mädchenhandel ” activities, 321 in 1911, and 360 in 1912. The police agents specially concentrated on women and minors undertaking foreign travel. They made liberal use of the press to issue public warnings to women about undertaking international travel and taking up service positions in foreign locations. See, Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 20. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 23–24. Finger and Baumgarten, Referat über die Regelung, 14–23. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 22. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 20–21. Karl Kraus, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität, ed. Heinrich Fischer (München, 1970), 239; Nancy M. Wingfield, “Echos of the Riehl Trial in Fin-de-Siècle Cisleithania,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 36–47. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913 (Vienna, 1914), 6–7. Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1910 und Generalversammlungs-Protokolle vom 30. Mai und 26. Juni 1911 (Vienna, 1911), 8. Between 5 and 8 October 1909, Vienna hosted an international conference against Mädchenhandel that brought together delegations from the national committees of other nations as well as high officials in Austria-Hungary. Attendees discussed Finger and Baumgarten’s report on regulation of prostitution, which recommended what amounted to increased police surveillance of working-class women. The report prescribed increased legal regulation of private placement agencies, especially those agencies that dealt with placements in foreign lands, increased monitoring of railways, better record keeping of procurers, and monitoring engagements of foreign female artists. See Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1910 und Generalversammlungs-Protokolle vom 30. Mai und 26. Juni 1911 (Vienna, 1911), 8–10; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913 (Vienna, 1914), 6–7; “Die Internationale Konferenz zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels,” Der Bund: Zentralblatt des Bundes österr. Frauenvereine 4, no. 7 (November 1909): 10–12. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 10–11. Melissa Kravetz points out how female physicians during the Weimar and Nazi periods in Germany attempted to make professional gains by imposing their ideals on lower-class women. See Melissa Kravetz, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics, and Professional Identity (Toronto, 2019). Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 11–12. Ibid., 25.

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59. Mgbako argues that in many parts of the world prostitution provides a better source of income to women than other forms of employment. See Mgbako, To Live Freely in This World, 29–32. Nina Kushner shows that sex work offered a chance for upward mobility and a comfortable life for many women; see Kushner, Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 60. “Neugewahlt,” in Bericht des Bürgermeisters Dr. Raimund Grübl, Die Gemeinde-Verwaltung der k.k. Reichshaupt- und Residenzstadt Wien in den Jahren 1889–1893 (Vienna, 1895), 43. 61. “Antrag des Gemeinderathes Herrdegen,” in Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 59; see also “Referat des Bezirksausschusses Dr. Walter Brix, betreffend die Einführung unentgeltlicher städischer Dienstvermittlungämter,” in Die Arbeitsvermittlung in Österreich, 59–61. 62. Ibid., 208. 63. Ibid., 59. 64. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung, 9. 65. Ibid., 9–10. 66. The AÖF was founded in Vienna in 1893 with the purpose of addressing women’s issues in its entirety. See Daniela Lackner, “Die Frauenfriedensbewegung in Österreich zwischen 1899 und 1915” (master’s thesis, Wien Universität, 2008), 66–73. 67. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung, 3. 68. Ibid., 4. 69. Ibid., 3. 70. Ibid., 5; “. . . der bestehenden Ordnung einige ganz unerträgliche Härten ausgeschieden haben. Er steht in der grundsätzlichen Auffassung der Dienstbotenfrage noch ganz auf dem Standpunkte des Jahres 1810, welcher die dienende Person als homo inferior der Polizei überweist.” 71. Ein Betrag zur Lösung, 10. 72. Ibid., 7. 73. Ibid., 10. 74. Ibid., 12. 75. Ibid., 8, 12–13. There is much scholarship on the tensions between bourgeois women and their servants. For example, see Lenore Davidoff, “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (1974): 406–28; Katharina Schlegel, “Mistress and Servant in Nineteenth Century Hamburg: Employer/Employee Relationships in Domestic Service, 1880–1914,” History Workshop Journal 15 no. 1 (1983): 60–77; Yates, Maid and Mistress. 76. Ein Betrag zur Lösung, 13; “wie die kleinsten Knirpfe sich Dienstboten gegenüber geberden, als wenn sie höhere Wesen wären. . . . Daß aber ein solch’ verkehrtes Verhältniß für die Erziehung der Kinder gewiß ebenso böse Folgen haven müsse, als für die Stellung der Dienstmädchen.” 77. Ibid., 13–14. 78. Ibid., 15–17. 79. Gabriella Hauch, Frau Biedermeier auf den Barrikaden: Frauenleben in der Wiener Revolution 1848 (Vienna, 1990), 193–98; Maximilian Bach, Geschichte der Wiener Revolution im Jahre 1848 (Vienna, 1898), 270; Richter, “Die Produktion,” 63. 80. Nussbaum, “Der Entwurf,” 523–27. 81. “Labour Abroad: Austria,” The Labour Gazette, January 1903, in The Labour Gazette Volume XI: January–December 1903 (London, 1903), 13–14.

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82. See, Morgenstern, Geindewesen, v; “. . . die vielen Schwierigkeiten und Zweifel kennen zu lernen, welche die mangelhafte Stilisierung der vielen Dienstbotenordnungen und deren vielfache Lücken der Rechtsprechung werden, der wird diesen Mangels schon oft schwer empfindung haben.” [. . . understanding the many difficulties and questions caused by the defective style of many servant laws and the various gaps in the legal language makes the situation even more problematic.] 83. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung. 84. The classic book on the crisis of liberalism is Schorske’s work: Carl E. Schorske, Finde-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1979). See also, Beneš, Workers and Nationalism, 13–14. 85. Johanna Meditz, Die “Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung” und die Frauenfrage: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der österreichischen sozialistischen Frauenbewegung der Jahre 1890–1918 (Vienna, 1979) 86. Dokumente der Frauen, Band II, no. 21 (January 1900), in Dokumente der Frauen Band II October 1899–März 1900, eds. Auguste Fickerte, Marie Lang, and Rosa Mayreder. 87. VGA-Wien, Winter, “Die Revision,” 455–60; VGA-Wien, Winter, “Dienstbotenordnungen,” 305–9. 88. About six hundred members founded the Unterstützungsvereines der herrschaflichen Diener (Assistance Association for Stately Servants) in 1855. The all-male organization represented the interests of a select group of servants such as those working for government employees. See Stephan Sedlaczek, Wilhelm Löwy, and Wilhelm Becke, eds., Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien für das Jahr 1900 (Vienna, 1902), 680. An article reporting on a meeting of the organization was published in a servant newspaper in 1906. See “Ausserordentliche Generalversammlung des Unterstützungs-Vereines der herrschaflichen Diener in Wien,” Der herrschaftlich Angestellte, 17 November 1906, 3. 89. The Christian Unions (Christlichen Gewerkschaften) in Austria came into existence in 1903. They comprised a group of associations that represented the interests of Christian—especially Catholic—working classes. See Ludwig Reichhold, Geschichte der christlichen Gewerkschaften Österreichs (Vienna, 1987); Georg Hans Schmit, “Die Rolle der Christlichen Arbeiterbewegung im politischen und sozialen System des austrofaschistischen Ständestaates” (master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2009). 90. “Wie soll sich die Dienerschaft organisieren,” Der herrschaftlich Angestellte, 3. 91. “Der herrschaftlich Angestellte,” Der herrschaftlich Angestellte, 27 October 1906, 1. 92. “Wie soll sich die Dienerschaft organisieren,” Der herrschaftlich Angestellte, 22 December 1906, 3–5. 93. In 1919, this organization released its monthly newspaper Die Hausgehilfin. This was a highly influential publication in the interwar period. See Michaela Maria Hintermayr, “Diskurs über Suizide und Suzidversuche von Hausgehilfinnen in Wien zwischen 1925 und 1933/34,” (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 2010), 37; Richter, “Die Produktion,” 85–92. 94. In 1875, Auer had founded a Cassianeum—a multifaceted, philanthropic Catholic institution that provided education and training facilities. The Cassianeum published the servant periodical Nothburga: Zeitschrift für Dienstboten in 1877. See Ludwig Auer, Northburga: Zeitschrift für Dienstboten (Donauwörth, 1880). See also Christiane Schloms, Ludwig Auer: Ein christlicher Bildungsreformer am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Donauwörth, 1994).

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95. “Dienstboten-Versorgungskassa in Wien,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 5 February 1911, 7–8. 96. “Der Dienstmädchenverein ‘Einigkeit,’”Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 13 April 1911, 4–5; Traude Bollauf, “Dienstboten-Emigration: Wie jüdische Frauen aus Österreich und Deutschland nach England flüchten konnten” (PhD diss., Wien Universität, 2009), 30–34, 99. 97. In 1911, one report argued that the summer months were the worst for servants, since from June to September bourgeois families visited the countryside for vacation and dismissed the servants in their employ. In 50 percent of cases in Vienna, the report argued, a servant was dismissed in this fashion. See “Entlassung von Dienstmädchen während der Sommermonate,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 1 June 1911, 4. 98. “Das Hauspersonal und der Zentralverein,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 October 1910, 2–3. 99. “Vereinsnachrichten,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 January 1911, 7–8. 100. Krone (K/kr) was the currency introduced in Austria-Hungary in 1892 and replaced the gulden or florint (Frt/fl). 1 gulden = 2 kronen = 60 kreuzers; 1 kreuzer = 8 heller (h); 100 hellers = 1 krone. These rates changed throughout the century. See George Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s Illustrated Hand-Book to Germany and Austria, Forming a Complete Guide to Those Countries, Including All the Spas and Places of Resort; With a Detailed Account of the Black Forest Adapted to the Railway System (London, 1895), xvii–xviii. For currencies, I have used the same symbol or word that is used in the original source. 101. “Unser Heim,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 20 February 1911, 4–5. 102. “Unsere Organisation,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 25 January 1912, 1. 103. Einigkeit released its own newspaper Vereinsblatt in 1913, then, subsequently, in 1924 (Einigkeit) and 1928 (Die Hausangestellte). See Bollauf, “Dienstboten-Emigration,” 30–31. 104. Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 10 March 1911, 1; “. . . zur Wahrung der materiellen und sozialen Interessen und für den Rechtsschutz der dienenden Klassen.” 105. “Zustellung der ,Oesterreichischen Dienstpersonal-Zeitung‘ in die Sommerfrischen,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 21 April 1911, 2. 106. “Kostenlose Stellenvermittlung,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 13 April 1911, 9. 107. There is copious scholarship on this topic. See, for example, Barbara Kosta, “Employed Bodies: Female Servants in Works by Marieluise Fleisser,” German Studies Review 15, no. 1 (1992): 47–63. 108. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux: Der Roman eines Dienstmädchens, trans. Emma Adler (Vienna, 1896), iii–vii. 109. One report in 1910 argued that 16,000 servants earned between 12 and 18 kronen per month, 19,043 servants received an average wage of 20 kronen per month, 18,454 servants had wages between 20 and 24 kronen, 16,080 between 24 to 30 kronen, 7,324 earned up to 40 kronen, and only 1,475 servants earned above 40 kronen. See “Vom Wiener städischen Dienstvermittlungsamt,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 19 October 1911, 5. The price index for a basic standard of living in 1910 that included food, transport, clothes, and rent was about 90–100 kronen and about 80 kronen without rent. The price index of food alone was about 50 kronen per month. Even if we assume that food and rent was provided by the employer’s family, a servant required

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114.

115. 116. 117.

118.

119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

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earnings of about 30 kronen per month to maintain a basic living standard in Vienna in 1910. See Thomas Cvrcek, “Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in the Habsburg Empire, 1827–1910,” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 1 (2013): 1–37. Popp-Dworzak, “Dritter Abend: Provozierende Momente: Über die Wohnverhältnisse (als provozierende Moment),” in Die Enquete, 100. “Dritter Abend: Diskussion,” in Die Enquete, 126. Ehrmann, Die Enquete, 94–127. The dearth-of-servants trope was common in many major cities of Europe as well as the Americas. For example, for the case in Zürich, see Regula Bochsler and Sabine Gisiger, Städtische Hausangestellte in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz des 20. Jahrhunderts (Zürich, 1989), 241–45; and for the example of Germany, see Uta Ottmüller, Die Dienstbotenfrage: Zur Sozialgeschichte der doppelten Ausnutzung von Dienstmädchen im deutschen Kaiserreich (Münster, 1978). VGA-Wien, Adelheid Popp, “Lebensschicksal der Arbeiter,” Der Kampf 4, no. 10 (1 July 1911), in Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatschrift Vierter Band (Oktober 1910 bis September 1911), ed. Otto Bauer, Adolf Braun, and Karl Renner (Vienna, 1911), 470. Ibid. Ibid.; “dass die Werkmeister lange nicht so grob seien wie die gnädigen Frauen.” Some historians have argued that the Servant Question was a Social Democratic construct. This might be an exaggeration since there was a decrease in proportion of servants to the total population in different cities of Europe at the turn of the century; however, that did not imply that there was a dearth of servants. See, for instance, Ottmüller’s and Zull’s discussions on the Servant Question. Ottmüller, Die Dienstbotenfrage, 15–16; Zull, Das Bild vom Dienstmädchen, 3. Regina Köpl, “Popp, Adelheid (1869–1939), A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi (New York, 2006), 447–49. Czeike, Historisches Lexicon Wien, Band 3 H-L, 95–96. Gyáni, “Women as Domestic Servants,” 8. The total population of Vienna in 1910 was 2,031,498. The population of Vienna in the last decades of the nineteenth century increased mostly due to Czech migrants from the lands of Moravia and Bohemia, and these were working-class migrants who were unlikely to hire servants. While there was an increase in the number of bourgeois employers in Vienna, the number of migrant women entering the domestic service industry was far more than the number of bourgeois employers in Vienna. In fin de siècle Vienna, it was the excess of servants rather than the dearth of servants that was the problem. Czeike, Historisches Lexicon Wien, Band 3 H-L, 95–96; Hintermayr, “Diskurs über Suizide und Suzidversuche,” 46. Of these, 9,452 placed servants were 14 to 16 years of age, 19,986 were 20 to 24 years of age, 10,209 were 25 to 40 years, 5,075 were between 41 to 50 years, 2,221 between 51 and 60 years, and 790 were above 60 years of age. See, “Vom Wiener städischen Dienstvermittlungsamt,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 19 October 1911, 5. For instance, one report argued that in 1902, 10.6 percent of female migrants were servants. This percentage increased to 12.3 percent in 1907 and remained constant until 1910. In 1902, 66.7 percent servants had changed their service positions before a year; in 1910, the number fell to 50 percent, implying that 2,503 servants were unemployed.

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125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131.

132.

133. 134.

135.

136. 137.

138.

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See “Die Häufigkeit des Stellenwechsels der weiblichen Dienstboten,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 28 September 1911, 5. Gyáni, Women as Domestic Servants, 4. “Die Lage des männlichen Hauspersonales,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 1 October 1910, 3. “Zur Lage der Herrschaftsdiener,” Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 20 February 1911, 3–4. “Versammlung tschechischer Dienstmädchen,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 10 March 1911, 5. “Dienstbotenselbsmorde (1900),” in Totgeschwiegen: Texte zur Situationen der Frau von 1880 bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Sigrid Schmid and Hanna Schnedl (Vienna, 1982), 184. Hintermayr, “Diskurs über Suizide und Suzidversuche.” For cases of servant suicides in Berlin, see Karin Orth, Nur weiblichen Besuch: Dienstbotinnen in Berlin 1890–1914 (Frankfurt, 1993), 111–12. Ehrmann, Die Enquete, 127. The system of robot was a form of serfdom that existed in the Habsburg Empire wherein serfs paid compulsory labor to the nobility. Maria Theresa’s and Josef II’s Robot Patents in the 1700s served to increase peasant rights. The Habsburg authorities abolished the system during the Revolutions of 1848. See, for instance, Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of European History, 1494–1789 (New York, 2005), 185. Literally translated, Gnädige means “gracious”; however, the address is a form of extreme reverence and reaffirms a social hierarchy of rank, status, title, etc. The paternalistic servility in Austria diverged from that in Western Europe in many respects. Kuzmics and Axtmann, for instance, argue that the urban middle classes adopted a courtly pattern of interacting with authority as opposed to a more parliamentarian style in England. See Helmut Kuzmics and Roland Axtmann, Authority, State and National Character: The Civilizing Process in Austria and England, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, 2007). “Die ‘Gnädige’ bei uns und andere,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 11 May 1911, 2. Adelheid Popp, Haussklavinnen: Ein Beitrag zur Lage der Dienstmädchen (Vienna, 1912), 31. “Dienstmädchen! Bleibt nicht länger jede allein, schließt euch zusammen, organisiert euch und kämpft gemeinsam um höhere Menschenrechte. Laßt euch nicht einschüchtern und nicht abhalten, was die Organisation will, ist nicht gegen die Gesetze. Jeder Mensch hat das Recht, sich zu organisieren und Vereinen anzugehören, also auch ihr. Erhebt euch und werst an die Ketten, die ihr tragt, kämpft alle gemeinsam für eine bessere Zukunft der im haushalt tätigen Mädchen.” WStLA, BG Innere Stadt II, A4-A: A282/1890—Verlassenschaft: Anna Strotzenberger, Protokoll aufgenommen bei dem k.k. städtisch-delegirten Bezirksgerichte der inner Stadt, 12 April 1878; Inventar, 14. November 1878; Inventar, 1 November 1878. DOKU, Helene Gasser, Memoiren einer Köchin, 1834; Transkription: Andrea Althaus, December 2007. See also Althaus, Mit Kochlöffel, 7–10, 23–124. See, for example, the case from 1780 of a widow from Lembruck named Maria Josepha leaving about one hundred guldens to the governess Anna Milet. See Historische und Typographische Darstellung von Schönbrunn und seiner Umgegend mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Pfarren, Stifte, Klöster, milde Stiftungen und Denkmähler (Vienna, 1824), 96. Edward Higgs, Domestic Servants and Households in Rochdale, 1851–1871 (New York), 41–48. See also Sarti, “Who Are Servants?” 3–59.

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139. “Der Streik der Ammen,” Reichenhaller Badeblatt, 19 May 1894, 2; “Soziales,” Das Echo, 10 May 1894, 677. 140. For the specific schedule prescribed for a governess in 1780 Prague, see Wilhelm Schram, ed., Die gute alte Zeit in Österreich: Eine Sammlung kulturhistorischer Denkwürdigkeiten (Brünn, 1906), 90–91. 141. David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Providence and Oxford, 1996), 12–15. 142. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien für das Jahr 1901 (Vienna, 1903), 724. 143. Statistisches Landesamt, Statistische Mitteilungen über Steiermark (Styria, 1896), 238. See Charitas (1899), 23; Heimgarten 16 (1892), 240. 144. See “Die Gouvernante,” Dokumente der Frauen, nr. 1 (1 April 1900), 12. “Körperliche Arbeit hat und darf die feinere Gouvernante nich verrichten, einestheils um nicht auf das Niveau eines Stubenmadchens hinabzusinken, andertheils weil ihrer Wurde in den Augen der Kinder Eintraf geschieht, wenn sie das Zimmer ordnen oder sonstige Diensbotenleistungen verrichten wurde.” 145. “Sind Erzieherinnen und Kinderfräuleins Dienstboten?” Österreichische DienstpersonalZeitung, 13 July 1911, 6. 146. “Dienstmädchen brauchen nichts zu lesen,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 13 April 1911, 7. “Dienstboten brauchen nicht zu lessen. Die sollen den Besen in die Hand nehmen.” 147. Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 11 May 1911, 1. 148. See, for instance, images in “Kindermund,” Die Bombe, 31 October 1909, 3; Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 11 May 1911, 1. 149. Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 178. 150. Tara Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in East Central Europe, 1889– 1989,” Past and Present 223, no. 1 (2014): 161–93. Intense Mädchenhandel investigations conducted by the vice police and the ÖLBM to “rescue naïve and hapless girls” achieved the surveillance of large numbers of adult women who chose to travel away from their hometowns for work. Scholars have argued that international anti–white slavery efforts in fact consolidated rather than undermined the retention of prostitutes in the trade through practices of protection and discipline. For instance, see, Ashwini Tambe, “The Elusive Ingénue: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of European Prostitution in Bombay,” Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 160–79. 151. Paragraphs 127 and 128 of the Penal Code of 1852 set the age of consent for sexual activities for both sexes at fourteen years. See Sonja Matter, “‘She Doesn’t Look Like a Child’: Girls and Age of Consent Regulations in Austria (1950–1970),” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 1 (2017): 104–22. 152. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Note from k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, Büreau für sittenpolizeil. Agenden, 17 July 1908. 153. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Zeitungs Notiz des Wr. Journals vom 15/7 1908. 154. Ibid. 155. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Letter from fökapitányhelyettes A budapesti m. kir. államredörség fökapitánysága to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, January 1908.

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156. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Letter from the Rat und Abteilungsvorstand at the Polizeibehörde Abteilung II (Kriminalpolizei) in Hamburg to kaiserlich königliche Polizeidirektion in Wien, 21 August 1908. 157. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Protokoll aufgenommen beim Regierungskommissär in Sarajevo, 24 January 1911. 158. Ibid. 159. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Letter from the Regierungskommissär in Sarajevo to the k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien, 24 January 1911. 160. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911: Stany Johanna, Abschrift from Karnitschnigg Graz, 9 March 1911 to k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien, 10 April 1911. 161. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Jansohn Mathias Friedrich, Bauer Josef, Schatz Germinie, Biller Marianne, Relation from the Polizeiagent Aloisie Niederhuemer, Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 3 May 1910. 162. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Jansohn Mathias Friedrich, Bauer Josef, Schatz Germinie, Biller Marianne, Letter to the Kriminal Polizei-Chef in Riga, 3 May 1910. 163. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Prostitutionswesen—diverse Akte (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Jansohn Mathias Friedrich, Bauer Josef, Schatz Germinie, Biller Marianne, Relation by k.k. Polizei Agent Johann Ungar, 7 December 1911; Anfrage Estmeister, 7 December 1911. 164. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/4, Akte: Mädchenhandel 1910, Letter to the Stadtrat in Bregens from the k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien als Zentralestelle für Überwachung des Mädchen-Handels, 27 October 1910. 165. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from the k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to Herrn staatsanwaltschaftlichen Funktionär beim k.k. Bezirksgerichte Leopoldstadt I in Wien, 29 May 1913. 166. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from Polizeiamt Aussig to k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien, 6 February 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to kgl.sächs. Polizei-Direktion Dresden, 25 January 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to Magistrat der kgl. Hauptstadt Olmütz, 25 January 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to Polizeiverwaltung Worms, 25 January 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to Stadthauptmannschaft Nagy-Szombat, 25 January 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to städtische Polizeiamt Teplitz-Schönau, 25 January 1911; Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Ueberwachung des Mädchenhandels to Polizeiverwaltung Bamberg, 25 January 1911. 167. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from Polizeirat Dresden to k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien, 6 February 1911. 168. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from städtisches Polizeiamt Teschen to k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien, 19 June 1911.

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169. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Abschrift from Stadtpolizeiamt Mähr.-Ostrau to the k.k. Bezirksgericht in Mähr-Ostrau, 9 October 1911. 170. Ibid. 171. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from Stadtpolizeiamt Mähr.-Ostrau to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 13 December 1911. 172. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from Stadtrat als Sicherheitsbehörde in Brünn to the k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 23 March 1912. 173. Ibid. 174. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/2, Akte: Mädchenhandel Patek Andreas 1910, Letter from the k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien to the Herrn staatsanwaltschaflichen Funktionär beim k.k. Bezirksgerichte Leopoldstadt I Wien, 29 May 1913. 175. Ibid. 176. Wingfield argues that panderers were crucial for refreshing the sexual talent in tolerated brothels of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the relatively limited penalties such transgressions entailed enabled panderers to supply women to various regions within as well as outside the empire’s borders. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 178. 177. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Letter from the Erste Bürgermeister Stellvertreter in Brünn to the k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 10 July 1910. 178. Wingfield notes that many Mädchenhandel “victims” were women who married hastily to escape their impoverished conditions and traveled with their spouses to foreign locations only to realize they had been tricked and had to resort to prostitution or working at questionable locales to alleviate financial difficulties. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 189. I argue that these are instances of poor decision-making on the part of these women and not cases of coercion. 179. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft Steyr to k.k. Polizeidirektion (Zentralstelle zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels) in Wien, 17 February 1914. 180. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Abschrift from Meixner, Wachtmeister, k.k. Landesgendarmeriekommando Abteilung Linz to the k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft in Steyr, 15 February 1914. 181. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/1, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from the Bezirkshauptmannschaft Steyr to the k.k. Polizei-Direktion (Zentrale zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels) in Wien, 24 March 1914. 182. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Prostitutionwesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Wahrnehmungs-Meldung der k.k. Bezirks-Polizei-Gemeiderat Prater, 24 March 1911. 183. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Prostitutionwesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Abschrift from the Stadtrat als Sicherheitsbehörde in Brünn to the k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 18 April 1911. 184. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Prostitutionwesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Letter from the Stadtrat as the Sicherheitsbehörde in Brünn

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185. 186.

187. 188.

189. 190. 191. 192.

193.

194.

195. 196. 197. 198. 199.

200.

201.

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to the k.k. Polizei-Direktion als Zentrale zur Uberwachung des Mädchen-Handels in Wien, 14 July 1911; “es für unrichtig, dass sie gegen ihren Willen im Bordelle zurückgehalten werde.” Ibid. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Prostitutionwesen—diverse Akte zur Registrierung (Mädchenhandel) 1911, Letter from the k.k. Bezirksgericht Leopoldstadt I to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 3 February 1912. Wingfield, for instance, argues that alleged Mädchenhandel “victims” entered the sex trade for a variety of reasons. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 189. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, Letter from Königl. Sächs Polizei-Direktion in Dresden to the Magistrat at Teplitz Schönau, 18 June 1910. For some details on Mädchenhandel in Germany, especially München, see, Sybille Krafft, Zucht und Unzucht: Prostitution und Sittenpolizei im München der Jahrhundertwende (München, 1996), 190–99. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, K.K. Pol. Dion Wien St., 3 June 1910. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, Letter to Polizeiamt in Aussig and k.k Pol. Dion Prag, 31 May 1910. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, K.K. Pol. Dion Wien St., 3 June 1910. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, Letter from k.k Polizei-Direktion Wien als Zentralstelle zur Überwachung des Mädchen-Handels to the städtische Polizeiamt in Teplitz, 3 June 1910. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/5, Akte: Weber Karl, Abschrift and Strafkarte from Stadt Polizeikommissar at Teplitz-Schönau to Polizei-Direktion in Wien als Zentralstelle zur Überwachung des Mädchen-Handels, 6 June 1910; Strafkarte Weber, 1910. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1913: Mädchenhandel 1913, Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien to the Herrn staatsanwaltschaftlichen Funktionär beim k.k. Bez. Gerichte Leopoldstadt and städt. Polizeiamt in Aussig, 3 December 1913. Ibid. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1913: Mädchenhandel 1913, Auschnitt aus Nr. 331 der Zeitung J11. Wiener Extrablatt vom 4.12.1913. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1913: Mädchenhandel 1913, Letter from Polizeikommissariat Aussig to k.k Polizeidirektion Wien, 10 December 1913. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution und Mädchenhandel 1913: Mädchenhandel 1913, Letter from Polizeikommissariat at Aussig to the k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien, 23 February 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Abschrift from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to Herrn Staatsanwaltschaflichen Funktionär beim k.k. Bezirksgerichte Leopoldstadt I in Wien, 5 April 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Konzept from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to the Königl. Ungariche Staatsawaltschaft in Besztercebanya, 26 June 1914. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Telegram from Tureczmarton to Pol. Dion Wien, 18 June 1914.

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202. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Konzept from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to the k.k. Staatsanwalt Finctionär des Bezirksgerichtes Leopoldstadt I, 25 June 1914. 203. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Abschrift from königl. Staatsanwaltschaft in Beszterczebanya to k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 22 June 1914. 204. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Uebersetzung von der Königl. Staatsawaltschaft in Beszterczebanya to k.k. Polizei-Direktion Wien, 22 June 1914; Konzept from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to the k.k. Staatsanwalt Finctionär des Bezirksgerichtes Leopoldstadt I, 25 June 1914; Konzept from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to the Königl. Ungariche Staatsawaltschaft in Besztercebanya, 26 June 1914. 205. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr) Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from Police Headquarters in Budapest to k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien, 1 July 1914. 206. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913 (Vienna, 1914), 7. 207. Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 13; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 18; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 18; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchenund Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 14; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 22; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 11–12. See, Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 27. 208. Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1908 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 30. Mai 1909 (Vienna, 1909), 12; Bericht der Oesterreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels: Über das Vereinsjahr 1909 und Generalversammlungs-Protokoll vom 7. April 1910 (Vienna, 1910), 6; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 15; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchenund Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1911 (Vienna, 1912), 11; Bericht des Vereines: Oesterreichische Mädchen- und Kinderschutzliga (Österreichische Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels): Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 16–17; Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 9. 209. See, Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 7. 210. See the following volume of labor intermediation: Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner, and Alexander Mejstrik, The History of Labour Intermediation: Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2015). Sigrid Wadauer’s essay especially elucidates how tramping was a way to search for and find work. 211. On the susceptibility of servants to prostitution, see Karin Walser, “Prostitutionsverdacht und Geschlechterforschung: Das Beispiel der Dienstmädchen um 1900,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (1985): 99–111. 212. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910 (Vienna, 1911), 27. 213. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 36. 214. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1912 (Vienna, 1913), 25.

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215. 216. 217. 218. 219.

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Ibid., 30. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 12. See, Wingfield, World of Prostitution, 151. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1910, 13–14. See, LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, Durchgeführte Reformen im Prostitutionswesen, Abschrift k.u.k Ministerium des kais. u. kgl Hauses und des Aeussern, 9 March 1911. On 15 April 1911, the Ministry of the Interior directed the league to issue an official apology to the consulate. See LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911 Durchgeführte Reformen im Prostitutionswesen, Letter from the K.K. Ministerium des Innern to Hernn k.k. Statthalter Wien, 15 April 1911. 220. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1910/4, Akte: Mädchenhandel 1910, Letter from k.k. Vizekonsul, k und k Oesterr. Ungar. Vize-Konsulat to k.k. Polizeidirektion in Wien, 3 March 1911. 221. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, Newspaper clip of 14 February 1911. 222. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, Newspaper clip of 14 February 1911. 223. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, Relation k.k Polizei Direktion Wien, 17 February 1911; to the k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft Trautenau, 17 February 1911. 224. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, to the k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft Trautenau, 21 March 1911, 1 April 1911. 225. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1911, Akte: Reformen in Prostitutionwesen 1911, Protokoll, 18. April 1911. 226. Paul Kampffmeyer was one of the key participants of the prostitution and Mädchenhandel question in Germany. See, Paul Kampffmeyer, Die Prostitution als soziale Klassenerscheinung und ihre sozialpolitische Bekämpfung (Berlin, 1905). 227. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1913, 50. 228. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden, Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr), Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Letter from k.k. Polizeidirektion Wien to the k.k. Bezirkshauptmannschaft in Rumburg, 5 June 1914. 229. LPDW, Karton: Prostitution 1914/3, Akte: Sittenpolizeiliche Agenden, Jahrgang: 1914 (Kriegsjahr), Prostitution-Mädchenhandel, Note from Aloisia Lehminger to the Kommissariat in Wien, 14 June 1914. 230.“Versammlung tschechischer Dienstmädchen,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 10 March 1911, 5.

Chapter 6

VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS

d T

his chapter juxtaposes the cases of Hugo Schenk (1883) and Franz and Rosalia Schneider (1892) against the cases of Hedwig Ruß (1874) and Franziska Nawratil (1905) to demonstrate that despite the harsh conditions of the fin de siècle servant occupation, women acted beyond the constraints of vulnerability, dependence, and exploitation that dominated their daily lives. The cases of Schenk and Schneider enabled populists to underscore the vulnerabilities of the servant occupation and demand reform of the 1810 Codes. However, the cases of Ruß and Nawratil reveal four key areas of power that servants exhibited. First, the employers were themselves vulnerable to servant-instigated violence within the premises of their own homes. Second, servants had access to almost all areas of the employer’s household. Third, servants could easily put the employer’s minor dependents in harm’s way. Finally, there were enough loopholes in the system of Dienstzeugniss and Dienstbotenbuch to make it difficult for police officials to apprehend servant criminals. In conclusion, I argue that narratives that cast maidservants into the role of innocent victim failed to acknowledge their ability to exercise their intellect and exert control over their environment. Moreover, these narratives masked any real culpability on the part of these women. In other words, the paternalism of the outdated legal system and the trenchant maternalism of these narratives sometimes softened the blow for maidservant perpetrators.

The Marriage Swindler The marital ambitions of a female servant featured prominently in Vienna’s post1848 Servant Question debate. In 1852, Georg Schulz submitted a written application to the mayor’s office requesting that they make the approval of marriage

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certificates more difficult for servants. An irreligious and immoral maidservant, he argued, would likely raise irreligious and immoral children and thrust her entire future family into misery. Therefore, he suggested that marriage licenses should not be granted without strict examination of the maidservant’s testimony.1 While Schulz drew upon the Rautenstrauchian discourse, populists in fin de siècle Vienna constructed the trope of the marriage swindler to emphasize the naïveté and victimization of female servants who sought to marry. A marriage swindler was a man who lured an unsuspecting maidservant with promises of marriage and robbed her of her life savings.2 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the case of Hugo Schenk and his accomplices supported the victim narrative by constructing the marriage swindler as a dangerous threat to servant lives. Hugo Schenk was a serial killer, who, along with his associates Karl Schenk (his brother) and Carl Schlossarek, perpetrated a series of robbery-murders in 1883. Most of Schenk’s victims were maidservants. The gang operated in the following manner: pretending to be an engineer, Schenk posted marriage advertisements in Viennese newspapers. When a prospective victim responded, Schenk would court her. He would pretend to be a Russian nobleman in disguise to entice his victims to marry him, whereby he would gain access to the woman’s dowry or savings. Following the marriage or engagement, the couple would take a trip to a far-off location. During the trip, Schenk would lead his victim into a secluded forest area, where his gang would kill her. Then they would rob her belongings and later withdraw money from her savings.3 The gang selected Schenk for the task of posing as a prospective groom since he was best suited among the three, due to “his personality, his allure, the power of his eloquence, his good manners,” to ensnare new victims.4 Case records suggest that Schenk had already attempted a marriage swindle in 1881 for which he had served a prison term. By the time of their capture in January 1884, Schenk and his accomplices had murdered and robbed four maidservants, namely Josefine and Katharina Timal, Theresia Ketterl, and Rosa Ferenczy. Through their marriage swindles, they stole over 4,000 florins from their victims’ savings. This amount excludes other valuables that they stole, such as jewelry. They also attempted to rob three men, succeeding in one case.5 Prominent police investigator Hofrat Karl Breitenfeld and his team arrested Schenk and his associates in early January 1884.6 The Viennese criminal court sentenced Schenk and Schlossarek to death by hanging during their trial in March 1884.7 Karl Schenk was also sentenced to death but was later granted the emperor’s pardon and served a life sentence.8 The case of Schenk and his accomplices occurred in the context of increased public fascination for crime and violence in post-1850 Vienna. In Vienna, public executions of prisoners ended only in 1869 when the Ministry of the Interior reorganized the structure of the police forces. In the 1870s, periodicals that carried illustrations of crimes replaced the spectacle of public executions. With the progress of the decade, these illustrations grew increasingly graphic and sugges-

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tive.9 Further, illustrated newspapers circulated drawings of crimes in progress.10 Additionally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a new literary genre, the Pitaval—a story based on a real case that focused on the criminal rather than crime-fighting mechanisms—became popular in the German-speaking world.11 Publications focusing on single criminal cases such as Chronik der Zeit (Chronicles of the times) and sensationalist novels (Kolportagroman) proliferated within the empire.12 The Schenk case increased voyeuristic tastes for violence, especially sexual and corporeal violence, against maidservants and propelled the Servant Question in a novel direction—one that graphically dramatized the vulnerabilities of servanthood.13 Ten of the empire’s major newspapers and copious local newspapers published over one thousand articles pertaining to Schenk between 10 January and December 1884 alone. Between January and April 1884, that is, in the period between Schenk’s arrest and his execution, news reports on the Schenk case appeared every single day without break. Further, more than five hundred newspaper articles referring to the Schenk case appeared in the following decade in addition to copious sensationalist publications on the case.14 The Schenk case first captured press attention in August 1883, and, at this time, the press focused on the mysterious disappearance of one of his victims, the thirty-seven-year-old Theresia Ketterl, instead of on Schenk.15 Ketterl was born in Munich and, for several years, was employed as a cook in the house of Ottokar Freiherr von Buschmann, an official in the Finance Ministry. Since her employer was such a prominent member of the Habsburg government, her disappearance attracted reportage in seven major Viennese papers, including Die Presse, MorgenPost, Neue Freie Presse, and Neues Wiener Tagblatt. According to these reports, the baron left on a trip to Italy for six weeks in June, and when he returned in August, Ketterl was missing. Other members of the household notified the police of this disappearance well before the baron’s return. Further, they also informed the police that, before her disappearance, they often saw Ketterl with a man of about thirty years of age. Six days after the disappearance of Ketterl, investigating police officials discovered an empty dog case in the compartment of a Western Railway train heading to Vienna from Paris. Apparently, Ketterl took the baron’s pooches with her when she departed from her employer’s home.16 Between August and October 1883, major Viennese newspapers published over forty articles tracking the progress of police investigations.17 The trope of the marriage swindler who targeted maidservants surfaced often in these reports. For instance, on 5 September 1883, Morgen-Post reported that a maidservant named Theresa H. informed the police that she could identify the marriage swindler who was responsible for the disappearance of Ketterl. She claimed that she met a trader named Sigmund Rosenzweig in the Prater in July. According to her story, Rosenzweig introduced himself as Theodor Hofmann and claimed that he was single. He planned a trip with her to Weidlingau, had spoken to her of mar-

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riage, and had taken ten florins from her. In August, the housemaid discovered that Rosenzweig had a wife and five children. Following this tip-off, the police arrested Rosenzweig. Officials discovered that the suspect had, in fact, robbed another man, a junk dealer named Heinrich Drill, of eighty florins via a bogus newspaper advertisement. But he had no connection with Ketterl’s disappearance.18 Similarly, on 26 October 1883, Die Presse reported that the police arrested an unemployed man named Karl Wagner under suspicion of the alleged murder of Ketterl on 20 October and sent him to the district court. Two days later, police discontinued investigations on Wagner since he had an alibi.19 Initial news reports of Schenk’s arrest in January 1884 focused on him mainly as a suspect in the alleged murder of Ketterl. On 10 January, an article in Die Presse reported Schenk’s arrest under the title “Der Fall Theresia Ketterl” (The case of Theresia Ketterl). The article contained a detailed account of the circumstances of Ketterl’s disappearance followed by a few lines detailing Schenk’s arrest and concluding with the comment that police officials also suspected Schenk of the alleged murder of three other victims, possibly a fourth.20 But a few weeks after the arrest, the press focus shifted from the victim Ketterl to the character of the criminal Schenk. On 20 January 1884, the illustrated Viennese family newspaper Neue Illustrirte Zeitung published the picture of Schenk. In the column that accompanied the picture, the author remarked, “How many women did Schenk lure in through newspaper ads, seduce through the pervasive magic of his personality and then eliminate? Five, six—ten?”21 Subsequent reports on the case emphasized the professionalism of the killer by underscoring alleged common characteristics of the class of female victims he targeted. For instance, according to one report, the gang believed maidservants were the best targets for their modus operandi “because they were easier to deceive due to their lower education level, and they would be more likely to give into the flattering speeches of the elegant Hugo Schenk, who, pretending to be a government official or an engineer, would promise marriage to them.”22 The Schenk gang was a band of robbers. Their initial victims were servant-class men willing to pay deposits for service positions, and their modus operandi was first applied to these men before they adapted their method for maidservants. Their first victims were a miller’s assistant named Franz Podpera and an itinerant coachman named Franz Bauer. According to their plan, under the pretext of offering a good service position, Schlossarek would travel with each of these men to a location outside Vienna. During the trip, he would drug them with a drink laced with a sedative. He would then lead the victim in a sedated state to a secluded spot where Schenk and Schlossarek would attack and rob the unsuspecting victim of his belongings.23 In both instances, Schlossarek was responsible for luring the victims to their trap with promises of good service positions. Furthermore, even after they had adapted their modus operandi to maidservants, they did not cease attempts to steal from other types of victims. For instance, in the short time between

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the murders of Josefine and Katharina Timal, Schenk and Schlossarek attempted to rob a postman who carried money from Pöchlarn to Artstetten.24 Moreover, even though Schenk lured in maidservants with prospects of marriage, Schlossarek actively participated in murdering at least three of the maidservant victims, and Karl Schenk participated in one instance.25 Despite this, while the prosecution condemned Schlossarek and Karl Schenk, Hugo Schenk attracted most of the censure for having seduced and duped so many women. During their trial, for instance, the judge underscored the depravity of Schenk’s character by arguing that after the murder of Josefine Timal, Schenk withdrew the money from her savings, traveled to Mölk with his lover Emilie Höchsmann, and attended the theater that afternoon: “A man, who forms love relationships with three women to kill them, murders one and the next day deprives another of her honor and goes to the theater with her, demonstrates a deplorable attitude.”26 Further, the prosecution argued that Schenk was in correspondence with many other girls and, as evidence, presented the letters that Schenk wrote to eight of them.27 When the judge of the trial inquired, “You have often after a few days spent the night with other girls,” Schenk responded, “I could have taken many persons away, if I had wanted.”28 Schenk’s alleged ability to seduce women stirred considerable public curiosity. An illustrated version of the Schenk trial Prozess des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seine Genossen (The trial of the girl murderers Hugo Schenk and his accomplices), published by a printer in Linz S. Tagwerker, first addressed why Schenk’s personality appealed to maidservants.29 The pamphlet argued that older cooks considered him handsome because they were eager to marry. The report insisted that Schenk had no physical appeal and that he relied on his smooth-talking skills to capitalize on the victims’ desires to marry: Is Hugo Schenk a handsome man?—That was the question that every man asked before turning his gaze to the place where the murderer sat calm and cheerful. The question was denied by a large majority. The man was not handsome, he dressed disgustingly. . . . The man does not seem to have charmed the girls so much by his appearance as by the prospect of a carefree future that he pretended to offer. The simple Teresia Ketterl, the woman from Budweiser, Katharina Timal, the inexperienced Josefine Timal liked his high German, the engineer’s affected and selected speeches made a better impression than his face and his figure.30

Tagwerker’s dramatic report of the trial repeatedly emphasized the maidservants’ inexperience and simplicity in the face of Schenk’s worldly charm and deception. For instance, his description of the testimony of two key witnesses— Emilie Höchsmann and Josefine Eder—underscored their trusting devotion to Schenk and helplessness in the face of his machinations.31 Höchsmann testified on the second day of the trial, and, the report noted, she attracted considerable interest from the gathered courthouse crowds for being the only woman to whom

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Schenk seemed devoted. The report described her as a slim young woman who, “known to be in the state of pregnancy,” was asked to sit for her interrogation. The chairman, the report argued, always referred to her as “miss” and “lady.”32 After her testimony, when the pregnant Höchsmann had to leave the courtroom, the report described the scene thus: A heart-wrenching scene took place as Emilie Höchsmann was about to leave the courtroom. The girl stood up from the chair, staggered toward Schenk, who leaned forward, and wanted to press his hand in farewell. The chairman alone with a thunderous voice said, “Do not approach him, beware of touching this man.” The eyes of the girl filled with tears; she took her hand back slowly and braced herself as she left the room.33

Similarly, the report was sympathetic to the twenty-five-year-old chambermaid Josefine Eder, even though she confessed to theft.34 The report claimed that Eder was so amenable to Schenk’s will that she had, for his sake, stolen valuables worth over three hundred florins from her employer, Hedwig von Malfatti.35 Furthermore, the report underscored Eder’s victimization by emphasizing that although the Vienna criminal court found her guilty of theft in February 1884, at the time of the Schenk trial, she was not “in prison clothes, but in a gray dress” (nicht in Sträflingkleider, sondern in eine graue Robe gehüllt). The report’s description of Eder’s testimony on the witness stand reveals that there was considerable official as well as public sympathy for Eder: Once, when describing the disappearance of Hugo Schenk concerning the theft, the president says, “You poor thing, you have had enough!” The chairman accuses the witness in plain words for not making a full confession in time. Josefine Eder testifies, crying, that Hugo Schenk had pressured her to secure him money as he needed it to secure his shop. After the interrogation ends, the chairman dismisses her. Josefine Eder goes out crying and Schenk sends her a few glances.36

Eder’s collusion with Schenk, knowing or otherwise, earned her a three-year prison sentence.37 Although officials did not charge her with any crime, Höchsmann’s complete ignorance about Schenk’s criminal activities is debatable. Nevertheless, the report reveals a key assumption about late nineteenth-century maidservants—that due to their illiteracy, youth, and inexperience, maidservants were so gullible and so desperate for love and marriage that in the face of an appealing personality like Schenk’s, they could not possibly exhibit any awareness or resistance or even knowingly participate in crimes. This assumption allowed the press to create an image of a marriage swindler that was much more sinister than that of a mere bandit: a marriage swindler was a professional seducer who specialized in luring and killing innocent servant girls for their life savings. Independent pamphlets as well as newspapers published copious illustrations of the crimes, which graphically depicted the passivity and helplessness of maid-

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servants. The publisher C. Fritz produced an illustrated version of the Schenk trial under the title Prozeß des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk (Trial of the girl murderer Hugo Schenk).38 One illustration portrayed Schenk and Schlossarek holding Rosa Ferenczy and attacking her with a knife.39 Similarly, on 20 March 1884, Das interessante Blatt published an illustrated report of the Schenk trial, including murders-in-progress images of all four female victims: Schenk and Schlossarek throwing Josefine Timal, tied to a rock, into a pool of water; the Schenk brothers and Schlossarek binding Katharina Timal to the ground holding a knife to her face; Schenk coaxing Ketterl to shoot herself in the temple;40 and Schenk and Schlossarek attacking Ferenczy with a hatchet. The much-publicized helplessness of the maidservant victims in the face of Schenk’s allure increased focus on the lurking dangers that threatened the lives of “naïve” servant-girls. Press reports emphasized that Schenk targeted maidservants, as it was easy to beguile illiterate servants who were eager to marry.41 Publications on the case downplayed Schlossarek’s involvement and underscored the charisma of Schenk. C. Fritz printed and circulated a two-part ballad titled “Der Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk” (The girl murderer Hugo Schenk), set to the tune of the famous Austrian folk song “Karl am Grabe seiner Wilhelmine.”42 The ballad was a musical rendition of Schenk’s crimes against his female victims. While the presence of accomplices was mentioned in the ballad, the author did not specify their names. The song ends with an ominous warning to girls to beware of male admirers and their flattering promises.43 Das interessante Blatt published a photograph of a letter addressed to a woman dated 9 October 1883 in Schenk’s original handwriting. About the letter, the article remarked: “No one would have believed the author of this fine handwriting, who betrays an adorably engaging style, is a common murderer, worse, a beastly assassin.”44 Due to press’s efforts to exaggerate Schenk’s magnetic appeal to maidservants and to modulate the participation of other members of the gang, the fact that the gang was a band of robbers who targeted unsuspecting men as well as women was largely ignored. None of these publications considered the possibility that some “victims” might not be so innocent. For instance, Hartleben’s 126-page report with copious illustrations titled Process des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seiner Genossen (Trial of the girl murderer Hugo Schenk and his accomplices), sympathized unconditionally with Höchsmann and argued that all her actions resulted from Schenk’s influence on her. The report juxtaposed Schenk’s crimes and deceptions against Höchsmann’s steadfast and trusting nature. The report noted all of Schenk’s crimes starting from his birth in 1849.45 Even though Schlossarek and Karl Schenk featured in its pages, Hugo Schenk emerged as the star of the book. The issue devoted a special section to Höchsmann, “to whom the murderer devoted his true love” and who “was the unluckiest of all for holding the pledge of his love in her heart.”46 Schenk, the issue reported, met the twenty-

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four-year-old Höchsmann at the end of April 1883. At the time, she was residing with her brother-in-law in Vienna. But fearing that her brother-in-law did not approve of her relationship with Schenk, she went to her sister’s place on the Rennweg. Höchsmann met Schenk on 26 April 1883, and on 1 May she accompanied Schenk to Schönbrunn. Schenk initiated an “intimate contact” (intime Annäherung), but when Höchsmann refused, he threatened to poison himself if she resisted. She, however, “remained steadfast” (bleib Standhaft). One day, she received a letter signed by a Dr. Josef Schenk, the brother of Hugo Schenk, which revealed that Schenk had tried to poison himself to death. Soon after, Karl Schenk delivered a letter to her from Hugo Schenk seeking another meeting.47 Thus having “ensnared” Höchsmann, the report continued, Schenk told her that he would receive a lucrative post at the Arlberg Railway on 12 August, and he paid a deposit of 1,200 guldens for the same. In the middle of May, he traveled to Mölk with her and convinced her that he would like to marry her. Further, he told her that he was a member of a nihilistic society that had its center in Zürich. He himself was a Polish-Russian prince named Wielopolski and, therefore, could not marry her since he could walk to the altar only under the name of Hugo Schenk. This would make the marriage invalid. In addition, he could not risk marrying her and putting her life in danger. The report noted that Höchsmann was taken in by these lies. According to the report, Höchsmann also believed the story that Schenk had an enormously wealthy uncle in Cincinnati who had property worth over a million dollars. Schenk persuaded Höchsmann to write to this uncle requesting him to deposit 5,000 dollars in his London bank account. Schenk sent this letter to a “Marquis Wielopolski, a property-owner in Cincinnati.” Höchsmann was thus convinced of the existence of this rich uncle. Sometime in June, Schenk told Höchsmann that he had to travel to London to receive the money. For this purpose, Höchsmann gave him 200 guldens for the travel. This was the trip Schenk undertook to Mährische-Weißkirchen to murder Timal. On 23 June, Höchsmann received a letter from Schenk that bore the stamp of MährischeWeißkirchen stating that he could not receive the money in London since he could not prove his identity as Wielopolski there; however, he had received the money in another manner. When he returned from Weißkirchen, he gave Höchsmann not only the sum she had lent him but an additional amount.48 The report continued that on 18 July, Schenk and Höchsmann traveled to Zürich to get married and had a honeymoon dinner in Ronacher. Following their return, they stayed at the house of her brother-in-law Vogt on the Rennweg. The latter wanted to leave Vienna to start a business in Stettin. Schenk promised to invest in it. However, he borrowed eighty guldens from Vogt, claiming that he had a diplomatic mission to fulfill. After the murder of Ketterl, on 5 August Vogt and Höchsmann met him at the Western Railway station. The section concluded with the note that Schenk gave Höchsmann large sums of money.49

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So, Hartleben’s narration of Höchsmann’s innocence comprised the following: she formed a sexual relationship with Schenk, gave him money for his travels, met him multiple times between murders, received jewelry from him that was stolen from the victims, married him, undertook a honeymoon trip with him, and came out of all these interactions unharmed. Further, even after noting that Höchsmann and her family benefitted financially from Schenk’s crimes, the report did not consider the possibility that perhaps Höchsmann knew some of Schenk’s plans and maybe even indirectly participated in them. Höchsmann, according to the report, was a completely innocent and victimized woman. Other publications sympathized with Josefine Eder, whom the Viennese criminal court sentenced to three years imprisonment for stealing from her employer. At the time of the trial, the chairman remarked, “The poor girl, she has enough to pay,” and nearly every report on the Schenk case referred to this statement to emphasize the magnitude of control Schenk’s personality exerted on women.50 In 1884, Emil Carl Fischer published a small booklet titled Hugo Schenk’s Gedichte. This was a collection of fifteen poems that Schenk had written during his lifetime. In the preface, Fischer argued that 5 percent of the profits from the sale of the brochure would be given to the police for the benefit of Eder.51 By the time of his execution in April 1884, news reports within and outside the empire assumed that Schenk’s personality exerted incredible sway over women. In Hamburg, for instance, the publisher L. Tidow printed a tract titled Die Hinrichtung der Wiener Frauenmörder Hugo Schenk und Schlossarek (The execution of the Viennese women murderer Hugo Schenk and Schlossarek), which referred to Schenk as Don Juan.52 In 1884, Carl Theodor Fockt (1839–1907) published a two-volume, 1,087-page crime novel that bore the title Hugo Schenk und Genossen oder Ein moderner Blaubart (Hugo Schenk and accomplices or a modern Bluebeard). Replete with lively conversation and illustrations, Fockt converted the Schenk case into a gripping work of fiction for mass consumption.53 In the novel, Fockt developed Schenk’s backstory, increasing his sinister appeal and luring the reader into the dark tale of the murder of hapless young brides who fell into Schenk’s seductive trap. The novel depicts Schenk as a criminal from a good family who lived at the heart of the Habsburg Empire, the imperial capital Vienna. Further, he bore the same urbane allure as that of Charles Perrault’s wellknown fictional character Bluebeard. Schenk was sophisticated, wrote poetry and flattering letters, and was well-versed in the art of courtship. For instance, the following describes Schenk in the second chapter, titled “Der Herr Director” (Mr. Director): The director was 34 years old—he was a man to whom the epithet handsome could not have set nicely; however, his engaging features, and the great care he exerted on his appearance, his pleasant cosmopolitan manners, and the educated manner of expression that he employed, made it evident that he must have made an impression

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on Ernestine; the director, always elegantly and immaculately dressed in the finest fashion, had a well-tended moustache, which was reddish-blond in color and was in perfect harmony with his dark blond hair.54

The Schenk case made the concept of the marriage swindler so popular that even the Vienna police began to use the term to classify specific kinds of theft.55 For instance, a police decree from July 1888 requested police officials to use specific classification terms to refer to perpetrators in police announcements. One of the terms was “marriage swindler.”56 The Schenk case was easy pickings for those who wished to emphasize the victim narrative of servanthood. Anti-Mädchenhandel campaigner Josef Schrank, in his work on prostitution in Vienna, reported that procurers often used the proliferating marriage advertisements in newspapers to recruit prostitutes. He specifically noted that the Schenk case was the first instance when criminals used these newspaper advertisements (kleine Anzieger) to commit acts that had been forbidden in the Penal Code.57 While Schrank pointed to the problems arising from the indiscriminate spread of newspapers, feminists and Social Democrats borrowed on the marriage swindler trope to construct stories of servant victimhood. In 1911, Hermine Jungwirt published Der Heiratsschwindler in the servant newspaper Oesterreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung. The novel detailed the story of a marriage swindler named Josef who dupes a maidservant, Anna. Josef courts Anna, marries her, and receives about 80,000 kronen from her in the form of dowry before leaving her unsupported and bankrupt.58 Hugo Schenk was the stuff of legends. His story contained all the ingredients for a great romantic saga—a charismatic serial killer who wrote poetry and innocent maidservants in search of their soulmate who took a chance and unfortunately paid the ultimate price. This story line, which lacked the preaching quality of morality tales, appealed to the Viennese imagination. The Viennese public’s interest in this saga continued well into the interwar period.59 While these tales certainly embellished the Viennese public’s thirst for legendary romances, it also conveyed the message that maidservants had such naïve, romantic, and gullible sensibilities that they could not possibly be anything other than innocent victims.

Murderous Placement Agents In the 1890s, the case of Franz and Rosalia Schneider bolstered feminist and Social Democratic claims that the system of private placement agencies in Vienna required reform. Franz and Rosalia Schneider lured servants to the Haspelwald forest in Neulengbach, Lower Austria, where Franz Schneider murdered them and, subsequently, stole their belongings. The couple registered at various placement agencies in Vienna in search of prospective targets. The Vienna criminal

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court sentenced them to death by hanging in January 1892.60 Rosalia Schneider received the emperor’s pardon in March 1892 and served a life sentence.61 The police discovered the Schneider crimes through a series of chance encounters. Sometime in July 1891, a woman with the name Schmidt wandered into the forest near Neulengbach. As a resident of a village nearby, Schmidt was accustomed to walking through the forests.62 Several paces into the forest, she detected a disturbing smell. She returned to Neulengbach and notified the gendarmerie. The latter patrolled the forest and found the body of a young woman between eighteen and thirty years of age. An ensuing autopsy revealed that someone had strangled the woman to death.63 Following the discovery, the gendarmerie office at Neulengbach posted the discovery of the body in an official announcement in newspapers.64 A few days later, having read the advertisement, a goldsmith’s assistant named Karl H. approached the Viennese police headquarters. He suspected that the dead girl was his lover, the thirty-year-old Marie Hottwagner, and recited the following story: In early July 1891, Hottwagner, an unemployed servant cook, went to register at a placement agency in Franziscanerplatze. There, she met a woman who informed her that she was the caretaker and gardener at a mansion called “Villa Hauser” in Rekawinkel and that there was a position available at the house. The woman persuaded Hottwagner to collect her belongings and accompany her to Rekawinkel. Hottwagner agreed to the proposal, and the woman accompanied her to her residence—a small Gasthaus in Mariahilferstraße. Karl, who temporarily saw the two women at the time, claimed that he did not want to ruin Hottwagner’s chances, so he refrained from disclosing that he was her lover. Soon, the two women left the scene. After some time, Hottwagner returned with the woman and a man, locked her residence, and left with her companions toward the Western Railway station. That was the last time Karl H. heard from Hottwagner.65 According to Karl H.’s story, the woman returned alone two days later. She had a key to the room and claimed that Hottwagner liked her new position and wished to stay at Rekawinkel. Accordingly, the latter requested that her trunk and other belongings be sent to the new residence via the woman. Around the time the woman was recounting this tale, a postman conveyed a letter, supposedly from Hottwagner, that bore a stamp of Rekawinkel. Since the contents of the letter supported what the woman recounted, the property manager granted the woman charge of Hottwagner’s belongings. The latter brought with her a service man to help transport the belongings, along with another man who had accompanied her the previous time. The two men carried away Hottwagner’s trunk and suitcases filled with her clothes and other valuables.66 Upon investigation, the police discovered that the alleged man and woman initially stored Hottwagner’s belongings at a Hotel Holzwarth, then subsequently collected them in early July.67 Police officials interrogated several service men, carriage companies, and local placement agencies. They found that a certain man and woman in search of suit-

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able candidates were registered at many placement agencies. During these investigations, a maidservant named Anna Djuris, a resident in Vienna’s third district, reported an attack. Djuris claimed that in June, an alleged gardener, about thirty years of age, approached her while she was registering at a placement agency in Landstraße and offered her a service position with a baroness in Neulengbach. He persuaded her to travel with him to Neulengbach. Upon reaching Neulengbach, he told her that she would have to follow him through the pine forests, the Dreiföhrenwald. Dreading the consequences, Djuris refused, and the man took her to a Gasthaus in Neulengbach. There, he attempted to rape her and seized her savings—a sum of about thirty florins—that she carried in her purse. Djuris put up resistance, escaped her attacker, and returned to Vienna. In July 1891, the police commissariat at Landstraße released an official announcement about the attack on Djuris along with the description of the alleged gardener. From Djuris, police officials also discovered the supposed identity of the man. While they stopped at the Gasthaus, Djuris asked the innkeeper whether it was safe to follow the man into the forest, and the innkeeper replied in the affirmative, claiming that her companion was a known Franz Ridler from Rudolfsheim. Police officials found that Ridler and his wife Aloisia were registered at an address in Rustengaße.68 In August 1891, with the help of the gendarmerie in Neulengbach, Viennese police officials raided the house of Ridler in Rudolfsheim and arrested the couple. Investigations revealed that the couple’s real names were Franz and Rosalia Schneider.69 A search of the residence revealed the suitcases that belonged to Hottwagner.70 Further, investigating officials found rings, brooches, and earrings that had been missing from Hottwagner’s body. They also found a wooden box with valuables and a handbag with some clothes, shoes, and other items that belonged to Hottwagner.71 Aside from Hottwagner’s objects, the police discovered three other trunks that belonged to servants. Detectives then showed the photograph of a girl that they had found in one of the trunks to placement agencies. At one placement agency, the employees identified the girl to be Friederike Zoufar.72 Officials discovered that the thirty-five-year-old Zoufar was the daughter of a late clergyman in Proßnitz. Zoufar was a trained cook who worked in big mansions. Her previous employer was a government official residing in Hermannstadt outside Vienna. She returned to Vienna in July and visited the placement agency to find work.73 Her registered residence at the placement agency was an address in Fünfhaus. The police interrogated the property owner who revealed that, in early July, an alleged female gardener from Neulengbach accompanied Zoufar to her residence to collect the latter’s handbag.74 A few days later the alleged gardener returned, claiming that Zoufar was established in her new position, and conveyed her belongings away with the help of a service man who accompanied her.75 In the investigations that ensued, police officials discovered that a suspicious man dressed in the clothes of a male servant, accompanied by a woman, appeared

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at a junk dealership in Rudolfsheim and sold some clothes and jewels. Three days after the sale, the same couple appeared at another junk dealership at Sperrgaße in Fünfhaus. The man recounted to the owner that he was from Graz and had inherited a variety of articles that he wanted to sell. The owner accompanied them to the Gasthaus where the two were residing, and, while there, they presented her with a large basket of female articles, such as clothes, shoes, and overcoats, that they wished to sell. Finding this suspicious, the owner reported the incident to the police, who arrived and escorted the couple to the police station; however, finding no cause for retaining them, the police released the couple. Later, after officials discovered the body of Hottwagner, the police connected the two incidents.76 Following the Schneiders’ arrest in August 1891, a paper-factory worker from Pitten, Martin Presch, told the police that his nineteen-year-old daughter Rosalie Kleinrath had traveled to Vienna from their hometown in Wiesmauth, Lower Austria, in search of service positions. Since he did not received news from Kleinrath for a long time, Presch himself traveled to Vienna to search for her. Her previous employers told him that she left her position with them in July 1891 and went to a placement agency in Vienna’s second district. At the agency, he learned that a man of approximately thirty years persuaded her to take up a position with an alleged countess in Klosterneuburg. The placement agency informed Presch that the man was possibly Franz Schneider. Presch confirmed the news at the police station where he identified Kleinrath’s belongings.77 Further investigations revealed that Schneider’s list of crimes was longer. In May 1891, Franz Schneider encountered a maidservant named Johanna Stoiber at Rennweg and promised her a good position with a baroness in Pukersdorf. The latter accompanied him to Neulengbach. After leaving her trunk at a Gasthaus there, he led her into the forest, claiming it was a shortcut to their destination. There, near a brushwood thicket, he raped her and threatened to strangle her. He realized only the following morning that she did not have any money. At some point, Stoiber managed to escape from him before he could murder her.78 Even after the Schneiders’ arrest, investigating officials were unable to discover the bodies of Zoufar and Kleinrath—for about four months, the couple refused to reveal their exact location. Franz Schneider stuck with an obstinate “Na, das weiß i nix davon” (I don’t know about it) to all the questions.79 Rosalia Schneider was not forthcoming either. Officials speculated that the murders occurred elsewhere. After several months of fruitless search and interrogation, adjunct judge Dr. Josef Wach persuaded Rosalia Schneider to lead them to the murder sites in the Haspelwald forest.80 In November 1891, after a day-long trek into the forest, the gendarmerie finally found Zoufar’s and Kleirath’s bodies four months after their murders.81 During the trial in January 1892, the prosecution’s case rested upon proving that the Schnieders’ modus operandi relied on targeting maidservants. For in-

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stance, in the afternoon of the first day, the prosecution presented the testimony of Johanna Stoiber. While this section of the trial was closed to the public, it was printed the following day in newspapers such as Die Presse. These reports indicate that Franz Schneider accused Stoiber of lying about the assault; however, the prosecution argued, not only did Stoiber have no cause for fabricating the story, but her religious inclinations also prevented her from doing so.82 Further, the report noted that the prosecution presented two other witnesses to corroborate his case: Katharina and Marie Specht. The witnesses encountered Stoiber in the company of Franz Schneider at a Gasthaus in Neulengbach. The witness Josef Schorner claimed that he saw Schneider in the company not only of Stoiber but also another unknown servant girl.83 To elucidate their intention and their modus operandi, the prosecution presented the testimonies of maidservants who had escaped the Schneiders. For instance, pertaining to Kleinrath’s murder, the prosecution called upon a twentythree-year-old chambermaid named Helene Stranovsky, who testified that Franz Schneider offered her a position with a baroness in Neulengbach and instructed her to collect all her belongings and travel with him to their destination. The prosecution noted that Schneider made this offer to Stranovsky two days after the murder of Kleinrath.84 Likewise, when the case of Zoufar’s murder was heard on the third day, the prosecution presented another maidservant witness who had escaped the Schneiders. Leopoldine Loibel testified that she saw Rosalia Schneider at Widhalm’s placement bureau and was tempted by the prospect of a good position. She claimed that she would have followed Schneider to Neulengbach. Rosalia Schneider, however, apparently chose Zoufar since she was better dressed.85 Maidservants did not merely feature as victims during the trial. Some maidservants were crucial eyewitnesses of the Schneider crimes. For instance, Kleinrath’s former employer, the couple Marie and Alfred Döller, and another maidservant who worked at the same house, Marie Weigl, recounted the details of how the Schneiders fetched Kleinrath and her belongings for her new position. Similarly, the testimony of the sixteen-year-old maidservant Johanna Haarreißer proved that the Schneiders had stolen valuables from Kleinrath. Haarreißer worked at the house of a Baroness Antalia Falke, and for about two weeks around the time of Kleinrath’s murder, Franz Schneider lived with her in secret in her servant quarters. When asked why she was engaging in an affair with Schneider, she stated that it was a “unique emancipation” (besondere Emancipirtheit) for a sixteenyear-old.86 She testified that Schneider brought a suitcase with male coats and female clothing to the room that she shared with him and tucked it under the bed. She even recognized some of Kleinrath’s clothes during the hearing. Another witness, a Perrugio Zaterra claiming to be Haarreißer’s lover, testified that he knew the Schneiders from when the former spent three days with Haarreißer at the baroness’s house. The baroness claimed that she had no idea about Franz Schneider’s presence in the servant quarters, but she testified that Rosalia Schnei-

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der worked in her house as an assistant cook and that the latter had apparently told her that she was a widow.87 Some testimonies suggested that duping maidservants was not as easy as it seemed. For instance, Josefine Haugeneder, a placement agent working in an agency at Helferstorserstraße, recognized Rosalia Schneider as the same woman who in August 1891 appeared at the agency wanting to hire a Gasthaus cook in Würmla for a monthly wage of twenty to twenty-five florins. Haugeneder opined that no maidservant was willing to take up the supposed position since a woman was found slain in that locality.88 In the Schenk case, press reports were more involved in creating and embellishing the character of a seductive and charismatic marriage swindler whose power over female servants was absolute. In the case of the Schneider crimes, however, press focus remained on the maidservant victims. One reason for this was the degree of uncertainty about the number of victims. In the case of Schenk, relatives and employers of Schenk’s victims filed missing complaints with the police. But in the Schneider case, the victims were servants seeking job placements and did not have an employer who would file a complaint. Therefore, police investigations began only after the chance discovery of Hottwagner’s body. Further, Schenk and his associates confessed to their crimes soon after their arrest. But the Schneider couple remained reticent, and, for four months, the location of the bodies of other victims remained a mystery. Moreover, the location of the bodies was revealed by Rosalia Schneider, who was apparently only an accessory, and not Franz Schneider, who had perpetrated the crime. There was some contention as to how much Rosalia Schneider knew about her husband’s crimes and to what extent she participated. During their trial, each of the couple put the burden of crime on the other. Rosalia Schneider claimed that she had nothing to do with the poisoning or the murders of the girls. She argued that she was the “live victim” (lebendige Opfer) of her husband.89 Franz Schneider claimed that he was very dumb and that his wife directed his actions, giving him the ideas and inducing him to murder the girls.90 At the time of their arrest, Franz Schneider had an extensive criminal record. Between 1871 and 1891, Franz Schneider served five prison sentences. In all cases, he was found guilty of transgression of St.G. §197 of the Penal Code, that is, of the offense of fraud and theft. Rosalia Schneider, on the other hand, had a relatively clear record, except one transgression: in 1885, the regional court in Alsergrund fined her five guldens for falsifying her registration documents.91 Rosalia Schneider also appeared to show more remorse than her husband. For instance, in August 1891, when officials conveyed the Schneiders from their prison cell to the police headquarters in Vienna for a preliminary statement, Rosalia Schneider requested a visit to the toilet. There, she tried to commit suicide by climbing onto a gap in the wall and hanging herself from the ceiling. Officials immediately administered first-aid and conveyed her to the court hospital.92

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Similarly, after several months of fruitless search and interrogation, adjunct judge Josef Wach spoke one morning with Rosalia Schneider in a forlorn tone about what a hard fate the dead girls had encountered, having been struck down in the prime of life. One record of the case reports that she appeared pensive as she was conveyed to the prison cell and spent a sleepless night. The next day, she revealed that her husband had once recounted how he had murdered Kleinrath. She referred to a specific spot in the Haspelwald forest. In the expedition that followed, Rosalia Schneider aided them in locating the victims’ bodies.93 Furthermore, at the time of the trial, a twenty-nine-year-old maidservant, Rosine Manhard, appeared at a Viennese police station claiming that Franz Schneider had attempted an “Unsittlichkeits-Verbrechen” or an “immoral crime” against her. Manhard testified that in June 1891, Schneider offered her a position with a baroness in Pukersdorf. Manhard was a “vagrant servant” at the time, and after some persuasion she agreed to travel with him by train. At one railway stop, they apparently disembarked and walked for over an hour through a forest. After “forcing” her there, he searched her wallet and took the 1.20 florins that he found inside. They then returned to Vienna by foot and stayed at a Gasthaus. The prosecution concluded after the testimony that there was not enough cause to include another charge of immorality to Franz Schneider’s existing charges.94 Due to such uncertainties, a doubt prevailed in the press as well in the minds of investigating officials about how many maidservants Franz Schneider had victimized. For instance, the first independent pamphlet on the Schneider case, Die Dienstboten-Mörder Franz und Rosalia Schneider (The servant murderers Franz and Rosalia Schneider), was published by C. Fritz. While the exact date is unknown, it circulated sometime after the discovery of Hottwagner’s body and before the discovery of the other bodies in 1891. The last page of the pamphlet bore a list of maidservants who were missing in 1891. The list was sixteen strong and bore the caption: “As there is every indication that the Schneider couple have more murders on their conscience than those described, we have compiled an authentic list of all female servants who have been reported missing since the start of this year, and whose disappearance has been reported by the police in a customary way.”95 In the Schenk case, the police found materials belonging to the victims at the scenes of the crime and tracked most of the monies that the gang had robbed, but they could recover only one of the four bodies (Katharina Timal’s).96 But in the Schneider case, police officials discovered all the victims’ bodies in gruesome states of decomposition. Illustrated newspapers were quick to describe these discoveries in detail. For instance, on 20 August 1891, a full-page illustration of the discovery of Hottwagner’s body featured on the front page of Das interessante Blatt.97 The drawing featured a body lying facedown on the floor of a forest surrounded by gendarmes and other members of the public. Even though some accounts reported that Schneider stole the clothes off the victims’ bodies, the body

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in the illustration was clad, a torn sleeve being the only indication that Schneider stripped the bodies.98 The report of 18 November 1891 was far more gruesome: “On 7 July Zoufar was murdered, on 15 November decaying leftovers of her corpse were found. The animals of the forest had already gnawed the corpse, Haspel forest being their open dig . . . the gendarmes had a gruesome sight. A skull grinned at them from beneath.”99 An illustration of gendarmes and their dogs plodding through the forest and spotting a rotting skull amid the dense foliage accompanied this description.100 Similarly, in early 1892, a publisher from Dresden, C. Schwagner, circulated a panel of illustrations on the Schneider case under the title, Die Wiener Dienstmädchen-Mörder (The Viennese maidservant murderers). The panels contained a series of colored drawings that illustrated how Schneider conducted the robberies. For instance, one panel portrayed the crime against Johanna Stoiber with a picture of a young, distressed woman kneeling against a door and Franz Schneider standing behind her. Another panel bore the picture of Schneider assaulting a young woman in a Gasthaus. Then, there were the illustrations of the crimes that Schneider committed against Rosalie Kleinrath and Frederika Zoufar. The first depicted Franz Schneider strangling Kleinrath, then walking away with her clothes while one of the victim’s naked legs sticks out from the bushes. The second depicted Franz Schneider hurling Zoufar to the ground while Rosalia Schneider watches from behind the trees. The pithy description implied that Rosalia Schneider led Zoufar into the forest where Franz Schneider waited to murder her. The two panels that illustrated the trial portrayed the couple fighting in court and bore a caption that the couple burst upon each other like a “tiger and snake” (Tiger und Schlange) in front of a silent audience. The last illustration in the sequence bore the picture of the graves that the locals erected in the forest for the victims.101 In other reports, the victims of the Schneider crimes received veneration. For instance, in January 1892, Das interessante Blatt published an illustration bearing the caption, “Die Martertafeln der Ermordeten” (The martyr panels of the murdered). These were graves erected in the forest where officials discovered the bodies of Schneider’s murder victims. The report announced that the graves would attract pious worshipers in future who would pray for the victims’ salvation.102 Unlike Hugo Schenk, Franz Schneider did not retain his popularity for long.103 The case received extensive publication between 1891 and 1893, and over two hundred newspaper articles were published on the case at this time.104 Additionally, in March 1895, when the Anthropological Society in Vienna conducted its yearly meeting, university professor Moriz Benedikt presented a lecture on the anatomical and physiological anomalies of the brain and skull of Franz Schneider. Soon after the lecture, he published his analysis in Alexandre Lacassagne’s Archives d’Anthropologie criminelle et de Médecine legale in Lyons, France.105 However, the Schneider case all but disappeared in the first decade of the twentieth

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century. The case made a feeble comeback in the third volume of Edmund Otto Ehrenfreund’s Der Wiener Pitaval, published in 1925.106 Ehrenfreund also rendered a description of the case in the seventh volume of the German Pitaval series, Der Pitaval der Gegenwart: Almanach Interessanter Straffälle (The Pitaval of the current times: Almanac of interesting criminal cases), published between 1904 and 1914 in Leipzig. The description in this Pitaval attracted the attention of the university professor and prominent defense lawyer Dr. Eduard von Liszt, who, in 1926, published a criminal psychological study of the Schneider couple.107 The Schneider case occurred in the context of growing populist and feminist attention to the Servant Question. Even though the Schneider case was less sensational than the Schenk trial, the former provided the populists and feminists a more concrete agenda, that is, to push for the reform of private placement agencies. For instance, in an article published on 26 January 1892, the newspaper Neuigkeits Welt-Blatt discussed the exploitation of servants by placement agencies and the lack of legal checks on them. The article directed attention to the large number of girls from the countryside who migrated to Vienna and became victims of exploitation and crime. The article blamed the lack of systematic legal control over the two hundred placement agencies in Vienna for enabling the exploitation of maidservants as well as making crimes such as those perpetrated by Schneider possible.108 In 1895, at the meeting of the General Austrian Women’s Association dedicated to addressing the Servant Question, Johann Herrdegen, while explaining the role the police and private placement agencies played in compounding the unemployment situation among maidservants, commented: If inexperienced girls remain incarcerated109 for long periods of time and are also threatened by emergency, they fall into a state of helplessness that makes these poor beings vulnerable to every deception, every crime. This is the moral condition which criminals like Hugo Schenk and the couple Schneider were able to build upon and execute their diabolical plans; but this is also the condition on which other human monsters rely on, and year by year more young people are recruited for one of the saddest institutions of the big cities, for prostitution.110

Since all the victims in the Schenk case were employed, Herrdegen was possibly indicating the situation of the Schneider victims when he made the comment. Populists relied on the victim narrative of servanthood to push for the reform of the 1810 Codes. But a glance at this narrative’s long history reveals that it was by no means a refrain that empowered maidservants. In fact, the narrative was less about improvement of servant mistreatment and more about the populace’s penchant for fetishistic voyeurism toward violence committed against the female servant class. Ultimately, this fascination had more to do with the disposability of lower-class female bodies than any real sympathy for the victims in question.

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The Case of Hedwig Ruß Hedwig Ruß was a maidservant who, on 1 April 1874, murdered her mistress, Theresia Bondy. The Bondys were residents of Zirkusgaße in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. The husband, Moriz Bondy, was an agent in a press factory, and the wife, Theresia Bondy, was a twenty-six-year-old housewife. According to contemporary press reports, the couple lived in “poor conditions” (ärmlichen Verhältnissen), and, just a few days prior to the murder, they had had twins, increasing the number of their children to five. Following her release from the puerperium, Bondy contacted a placement agent, Frau Franziska Faigl, to find her a maidservant. The latter sent her a Victoria Heidl on the morning of 1 April. Heidl, the report noted, claimed that she would submit her Dienstzeugniss (character reference) to Bondy the following day. Since she spoke in an “ingratiating” (schmeichelndem) and “genuine Viennese” (echt wienerischer Aussprache) accent, the report noted, the Bondys hired her. On 1 April, Moriz Bondy returned at noon to discover the hacked body of his wife. The property manager reported the incident to the police commissariat at Leopoldstadt, and police investigations soon followed. An autopsy revealed that Theresia Bondy’s death occurred due to a lethal blow to the head above her right ear. The murder weapon was a blood-sodden chopper that the perpetrator had left on the floor next to Bondy’s body. Further investigations revealed that the perpetrator had stolen articles of clothing from the Bondys’ residence. For a considerable amount of time, the victim’s children were left unsupervised in the house with the body of their mother. Press reports noted that Moriz Bondy left for work at 8:00 am and returned to his residence only at noon to hear his newborn children shrieking from the building’s first floor.111 The children, Josef, Michael, Jacob, Karl, and Eduard were five years, four years, two years, and eight days old respectively. Josef claimed that the maidservant had trapped his mother in the kitchen and that he heard his mother’s shriek and a fall. After the murder, the maidservant came into his room, and he asked about his mother’s whereabouts. She replied that his mother was drunk in the alley. When he attempted to go to the kitchen, the woman stopped him. Then, she gathered some valuables and rushed away, leaving Josef to shriek after her while the other children cried.112 The Vienna police headquarters issued an announcement containing the description of the alleged Victoria Heidl. On 2 April, press reports noted that the name was fictitious, and the perpetrator was last seen with another infamous Viennese thief who masqueraded as a maidservant Viktorine Lenker.113 A contemporary report in the Illustrirte Wiener Extrablatt argued that the case had brought “monstrous excitement” (ungeheuerste Aufregung) at the police headquarters. Detectives and agents were “feverishly” (fieberhafter) searching for the perpetrator. The initial failures, the report claimed, irritated the president of the headquarters.

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The police received the first lead toward Ruß accidentally through a certain Albin Zimmermann. A few days after the murder, Zimmermann, who was staying at a Gasthaus in Mariahilf, mentioned that he might know the murderess. The police brought Zimmermann to the bureau for questioning, where he stated that while traveling to Vienna from Lindenburg on 29 March, he had encountered and conversed with a woman in the third-class compartment. The Karthaus prison had recently released her, and she was headed toward her hometown. However, concluding that life in Vienna was better, she had changed routes. They had traveled to Leopoldstadt together, and there the woman disappeared suddenly. Zimmermann was able to provide the woman’s first name—Hedwig.114 Records at the Karthaus prison revealed that on 28 March 1873, a maidservant named Hedwig Ruß from Karlstein had been sentenced to a year-long prison term. After she had served this sentence, the correctional facility for women at Wallachisch-Meseritsch had granted her a pardon.115 Authorities also learned that Ruß was erroneously registered as twenty-two years old, as she was only nineteen at the time. Before her arrest in 1873, she had lived in Vienna for a few years and had worked in several places as a maidservant. Her previous employers had described her as nimble and kind. Employers had begun to complain about her propensity to steal only a short while before her arrest. The district court in Vienna had sentenced her to imprisonment for theft twice. The first sentence had lasted for two months and the second for a year.116 Police detectives Rupp and Liebenberger then traveled to Ruß’s address in Karlstein and apprehended her there on 9 April.117 Ruß confessed that while Bondy was in the kitchen, she attempted to steal some clothes from a chiffonier in the bedroom. Bondy caught her during the theft and directed some curse words at her. Ruß claimed that Bondy wanted to lock the door to the room to prevent her from fleeing the scene until the police could be called. However, Ruß managed to run to the kitchen. During the struggle that ensued between the two women, Ruß hit her employer on the head with a kitchen chopper, then issued two further blows before Bondy died. Following the murder, Ruß gathered clothes worth about seventy-nine florins and eighty kronen118 and went to a junk dealer in Landstraße. The dealer bought the stolen items from her. Then, she fled to Ottakring where Ruß’s married sister lived. Ruß stayed there for two days, while the police searched for a Victoria Heidl. The third day, she left for her hometown in Karlstein, Lower Austria, via the Franz-Josef Railway.119 The Extrablatt reported that Ruß came from a respectable family. She was the youngest of nine siblings who were all well settled. One of her brothers was a pastor, another an accountant, and the third a correspondent at a local bank.120 Further, the report pointed out that she had a very sweet appearance with rich blond hair and full apple-round face that did not betray any “mental alertness” (geistiger aufgewecktheit).121 Another news report on 24 May 1874 published a blueprint of the Bondys’ house. The diagram illustrated that Ruß could easily gain access to all

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regions of the house, including the main bedroom and the children’s bedroom. The Ruß case demonstrates that despite police surveillance of servants and the system of character reference in the nineteenth century, the mere appearance of innocence, humility, and respectability was enough to earn a servant entry into some households. Some servants used this to their advantage.122 The Ruß trial did not result in a flurry of press reportage that speculated on the link between maidservants and criminal activity. Ruß’s defense borrowed from the trope of employer mistreatment. During her trial in May 1874, Ruß claimed that she had committed her previous thefts because her employer did not pay her enough wages. The jury sentenced her to death by hanging for the murder of Theresia Bondy.123 Coincidentally, less than a week after the trial, a case of robbery-murder occurred in a house in Hernals. A nineteen-year-old maidservant named Wilhelmine Langhammer was the victim of this murder. After striking her down with a hatchet, the perpetrator stole about two hundred florins.124 The incident immediately directed focus away from a young maidservant (Hedwig Ruß) as a perpetrator of a robbery-murder to a young maidservant as a victim of robbery-murder (Wilhelmine Langhammer).125

The Case of Franziska Nawratil In September 1905, officials put a twenty-eight-year-old maidservant, Franziska Nawratil, on trial for the murder of her employer, Johanna Natzler, a fifty-fouryear-old Jewish widow who lived alone in Vienna’s second district. In April 1905, following a report from Natzler’s aunt that Natzler had not contacted her for several days, police officials arrived at Natzler’s house and found her body on the floor near the bed. She had died of a several wounds to her head. After a search of the house, police officials estimated about four hundred kronen to be missing and concluded that it was a case of robbery-murder. Officials also found the murder weapon, a mortar and pestle, at Natzler’s house. Since the house appeared to be in order, police officials suspected that the victim knew the perpetrator. Their first suspicion fell on the maidservant Franziska Nawratil. From reviewing Nawratil’s registration forms, police officials discovered that Natzler had dismissed the maidservant, and she was not seen at the house for some days afterward.126 However, on the day before the crime, two witnesses had seen and interacted with Nawratil on Natzler’s premises. The first was Stefanie Bader, who was the daughter of the landlady. Upon seeing Nawratil walking toward the house late in the evening, Bader asked her why she was there. Nawratil responded that she had come to pick up something from her former employer. The second witness was Aloisia Granger, the maidservant of Natzler’s neighbor. Granger asked Nawratil why the latter had not told her about her dismissal, to which Nawratil replied that she herself did not know whether she had been dismissed or could continue to

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work. 127 Granger also saw Natzler open the door to let Nawratil inside the house while scolding, “You are coming so late?” (So spät kommen Sie?) In addition, on the day of the crime, Nawratil visited a friend living in Vienna’s thirteenth district and informed her that she had given her employer three days’ termination notice and was traveling to her hometown. Her friend noticed that Nawratil carried a new beer mug, toys, and hookah bowl, which the latter claimed were presents for her brother-in-law.128 Police remarks on the robbery reveal the extent of Nawratil’s knowledge of her employer’s habits and the layout of her house. Nawratil had stolen between one and two hundred kronen from Natzler’s writing desk. The police report noted that Nawratil had opened only the top left drawer where Natzler kept her savings. Further, even though the keys to all those drawers were also in the top left drawer and Nawratil could have gained easy access to them, all the other desk drawers remained locked and untouched. Police officials arrested Nawratil at her brother’s house in Olmütz and sent her to the local district court for preliminary questioning.129 Nawratil’s confession revealed that she was not satisfied with her employment situation. Nawratil confessed that between October 1904 and April 1905, she served as a maid-of-all-work at Natzler’s house. She received a monthly wage of fourteen kronen with a tip of about six kronen. Natzler, she claimed, “was always ill and treated her badly.”130 After her dismissal in mid-April, she traveled to the house of a distant relative in Vienna and lived there without proper registration. She returned to Natzler’s house about a week later to check if she had left behind any of her belongings. At this time, she asked Natzler if she would like some work done around the house for the upcoming Jewish holiday, and Natzler retained her. Early morning on the day of the crime, Nawratil placed a clean pair of shoes near Natzler’s bed and asked Natzler, who was awake, for the time. She received a “surly” (unwirsche) reply from her employer.131 According to her testimony, because of the response and because she had no money, she decided to finish her (ihr das zu tun). From the kitchen, she brought a pestle and rammed it on Natzler’s head while she was still in bed. When Natzler cried out in shock and tried to get up, she rammed the pestle on her head a few more times. Then, she went to the writing table and stole about 180 kronen cash and some blouses and trousers from the laundry basket before quitting the house. She claimed that she heard Natzler’s screams even as she walked away. She had used the stolen money to buy herself a pair of gold earrings and four aprons.132 The Vienna police investigated her service record and discovered that before working at Natzler’s house, Nawratil had worked at many coffeehouses and small business establishments in Vienna. Some of her former employers testified that she was “hardworking, good, and decent” (arbeitsam, brav und anständig).133 Other employers, however, testified that she had a propensity to steal. Coffeehouse owner Leopold Kober claimed that she had stolen a flask of beer, and Karl Jeschke claimed that she had stolen some clothing and other small items worth a

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total of eighteen to twenty-four kronen. She also worked at a butter shop where her employer had dismissed her for stealing a quarter pound of butter.134 Police reports indicate that there was considerable amount of uncertainty about whether Nawratil had in fact stolen something and about the worth of the stolen items. For instance, while she was working for a Marie Pohle, another maidservant there complained that her new apron was stolen. Further, even though the police had access to Natzler’s savings books, by their own account they could not determine with certainty the exact amount of money or what other possessions Nawratil had stolen from Natzler’s house.135 Family members indicated that Nawratil was not mentally ill; however, she did indeed have a difficult childhood. In his statement, Nawratil’s brother stated that their father, who was an alcoholic, passed away when they were children. Their mother had had several children through her first and second marriages. He also testified that Nawratil was always “affable, quiet, and very good” (leutselig, still und sehr gut) as a child; however, one of their sisters and their mother did not treat her as well as the other children.136 Her mother testified that Nawratil had studied at a local school in Busau but had entered service as a maidservant when she was about sixteen years old.137 Nawratil’s lawyer, Dr. Richard Pressburger, used this information to appeal to the district court for a nullification of the death sentence that the latter had meted out during her hearing in September 1905. Pressburger’s letter demonstrates that he appealed for a nullification on three counts: first, that Nawratil had a poor and abusive childhood; second, that Natzler had mistreated her; and third, that menstruation had caused a dramatic change in her hysterical personality so much so that Nawratil was unaware of what she was doing. The court doctor, Dr. Hövel, also testified that menstruation caused an incongruity between the overall personality of Nawratil and the actual act, as well as between the motive and the act. Further, he also claimed that Nawratil exhibited moral dullness.138 The court rejected the appeal in December 1905 and ordered the defendant to pay the costs of processing the claim.139 Following this, Pressburger appealed to Emperor Franz Josef for pardon. In his appeal letter, Pressburger argued that there were several reasons to lessen Nawratil’s punishment to a life sentence. Nawratil was the child of poor folk from the countryside. Her alcoholic father had brutally mishandled his children from a young age. Further, he drank away the little earnings of the family, putting them in a dire state. As a result, the letter claimed, Nawratil had a loveless childhood, lacking care and moral foundation. Insults and neglect had also embittered her. Pressburger continued, stating that at a very young age, she was sent to Vienna to earn a living. The fight to survive had demolished all honorable feelings in her, as she had to work as a lowly servant with poor wages. It was in this state that she took up a position with Natzler. The latter had continuously abused and tortured her, and Nawratil had to live on extremely low wages. On the day of the murder,

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Natzler had woken her up, derided her, and verbally abused her. Out of rage, Nawratil had committed the crime.140 The letter went on to claim that physician’s reports confirmed that Nawratil was a “morally inferior” (moralisch minderwertiges) and hysterical personality who specially came under the influence of catamenia.141 Pressburger argued that the murder was performed at a time when Nawratil was menstruating and that in all hysterical individuals, menstruation caused an increase in irritability and robbed them of the awareness of the graveness of their actions. Finally, he referred to Nawratil’s young age and claimed that a life sentence would be just as terrible as death.142 In January 1906, the emperor reduced Nawratil’s sentence to life imprisonment.143 The Nawratil case demonstrates that maidservants did not always suffer in silence but used their knowledge of their employers’ habits to commit crimes against their employers, especially when they felt their employers treated them badly. Furthermore, claims of “employer maltreatment” sometimes worked in the accused servant’s favor. In Nawratil’s case, for example, the claim earned her the emperor’s pardon. Servants choosing to exert control by committing crimes certainly exposed themselves to the danger of legal action. However, the existence of such cases (Nawratil and Ruß) suggests that despite the harsh realities of the servant occupation, the maidservant was not a perpetual victim of her circumstances. She was capable of retaliating and exerting considerable control using the knowledge about her environment. Those who perpetuated the immoral maid discourse accommodated this possibility, but they did so perversely. They typecast the maidservant as eternally malign and justified excessive paternalistic control based on that assumption. Those who forwarded the victim discourse, however, omitted the fact entirely, thereby completely negating the maidservant’s ability to use her intellect. A survey of the empire’s press reports reveals that there were instances when maidservants retaliated through creative use of their intellect. For example, in July 1911, the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung ran an illustrated news item titled “Dienstmädchen als Detektiv” (Maidservant as Detective). When a pickpocket had robbed her purse at a show booth at the Prater, and since the police could not find and apprehend the perpetrator, a maidservant, Anna Christl, decided to take matters into her own hands. She sewed her small penny-purse inside her pocket and returned to the same show booth. When the thief tried to steal her penny-purse and run, he was caught. The article concluded with, “He was arrested by Detective Julius Bierbaum, who had been searching for him for a long time.”144 Of course, the use of intellect on the part of maidservants was not always for “noble” ends. In 1889, the police were in pursuit of a nineteen-yearold maidservant from Salzburg named Maria Plairer on suspicion of theft. It is uncertain if they ever found her.145 Meanwhile, a twenty-seven-year-old maidservant in Graz, Johanna Beier, lured in nearly three hundred florins from café

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customers under false pretenses. She was caught and sentenced to four months of imprisonment.146 Not only were female servants capable of using their intellect but they also knew about all the goings-on in their employer’s household, as well as their employer’s habits, and were often the only witnesses to crimes. For instance, in April 1875, the innkeeper couple Josef and Aloisia Schieder of a Gasthaus in Vienna were the victims of a robbery-murder. The police suspected that an absconding guest who had stayed at the Gasthaus the night of the murder was the perpetrator. The victim couple’s live-in chambermaid Rosina Populorum was the prime witness in identifying the guests and apprehending the perpetrator.147 Similarly, in 1857, a married woman in Vienna filed charges against a man for “insulting her honor” and the honor of her sixteen-year-old maidservant. The maidservant confirmed the full content of her employer’s testimony but allegedly did not make an express declaration that she wanted to press charges against the defendant. The first judge convicted the accused of both insults, the second exonerated for lack of evidence. The employer appealed to the highest court in Vienna, and the court passed the following verdict: “The maidservant, by expressly confirming A.’s [the accuser’s] complaint that included the request for punishment for both insults, had given sufficient notice of her will that the accused should be persecuted for the act committed. This is within the meaning of the Criminal Law to authorize the judge to initiate criminal proceedings.”148 In this instance, the testimony of the maidservant was paramount in authenticating the employer’s complaint and proceeding with criminal proceedings against the accused. News articles reporting such incidents were extremely rare and often confined to a small corner of the newspaper. The few incidents that did make their way to the newspapers were completely overshadowed by the flurry of reports detailing how maidservants were duped, raped, murdered, neglected, and exploited. Even some of the crimes female servants committed were projected as occurring out of helplessness. The tendency of the press to project female servants as victims was not merely a fin de siècle phenomenon. Already by the middle of the nineteenth century, the press began to project certain groups of “finer” female servants such as female educators and governesses as victims of their ignorance and their circumstances. There were several organized associations that existed throughout the empire that catered to these groups of women. Specialized newspapers for female educators that circulated in the empire employed the victim discourse to describe the crimes committed by such women. For instance, in September 1870, the Freie pädagogische Blätter reported the case of a female educator named Maria Crivelli who had been sentenced to six months of rigorous imprisonment for fraud. According to the report, for four years Crivelli had served successively two noble families in Budapest as a governess. But she lost her position and traveled to Vienna in search of an opportunity. When she had exhausted her options, she allegedly decided to turn to crime. She pretended to be a female baker and con-

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tracted journeymen bakers for a small price. When she could not pay back the fees, the journeymen filed complaints, and she was arrested. The article went on to remark that Crivelli could have been saved from her fate if she had only known there was an organization for female teachers and educators in Vienna that could have found her a position more in keeping with her talent and education.149

Conclusion The populists who emerged in late nineteenth-century Vienna decried three social mediators as exploiters of maidservants: bourgeois employers, corrupt placement agencies, and marriage swindlers and procurers. Two fin de siècle criminal cases—that of Hugo Schenk (1884) and Franz and Rosalia Schneider (1892)— bolstered the victim narrative. The sensational reportage surrounding these two cases projected maidservants in Vienna as vulnerable, emotional, and hapless victims of their circumstances, incapable of exercising their intellect. These cases gave populists ample fodder to push for social and legal reform. Despite the constraints it placed on them, the obsolete legal system still left enough gaps for maidservants to inflict considerable harm on their employers. Although press reportage and subsequent references to the Schenk case and the Schneider case propelled the notion that female servanthood in Vienna was an endless tale of victimhood with employers, swindlers, and murderers at every turn ready to take advantage of “passive,” “helpless,” “naïve” maidservants, the narrative completely disregarded the considerable control maidservants could exert within the confines of their working and living conditions. Since many servants lived and worked inside bourgeois households, they could use their knowledge of their employers’ households and habits to inflict considerable harm. Between 1886 and 1938, the Viennese press embellished the legend of a certain countess Elizabeth Báthory, nicknamed the Blutgräfin (blood countess).150 Some stories about the Blutgräfin claimed that she killed over six hundred young girls between 1585 and 1609 in her residences in various places of the empire, including Vienna, and her murder spree apparently included about sixty young servant girls. Through several stories published in newspapers of the empire as well as R. A. v. Elsberg’s 1904 book Elisabeth Báthory: Die Blutgräfin (Elisabeth Báthory: The blood countess), published in Breslau, the legend of the countess circulated widely in Vienna. These stories typically contained the trope of a young servant girl being lured, possibly by one of Báthory’s minions, under the pretext of a job opportunity, into Báthory’s home.151 There, Báthory apparently tortured, strangled, and killed her victims before ripping off their clothes and waltzing in a pool of their blood.152 Thus, the theme of an innocent, young servant girl being lured into and trapped in a dangerous situation had several lives in fin de siècle Vienna.

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This theme was not limited to crimes committed within the Habsburg realm either. In 1862, the grisly case of the maidservant murderer Martin Dumollard in Lyons, France, attracted considerable press attention in the Habsburg realm. Between 1855 and 1862, Dumollard killed six maidservants; he attempted the murders of ten more.153 Dumollard lured these women into the woods with prospects of job opportunities in the countryside. In 1862 alone, about eighty articles on the case circulated in at least ten major newspapers in the empire. In the next ten years, newspapers published thirty-five more articles. This was more than the coverage that the Jack the Ripper case received in the empire’s newspapers.154 Die Presse in Vienna noted that a total of 536 plundered articles that belonged to victimized maidservants had been recovered from Dumollard’s house, including 30 pairs of garters, 38 hats, 17 corsets, 10 scarves, 71 handkerchiefs, 57 pairs of stockings, and 5 umbrellas.155 This persistent voyeuristic fascination with violence toward the perpetually innocent, passive, and romantically inclined maidservant was central to the victim narrative in fin de siècle Vienna.156 This voyeurism was directed not only toward the visualization of such crimes but also toward statistics, as I have demonstrated in chapter 4 in the case of the Second Vienna Medical School. This was a culture profoundly titillated by and ultimately comfortable with the disposability of lower-class female bodies. The portrayal of maidservants as victims, as helpless, as naïve, innocent women so swayed by their romantic and irrational sensibilities failed to capture the diversity of experiences many female servants faced. While feminists and populists relied on this narrative excessively, it did not help to reduce the paternalistic tendencies of the 1810 Codes. Rather, the idea aided the criminal justice system in fin de siècle Vienna to alleviate penalties, such as in Franziska Nawratil’s case; sympathize with such, as in Josefine Eder’s case; and even completely overlook such, as in the cases of Emilie Höchsmann and Johanna Haarreißer, those instances in which maidservants acted as perpetrators, accessories, and potential aides to crooks.157 Moreover, it completely disregarded a maidservant’s capacity for reason.

Notes 1. Schulz, Darstellung der Marien-Stiftung, 4–10. 2. Jungwirt published a serialized novel on the theme in Dienstpersonal Zeitung. See, for instance, Hermine Jungwirt, “Der Heiratsschwindler,” Österreichische DienstpersonalZeitung, 13 April 1911, 7. 3. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 2362/1884 Hugo Schenk I. Teil, Report titled “Gründe”; Prozess des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seiner Genossen (Linz, 1884) [hereafter, Prozess]. 4. Prozess, 6; “. . . er durch seine Gestalt, seine Alluren, die Macht seiner Beredsamkeit, sein Liebenwürdiges Benehmen vor allem sich qualificirt fühlte.”

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5. Ibid., 6–8. 6. Ludwig Altmann, Hugo Schenk und Seine Genossen: Aus dem Archiv des Grauen Hauses; Eine Sammlung merkwürdiger Wiener Straffälle 3 (Wien, Leipzig, München, 1925), 134–37. 7. Prozess, 21–22. 8. “Die Hinrichtung der beiden Mordgesellen Hugo Schenk und Karl Schlossarek am 22. April 1884 in Wien,” in Prozess, 2. For details on criminal sentencing in AustriaHungary, see Friedrich Hartl, Das Wiener Kriminalgericht: Strafrechtspflege vom Zeitalter der Aufklärung bis zur österreichischen Revolution (Vienna, Köln, and Graz, 1973). Specifically see pages 420–21 on the death sentence and pardons. 9. For instance, in 1872, the most graphic crime scene illustration was that of a man lying near a small streak of blood, a fencing sword at hand—a supposed fencing match accident. See “Das Duell in der Josefstädter Reiterkaserne,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 25 Oktober 1872, 1. But, within a year—that is, in 1873—the case of a Franz Skaryd produced more intensely graphic images. On 24 December 1873, neighbors found the dead, hacked body a Katharina Pollak, the wife of a laborer in Gaudenzdorf. A burglar, Franz Skaryd, whom the authorities subsequently arrested and sentenced to death, committed the crime. The illustration produced for this case depicted a woman’s body lying dead in a pool of blood, her clothes shredded, an axe lying nearby, and the entire house in disarray. See “Der Raubmord in Gaudenzdorf,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 28 December 1873, 1. 10. For instance, in July 1874, an illustration of a murder attempt by a Karl Senflechner on a woman named Hedwig Gruber in Landstraße depicted a disheveled woman pinned to the floor by a man wielding a knife. Another man held the perpetrator’s knife-wielding arm, while the third hurried in through the door. See “Der Morderversuch auf der Landstraße,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 29 June 1874, 1. Similarly, an illustration in April 1874 titled Das Familiendrama in Ottakring portrayed a man wielding a knife in one hand and a stick in the other standing menacingly over an injured woman on her knees. Nearby, a wounded child lay on the floor, the house in complete disarray. See “Das Familiendrama in Ottakring,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 6 April 1874, 1. 11. The idea of the Pitaval spread to Germany and the Habsburg realm from France. In France, François Gayot de Pitaval first initiated the genre in 1734 through the publication of a tome called Causes Célèbres et Interessantes, which contained a collection of contemporary criminal cases. The genre quickly gained popularity. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several criminal collections were published. Even though the Pitaval tradition took root much later in the Habsburg Empire compared with the rest of the German-speaking world, criminal cases from within the empire featured prominently in many Pitavals circulated in Germany, and these collections found an audience within the Habsburg realm. See, Todd Herzog, Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany (New York, 2009), 37–41. 12. One statistic shows that in the German-speaking world of 1884, there were 690 businesses and 148 publishers specializing in the genre of Kolportagroman; by 1895, the numbers had risen to 966 and 201 respectively. Most of these businesses were concentrated in big urban centers such as Hannover, Dresden, Vienna, and Leipzig. See, Günter Kosch and Manfred Nagl, Der Kolportageroman: Bibliographie 1850 bis 1960. Mit einer Beilage: Kolportagehandel. Praktische Winke. Von Friedrich Streissler (1887) (Stuttgart und Weimar, 1993), 24. 13. On an analogous note, Walkowitz describes the emergence of a peculiar type of curiosity and voyeurism that developed around the Jack the Ripper case in London in the 1880s.

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22.

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24. 25. 26.

27.

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See Judith R. Walkowitz, “Urban Spectatorship,” in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 15–39. Word search on the Austrian Newspapers Online Portal. Prozess, 8. “Tagesneuigkeiten: Mysteriöses Verschwinden einer Köchin,” Morgen-Post, 24 August 1883, 2. Word search on the Austrian Newspapers Online Portal. “Tagesneuigkeiten: Ein mordverdächtiger Heiratsschwindler,” Morgen-Post, 5 September 1883, 4. “Kleine Chronik: Der angebliche Mörder der Köchin Ketterl,” Die Presse, 26 October 1883, 2. “Der Fall Theresia Ketterl,” Die Presse, 10 January 1884, 11. “Verbrechen,” Neue Illustrirte Zeitung, 20 January 1884, 271. “Wie viel Frauen hat Schenk durch die Zeitungsannoncen an sich gelockt, sie durch den eingenthümlichen Zauber seiner Persönlichkeit gesesselt und dann beseitigt? Fünf, sechs—zehn?” Prozess, 6; “. . . weil dieselben vermöge ihres tiefer stehenden Bildungsgrades leichter zu bethören find und schmeichlerischen Reden des elegantin Hugo Schenk, der sich für einen Beamten oder Ingenieur ausgibt und ihnen die Ehe verspricht, geneigtes Gehör schenken.” WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 2362/1884 Hugo Schenk I. Teil, Report titled “Gründe.” Their plan was not successful in Podpera’s case. Podpera put up a resistance and managed to injure Schlossarek. In Bauer’s case, however, they managed to steal some money from him, although they did not kill him. Prozess, 7; WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 2362/1884 Hugo Schenk I. Teil, Report titled “Gründe.” WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 2362/1884 Hugo Schenk I. Teil, Report titled “Gründe.” Prozess, 14. “Ein Mann, der mit drei Personen gleichzeitig Liebes-Verhältnisse anknüpft, um sie zu tödten, der die eine von ihnen umbringt und am nächsten Tage ein anderes Mädchen ihrer Ehre beraubt und mit ihr ins Theater geht, beweist eine Gesinnung, der Alles zuzumuthen ist.” WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 2362/1884 Hugo Schenk I. Teil, Folio number 147, Letter from Marie Spitaler to Hugo Schenk, 27 December 1883; Letter from Marie Lahmann to Hugo Schenk, 31 December 1883. Prozess, 20. “Sie haben das öfters gethan, daß sie nach solchen Tagen mit anderen Mädchen übernachteten”; “. . . ich hätte viele Personen fortschaffen können, wenn ich hätte wollen, ich habe es nur gethan, wenn Schlossarek gedrängt.” Spector cites the author of this tract to be a certain Anon, however, I was not able to determine the name of the author from the pamphlets. See Spector, Violent Sensations, 167. Prozess, 9. “Ist Hugo Schenk ein schöner Mann?—Das war die Frage, die Jedermann sich stellte, bevor er seinen Blick dem Orte zuwandte, wo der Mädchenmörder ruhig und heiter saß. Die Frage wurde mit grosser Stimmenmehrheit verneint. Der mann ist nicht hübsch, er kleidet sich geschmacklos. . . . Der Mann scheint auch nicht so sehr durch sein Aeusseres die Mädchen bestrickt zu haben, als durch seine lügenhaften Vorspiegelungen, durch die Aussicht auf die sorgenlose Zukunft, welche er ihnen vorschwindelte. Der schlichten Teresia Ketterl, der Budweiserin Katharina Timal, der unerfahrenen Jose-

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33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

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fine Timal mag sein Hochdeutsch, dieses affectirt-gewählte Reden des Herrn Ingenieurs mehr imponirt haben, als sein Gesicht und seine Gestalt.” Ibid., 11. Ibid., 16. “Der Vorsitzende ersucht die Zeugin, welche sich bekanntlich in Zustande der Schwangerschaft befindet, auf einem Sessel Platz zu nehmen und beginnt so dann ihr Verhör, wobei er stets mit den Ausdrücken ‘Fräulein’ und ‘Dame’ von ihr spricht.” Ibid., 17. “Eine herzbewegliche Scene spielte sich hierauf ab, als Emile Höchsmann sich anschickte, den Gerichtssaal zu verlassen. Das Mädchen erhob sich vom Stuhl, wankte auf Schenk zu und wollte ihm, der sich gegen sie vorbeugte, die Hand zum Abschiede drücken. Allein mit Donnerstimme fuhr Vorsitzende dazwischen: ‘Treten Sie ihm nicht näher, hüten Sie sich vor der Berührung mit diesem Manne!’ Die Augen des Mädchens füllten sich mit Thränen; sie zog die Hand langsam zurück und stürtze mehr als sie ging aus dem Saale.” Ibid., 17. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 17. “Einmal, als sie das Undrängen Hugo Schenk’s bezüglich des Diebstahls schildert, sagt der Präsident: ‘Sie Arme, das haben Sie genug gebüßsst!’ De Vorsitzende macht dieser Zeugin in milden Worten den Vorwurf, dass sie nicht rechtzeitig ein volles Geständniß abgelegt habe. Josefine Eder gibt weinend an, daß sie von Hugo Schenk bestürmt worden sei, ihm Geld zu verschaffen, da er dasselbe zur Weiterführung einer Fabrik benöthige. Nachdem ihre Vernehmung zu Ende, entläßt sie der Vorsitzende. Josefine Eder geht weinend hinaus und Schenk sendet ihr einige Blicke nach.” “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Das Ausnahmsgericht in Action,” Die Presse, 9 February 1884, 11. Prozeß des Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk nach stenografischen Aufzeichnungen erschöpfend dargestellt, Mit vielen Illustrationen (Vienna, 1884) [hereafter Prozeß des Mädchenmörder]. Ibid., 49. During the trail, the prosecution remarked that the evidence against Schenk was circumstantial in the case of Ketterl’s murder and it was impossible to determine the truth. See Prozess, 15–16. “Der Verurtheilung der Mördercompagnie Hugo Schenk, Carl Schlossarek und Carl Schenk,” Das interessante Blatt, 20 March 1884, 3–4, 6–7. Josef Pommer and Hans Fraungruber, Das Deutsche Volksleid: Zeitschrift für seine Kenntnis und Pflege, 4 Jahrgang (Vienna, 1902), 140. WStLB, Die Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk (Vienna, 1884), E78570. “Der Verurtheilung der Mördercompagnie Hugo Schenk, Carl Schlossarek und Karl Schenk,” Das interessante Blatt, 20 March 1884, 8. “Niemand würde glauben, daß der Autor dieser fast zierlichen Schriftzüge, der einen liebenwürdig einnehmenden Styl verräth, ein gemeiner Mörder, ja schlimmer als das, ein bestialisch angelegter Meuchelmörder sei.” A. Hartleben, “Proceß des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seiner Genossen,” Chronik der Zeit neuntes Heft, 10–11. The author of this tract was likely Carl Theodor Fockt, and the publisher was A. Hartleben; however, since the publisher’s name, not the author’s name, is cited in the tract, I use the publisher’s name here. Ibid., 13, 18; “. . . welcher der Mörder in wahrer Liebe zugetan war” . . . “sie ist die Unglücklichste von Allen, da sie ein Pfand seiner Liebe unter ihrem Herzen trägt.” Ibid., 13.

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Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15–17. Ibid., 106. “Sie Arme das haben Sie genug gebüßt.” “An die Leser,” in Hugo Schenk’s Gedichte, ed. Emil Carl Fischer (Vienna, 1884), 1. WStLB, Die Hinrichtung der Wiener Frauenmörder Hugo Schenk und Schlossarek (Hamburg, n.d.), E83296. Carl Theodor Fockt, Hugo Schenk und Genossen oder Ein moderner Blaubart (Vienna, 1884). Ibid., 11. “Der Director stand im 34 Lebensjahre—er war ein Mann, dem das Epitheton ornans schön, gerade nicht beigelegt werden konnte; doch seine einnehmenden Gesichtszüge, und die große Sorgfalt, die er auf sein Aeußeres verwendete, seine gefälligen weltmännischen Manieren und die gebildete Ausdruckweise, derer er sich bediente, ließen es begreiflich erscheinen, daß er auf Ernestine Eindruck machen mußte; der Director, welcher sich stets elegant und tadellos nach der nenesten Mode gekleidet trug, hatte einen sorgfältig gepflegten Schnur und Backenbart, welcher von angenehm röthlich blonder Farbe war und mit seinen dunkelblonden Haar in richtigem Einklange stand.” Reports on the case were so widespread that in 1886, Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn’s Die Lectüre des Volkes used the case as an example to argue that sensationalist literature had replaced the custom of decent family publications. These literatures, he argued, by publishing the gruesome and dark details of criminal cases, catered to the basest of desires. Further, he criticized the decreasing standards of the public that preferred publications that printed the handwriting and the poems of a murderer over good German literature. He claimed that publishers usually marketed a good German book at about 1,000 copies. On the other hand, they circulated about 140,000 copies of the first edition of the crime novels featuring Schenk and his victims. Furthermore, he condemned the fact that one Schenk novel received an award with a picture of saints. See Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn, Die Lectüre des Volkes: Volksausgabe von Heft IX Flugschriften einer literarisch-künstlerischen Gesellschaft Gegen den Strom (Vienna, 1886), 6–7, 16–17. There were plenty of middle-class anti-“trash” activists who made criticisms of commercial and colporteur literature in Germany. See Kara L. Ritzheimer, “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (New York, 2016), 30–31, 74, 80. ALPDW, Die Normen für die Wiener Polizei-Verwaltung, Fortsetzung der von Hofrath Rauscher herausgegebenen Sammlung von Jahre 1858 bis incl. 1883, Jahrgang 1888, compiled by Dr. Victor Kroph, ed. Präsidium der k.k. Polizei-Direktion in Wien (Vienna, 1894), 57. Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien, I. Band: Die Geschichte, 300–301. Hermine Jungwirt, “Der Heiratsschwindler,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 13 April 1911, 7; Jungwirt, “Der Heiratsschwindler,” Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung, 11 May 1911, 8; Jungwirt, “Der Heiratsschwindler,” Österreichische DienstpersonalZeitung, 25 May 1911, 6. The long life of the marriage swindler trope that extended well into the interwar period owes its gratitude to the Viennese fascination with Schenk. Between 1913 and 1925, police commissioner Otto Edmund Ehrenfreund published the multivolume collection Der Wiener Pitaval: Eine Sammlung der interessantesten Kriminalprozesse aus Alt- und Neu- Wien. The case of Hugo Schenk was included in the third volume, published in 1925. See, Ubald Tartaruga, Der Wiener Pitaval: Eine Sammlung der Interressantesten Kriminalprozesse aus Alt- und Neu-Wien III. Band (Vienna und Leipzig, 1925), 117–45;

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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Several writers of serial killers have referred to Tartaruga’s Pitaval, including Michael Kirchschlager in his 2007 work Der Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk: Österreichs grosse Kriminalfälle, which featured, among other criminal cases, the details of the Schenk case replete with the poems he had composed between 1875 and 1884. See, Michael Kirchschlager, Der Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk: Österreichs grosse Kriminalfälle: Historische Kriminal Bibliothek Band 1 (n.p., 2007); In 1925, Hugo Schenk also featured as Hugo Schenk und Genossen in the third volume of the series Aus dem Archiv des grauen Hauses: Eine Sammlung merkwürdiger Wiener Straffälle, edited by Dr. Ludwig Altmann. See, Altmann, Hugo Schenk und Seine Genossen. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Der Raubmord-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 30 January 1892, 11; KMW, Raum I, Correspondence from the k.k. Landesgericht Wien in Strafsachen titled, “Urtheil und Darstellung der That,” 17 March 1892. Eduard von Liszt, Die Raubmörder Franz und Rosalia Schneider: Ein kriminalpsychologischer Nachtrag (Vienna, 1926), 14–15. Die Dienstboten-Mörder Franz und Rosalia Schneider (Vienna, n.d.), 9 [hereafter Die Dienstboten-Mörder]. “Die Mädchenmörder von Wien,” Das interessante Blatt, 20 August 1891, 2. “Die Mädchenmörder von Neulengbach,” Die Presse, 11 August 1891, 11. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 11. Die Dienstboten-Mörder, 9. Ibid., 8–13. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 12–13. “Die Mädchenmörder von Wien,” Das Interessante Blatt, 20 August 1891, 3. von Liszt, Die Raubmörder, 8–9. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 10–13. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 26 January 1892, 11–12. Ibid., 12. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 27 January 1892, 11. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse: Abendblatt, 28 January 1892, 2. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 27 January 1892, 11. Ibid., 12. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse: Abendblatt, 28 January 1892, 2.

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89. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 27 January 1892, 11. 90. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 26 January 1892, 11. 91. von Liszt, Die Raubmörder, 4–5. 92. “Der Raubmord in Neulengbach,” Volksblatt für Stadt und Land, 20 August 1891, 2. 93. von Liszt, Franz und Rosalia Schneider, 10–11. 94. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Die Raubmörd-Proceß Schneider,” Die Presse, 29 January 1892, 11. 95. Die Dienstboten-Mörder, 15. “Da alle Anzeichen dafür sprechen, daß das Ehepaar Schneider mehr Morde auf dem Gewissen hat, als die beschriebenen, so haben wir eine authentische Liste aller weiblichen Dienstboten zusammengestellt, welche seit Beginn dieses Jahres als vermißt angezeigt wurden, und über deren Verschwinden eine polizeilische Verlautbarung in der üblichen Weise erfolgte.” 96. Prozess, 15. 97. “Die Mädchenmörder von Wien: Der Leiche der Marie Hottwagner wird im Dreiföhrenwalde gefunden,” 20 August 1891, 1. 98. “Die Mädchenmörder von Wien,” Das interessante Blatt, 20 August 1891, 1. 99. “Die Auffindung der Leiche der Ermordeten Zoufar,” Das interessante Blatt, 18 November 1891, 1. “Am 7. Juli wurde die Zoufar ermordet, am 15. November fand man ihren Leichnam, die gerfallenen Reste ihres Körpers. Die Thiere des Waldes haben daru genagt, das Innenhalz des Haspelwaldes war ihr offenes Grab . . . Ein enfeßtlicher Anblick war es, der des Gendarmeen harrte. Ein Todtenschadel grinste ihm entgegen.” 100. Ibid. 101. KMW, Raum I, Die Wiener Dienstmädchen-Mörder (Dresden), No. 9058. 102. “Die Dienstmädchenmörder vor den Richtern,” Das interessante Blatt, 28 January 1892, 3–4; “Die Dienstmädchenmörder vor den Richtern: Die Martertafeln der Ermordeten,” Das interessante Blatt, 28 January 1892, 6. 103. In 1892, illustrated pamphlets such as Sensations-Proceß des Mädchen-Mörderpaares Franz und Rosalia Schneider were so widely circulated that they were found in the stall of a paper dealer who only possessed the concession to sell illustrated and written folk tales, not reports on serious contemporary issues. For holding two pamphlets on the Schneider case in his stall, officials charged him with violation of §23 of the Press Law (Preßgetzes), and criminal proceeding ensued against him at the regional court in Alsergrund. The action resulted in a meeting of the Corporation of Book Dealers on 21 April 1892 to discuss which books could be classified and sold as popular folk books. The Cooperation of Viennese Book, Art, and Music Dealers concluded that the presentation of popular themes in an easily understandable format should neither contain sensuous material nor be injurious to morality. The appropriateness of such material, they argued, could be determined only by some educated persons and not by the public. Therefore, they emphasized, it should be assumed that only limited licenses were granted for such printed materials. See, “Criminalnachrichten,” Oesterreichisch-ungarische Buchhändler-Correspondenz, 30 April 1892, 210. 104. Word search on the Austrian Newspapers Online Portal. 105. Moriz Benedikt, “Anthropologische Mittheilungen über Schädel und Gehirn des Mädchenmörders Schneider,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien XXV Der neuen Folge XV. Band, no. 2 u. 3 (1895), in Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen

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106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

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Gesellschaft in Wien XXV (der neuen Folge XV. Band), ed. Franz Heger (Vienna, 1895), 53. Tartaruga, Der Wiener Pitaval III. Band, 154–70. von Liszt, Die Raubmörder, 8; Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News, 227–28. “Ein Wiener Sensationsprozeß,” Neuigkeits Welt-Blatt, 26 January 1892, 1. Here Herrdegen refers to unchecked police persecution of servants, including arresting servants over small disagreements with employers, arresting unemployed servants, and so on, enabled by the 1810 Codes. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung, 7. “Wenn unerfahrene Mädchen längere Zeit diesen verderblichen Einflüssen ausgefetzt bleiben und auch von Nothlage bedroht sind, dann gerathen sie in einen Zustand der Rathlosigkeit, der jeden Betrug, jedes Verbrechen an diesen armen Wesen leicht macht. Das ist die moralische Verfassung, auf welche Verbrecher wie Hugo Schenk und das Ehepaar Schneider ihre entfetzlichen Pläne bauen und ausführen konnten; das ist aber auch der Zustand, auf welchen andere menschliche Ungeheuer rechnen und den sich von Jahr zu Jahr mehrenden Nachwuchs für eine der traurigsten Einrichtnungen der großen Städte, für die Prostitution, zu werben wissen.” “Was gibt’s denn Neues? Raubmord in der Leopoldstadt,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 2 April 1874, 3. Ibid. Ibid. “Was gibt’s denn Neues? Die Mörderin der Frau Bondy,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 10 April 1874, 2. Ibid. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 2–3. “Kriminal-Geschichten: Hedwig Ruß, die Mörderin der Frau Bondy,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 24 May 1874, 5. “Was gibt’s denn Neues? Die Mörderin der Frau Bondy,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 10 April 1874, 5. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. “Hedwig Russ,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 24 May 1874, 1; “Kriminal-Geschichten: Hedwig Ruß, die Mörderin der Frau Bondy,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 24 May 1874, 5. “Kriminal-Geschichten: Hedwig Ruß, die Mörderin der Frau Bondy,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 24 May 1874, 9. Although Bondy was a common Jewish name and the victim resided in a heavily Jewish locale, I could not find any antisemitic remarks in the press reportage of the case. Vyleta argues that antisemitism was not widespread in Austria-Hungary and that mainstream newspapers in fact went out of their way to not characterize a person in racial terms. See, Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News. “Was gibt’s denn Neues: Zum Raubmord in Hernals,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 27 May 1874, 2–3. “Ein neuer Raubmord,” Gemeinde-Zeitung, 27 May 1874, 4. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Betreff Nawratil Franziska, Raubmord an Natzler Johanna, from k.k. Polizeirat to der k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft in Wien, 25 April 1905. Ibid. “Sie wisse selbst noch nicht, ob sie schon entlassen sei oder wieder weitere dienen könne.”

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128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Form 77 (alt 65) St. P. D., Augenschein und Sachverständigenbefund, 24 April 1905, Folio no. 13; “Der Mord am Tabor: Der Schwurgerichtsprozeß gegen die Dienstmagd Franziska Nawratil,” Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, 22 September 1905, 1. 130. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, An die k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft Olmütz, 25 April 1905, Folio no. 69. “Die Frau war kränklich und hat mich schlecht behandelt.” 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid., Folio no. 69–70. 133. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Betreff Raubmord an Johanna Natzler, an die k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft in Wien, 27 April 1905, Folio no. 84. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid., Folio no. 85. 136. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Uebersetzung of Nikodém Navrátil’s statement from beeideter Gerichtsdollmetsch der böhmischen Sprache, k.k. Kreisgericht in Olmütz, 8 May 1905, Folio no. 294–97. 137. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Uebersetzung of Franziska Navrátil’s statement from beeideter Gerichtsdollmetsch der böhmischen Sprache, k.k. Kreisgericht in Olmütz, 4 May 1905, Folio no. 300–301. 138. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, From Dr. Richard Pressburger to the k.k. Landesgericht in Strafsachen Wien, Betreff: Nichtigkeitsbeschwerde als Verteidiges des Franziska Nawratil, 21 October 1905. Physicians frequently associated mental conditions with menstruation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, there is much medical literature on the idea that some women enter a manic state at certain times of their cycle, and there are instances in Central Europe when a woman was acquitted of crimes based upon this argument. For example, as early as 1825, a woman in Prussia, Marie Charlotte Elisabeth, with three illegitimate children, committed infanticide on the youngest, a one-year-old child. She was acquitted based upon the argument that she committed the crime under the influence of her monthly flux. See Julius Eduard Hitzig, “Erkennenden Criminal-Justiz und Zur gerichtlichen Medicin: Mord in einem durch Eintreten des Monatsflusses Herbeigeführten unfreien Zustande,” Zeitschrift für die Criminal-Rechts-Plege in den Preußischen Staaten mit Ausschluß der Rheinprovinzen 12 (1827): 237–331. In 1902, Krafft-Ebing published a book of case studies documenting menses-related psychosis. See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychosis menstrualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart, 1902). There is considerable historical research exploring medical discourse on menstruation. See, for instance, Julie-Marie Strange, “Menstrual Fictions: Languages of Medicine and Menstruation, c. 1850–1930,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 3 (2000): 607–28. 139. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Letter from Pflügl and Junker, 15 December 1905. 140. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Gnadengesuch der Dr. Richard Pressburger to Seine kaiserliche

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141. 142.

143. 144.

145. 146. 147.

148.

149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156.

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und königlich-apostolische Majestät Franz Josef I Kaiser von Oesterreich, König von Ungarn, etc.etc.etc. The medical term for menstrual flow. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 1905 Franziska Nawratil, Fasz 179, Zahl 3896, Gnadengesuch der Dr. Richard Pressburger to Seine kaiserliche und königlich-apostolische Majestät Franz Josef I Kaiser von Oesterreich, König von Ungarn, etc.etc.etc. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale: Wien, 27 Januar Begnadigung der Mörderin Franziska Nawratil,” Neue Freie Presse: Abendblatt, 27 January 1906, 5. “Ein Dienstmädchen als Detektiv,” Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, 19 July 1911, 12. “Es wurde von dem Detektiv Julius Bierbaum, der ihn schon längere Zeit beobachtet hatte, festgenommen.” “Aus dem Polizeiblatte,” Salzburger Volksblatt, 12 February 1889, 4. “Aus dem Gerichtssaale,” Grazer Volksblatt, 7 December 1889, 3. “Was gibt’s den Neues? Ein Doppelraubmord auf der Türkenschanze,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 15 April 1875, 2; “Was gibt’s den Neues? Ein Doppelraubmord auf der Türkenschanze,” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, 16 April 1875, 3. J. D. H. Temme, ed., Archiv für die strafrechtlichen Entscheidungen der obersten Gerichtshöfe Deutschlands, Fünfster Band (1858), 345. “Dass das Dienstmädchen durch die ausdrückliche Bestätigung der Anzeiger der A., worin das Begehren um die Bestrafung wegen beider Ehrenbeleidigung enthalten war, ihren Willen, dass die Beschuldigte wegen der an ihr begangenen Handlung verfolgt werde, im Sinne des Strafgesetzes genügend fund gegeben habe, um den Richter zur Einleitung des Strafverfahrens zu ermächtigen.” H. Chr. Jessen, ed., Freie pädagogische Blätter, Vierter Jahrgang (Vienna, 1870), 592. R. A. v. Elsberg, Elisabeth Báthory (Die Blutgräfin): Ein Sitten- und Charakterbild (Breslau, 1904). “Die Blutgräfin. Das Schlafzimmergeheimnis eines vertierten Weibes,” Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, 23 September 1928, 1. Helga Schimmer, Mord in Wien: Wahre Kriminalfälle (Innsbruck-Vienna, 2012), 128– 34. See also Kimberly L. Craft, Infamous Lady: The True Story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2009). “Feuilleton: Der Prozess Dumollard,” Gerichtshalle, 10 February 1862, 44. Word search on the Austrian Newspapers Online Portal. “Kleine Chronik,” Die Presse, 5 February 1862, 1–2. This type of voyeurism is not limited to maidservants alone. It features prominently in discussions about female harassment and women’s rights. See, for instance, Walkowitz’s remarks on the Yorkshire Ripper case. See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 229–45. One could argue that such instances of leniency were more imaginable in the climate of fin de siècle Central Europe than in earlier centuries. This leniency was not limited to women. There is scholarship showing that both men and women were punished equally for their crimes. For instance, using cases of crimes committed by women, including female servants, Ulinka Rublack contradicts the assumption that women were treated more leniently than men. Of course, this work pertains to German states in the early modern period, and this argument might not extend to the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. See Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (New York, 1999).

CONCLUSION

d The first two weeks after taking up the job went very well for Kathi. Suddenly, one night, she was awakened and led by the old chambermaid Dorothea Szöcs into the Countess’s bedroom, the eccentric entrance of which filled her with terrible forebodings. The Countess screamed at her about why she had done such a shabby job of cleaning the Knights’ Hall the previous day. For this, she was to be punished. At a hint from the mistress, the old Dorothea undressed the girl and beat her bloody with a whip . . .1 The new chambermaid, Katja, makes her entrance. She was such a delightful tease that even the commissioner’s heart, which had so far only been accessible to the temptations of his own wife and, by the way, was heavily constrained, went up in flames. When he met Katja alone in the dining room, he began to declare his love for her, and his excited voice sounded like a hoarse spring breeze. But Katja just smiled, looked at him coquettishly, and ran away. In the evening, the commissioner sneaked into her room and there described in the most ardent words the officially approved beliefs about free love. But Katja only whispered anxiously: “No, no, I cannot, what will the mistress say?” “There is no ‘mistress,’ there are no masters at all, now all are equal,” said the commissioner, trying to be profound. But Katja deftly got away from him and pushed him back. “I’ll show you what it means to rebel against your master, you stupid goose!” yelled the commissioner and made to renew his assault.2

T

he sexually innocent, reluctant, and abused Kathi and Katja flounder piteously in Vienna’s interwar press alongside the former’s sadistic mistress and the latter’s lecherous master. Their story is part of the story of the Habsburg Empire. It is the story of a civilization clinging to the cultural myths that it had inherited from the past in the face of a changing social reality. In this book, I have examined how different sociopolitical players in late nineteenth- and early

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twentieth-century Vienna weaponized the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant to forward specific agendas. I have argued that although the narratives propelled by many of these movements seem antithetical on the surface, they are not in opposition to one another. They are based upon paternalistic assumptions that maidservants, like children, must be groomed, guided, and policed into appropriate behaviors and choices.3 Habsburg authorities and social groups routinely deployed both these narratives to justify the surveillance of female work, movement, and private life. A glance at the long journey of the maidservant victim reveals that this construct was by no means a refrain that empowered maidservants. In fact, the narrative was less about improvement of servant conditions and more about the populace’s penchant for fetishistic voyeurism toward violence committed against the female servant class. This narrative also underpinned efforts to impose the ideas of respectability on female servants’ choices and limit their options. Victimhood undervalued a working-class woman’s adulthood and belittled female self-determination. In 1912, German feminist Bertha Pappenheim wrote, “Men and women of all nations and denominations must know that in order to meet the tremendous needs of men in the brothels and other prostitution establishments, thousands and thousands of destitute, ignorant, reckless, and gullible girls are constantly being deceived with pretenses of all kinds by pimps and traffickers (of both sexes) and coerced by all means of violence, brutality, and crimes of moral and physical annihilation.”4 Before World War I, the victim narrative helped populists push for the reform of the 1810 Codes. In 1910, socialist representatives brought the Servant Question to the floor of the Lower Austrian Assembly. The appeal of Christian Socialist Josef Porzer that the government should rescind the hundred-year-old Servant Order resulted in a series of parliamentary debates.5 The outcome of these debates was the neuen Wiener Dienstordnung für das Hauspersonal (new Viennese Service Order for the domestic personnel) that authorities enacted on 28 October 1911.6 The new Service Order came into effect in January 1912 and introduced some changes. One was the linguistic change from Servant Order (Gesindeordnung or Dienstbotenordnung) to Service Order (Dienstordnung) and domestic personnel (Hauspersonal). Second was the introduction of legal protections. For example, the new law code made it illegal to employ anyone under fourteen years of age as a domestic servant and asserted the necessity for the father’s consent for servants between ages fourteen and twenty-four.7 The code disallowed corporal punishment. Employers were punishable under the Penal Code for causing bodily harm to their servants.8 The code specified work times, leisure times, and living conditions that employers were obligated to grant their servants in addition to paying wages at appropriate times and granting leave in case of personal or family emergencies. Further, it scrapped the clauses in the 1810 Codes that allowed the police to arrest servants who left service without

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appropriate notice.9 Similarly, the employer was not permitted to withhold wages as a punishment for servant mistakes.10 However, the 1912 Code did nothing to professionalize the occupation. While it removed some harsher and impractical aspects of the 1810 Codes, it retained all the paternalistic assumptions. In fact, the 1912 Code tightened medical surveillance of servants. The retention of these peculiar perceptions about such a massive group of “Others” represented an empire crumbling under the weight of unattainable ideals. The Leopoldine model of social organization was very much alive in the countryside at the eve of World War I. This was a major fault line within the Habsburg Empire since the model was clearly not working in its urban centers. As increasing numbers of migrants flocked to Vienna and other big cities of the empire in search of jobs and a better life, the maintenance of paternalism became untenable. Consequently, the divide between urban and rural areas grew ever starker. Despite this changing reality, bourgeois liberals, populists, and other social movements insisted on keeping alive the Leopoldine paternalistic impulses. The eagerness to maintain these impulses resulted in a massive surveillance system that focused on policing increasing numbers of working-class migrant women. Ultimately, it was World War I, and not the 1912 Code, that contributed to eroding the paternalism of the master-servant relationship. During the war, thousands of men left work for the front lines, and many women who were formerly employed as servants moved into positions left vacant by men. Women were drafted into ammunition factories and generally took up jobs that were deemed to be men’s work. Many maidservants lost their positions, and still others left service voluntarily and gladly.11 In such dire conditions, maidservants routinely denounced their employers: “Snooping, intrigue or indiscretion on the part of a maidservant, which before the war might have caused a housewife social embarrassment, might now, in light of censorship, lead to political trouble for a bourgeois family.”12 However, the old paternalistic impulses were not destroyed. After the war, the coalition government dealt with the problem of providing jobs for returning soldiers by encouraging women to “return to the household” as dependents of male breadwinners or as domestic servants.13 The resurgence of the prewar paternalism in domestic service came in the form of a new law code in 1920: Gesetz über den Dienstvertrag der Hausgehilfen (Hausgehilfengesetz). In the postwar context, the government’s priority was to restrict women’s participation in factories and accommodate the surplus female labor into the domestic service industry. Unlike the previous codes, prominent socialists and working-class women such as Adelheid Popp participated in the drafting of the 1920 law.14 Although the linguistic shift from the Service Order for Domestic Personnel (Dienstordnung für das Hauspersonal ) of 1912 to the Service Contract for Domestic Help (Dienstvertrag der Hausgehilfen) of 1920 suggested the professionalization of service, the contract was again based upon the assumption that “housemaids . . . were not only employees but at the same time members

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of the family and required to be trustworthy and loyal.”15 Since the 1920 law again viewed housemaids as family members, the problems that prevailed in the enforcement of the protections prescribed in the previous codes carried over to the 1920 law as well. In the First Republic, movements calling for sexual enlightenment in schools and sexual reform again turned to the cultural construct of the itinerant maidservant. These movements recommended directing the “difficult to control” sexual urges of men at “pure” women rather than prostitutes and maidservants who allegedly increased the risks of contracting venereal disease. They also encouraged parents to speak with their children about sex so that they did not get educated on these matters from their domestics. Many movements aligned with measures that led to increased intervention of medical professionals in sexual matters. Similarly, groups that called for better protections for unmarried mothers, most of whom were maidservants, and illegitimate children aligned with ideas that argued for motherhood to be the “natural” role for women. These groups used the language of eugenics in their public appeals for sexual responsibility to create a healthy population.16 Composed in 1930, Robert Musil’s magnum opus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften contained the character of Christian Moosbrugger,17 whose story was based upon the notorious case of Christian Voigt. In August 1910, a day laborer discovered a body of a woman among the thickets of grass.18 Various persons identified the corpse as the twenty-year-old Josefine Peer. According to police records, Peer came to Vienna at the age of fifteen in search of a domestic service position. Her Dienstbotenbuch revealed that she did not stay in a single position for a long time and did not obtain a satisfactory Dienstzeugniss for her short tenure at various positions. She then allegedly turned to clandestine prostitution to tide over periods of unemployment.19 The police arrested a carpenter’s assistant named Christian Voigt for the “typical lust murder.”20 The police discovered that Voigt preyed upon and attacked young women. He had committed a lust murder in 1902 in Bayreuth, Bavaria, and he was institutionalized in an asylum for the crime. In 1906, Voigt escaped from the asylum and traveled to Vienna, where authorities arrested him and sent him back to the asylum in Bayreuth. However, he was released in 1909 with a clean bill of mental health.21 In his confession to the police, Voigt claimed that he spoke to Peer at the Hauptallee in Prater at about three o’clock in the morning, and she pursued him despite his harsh rejections. Voigt argued that he had developed a revulsion toward prostitutes since the time he had contracted gonorrhea from one. So, he attacked Peer and killed her.22 Voigt received a death sentence for his crime. The sentence was, through an emperor’s pardon, reduced to life imprisonment.23 Officials released Voigt sometime in the early 1930s. He settled in Nuremberg and perhaps he even remarried in 1934.24 As Amber Aragon-Yoshida argues, the “intelligent sex murderer” Voigt received considerable sympathy from the Viennese

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public and both Austrian and German professionals for a variety of reasons.25 The “vagrant maidservant” emerged from its Josephine past with full force in police reports that described Josephine Peer as “devoted to a dissolute way of life and used to, among other things, visit Prater for making male acquaintances.”26 In the period following World War I—a time when the female servant’s autonomy was on full display—she had to once again be neutralized. As bourgeois women had done in fin de siècle Vienna, the maidservant had to once again be rescued by the liberated “New Woman” of the interwar period. Even though the cigarette-smoking, sexually liberated, modern, and “free” woman appropriated and romanticized the lifestyle of the itinerant maidservant, she sought simultaneously to render the source of her appropriation harmless. Without a clear victim, there was no clear perpetrator to be found. For the “New Woman,” the lifestyle she had appropriated was symbolic of the assertion of her liberation. For her maidservant, it was a necessity of circumstance. The autonomous maidservant had to be rendered harmless to purge the “New Woman” of any culpability. The maidservant had to be the victim in order to prop up once again a hollowed-out system of ideas that had emerged from the former empire’s deep distrust toward “free” people. It is no surprise then that Musil chose to describe Moosbrugger’s victim as “the kind of girl that hires herself out to men down there by the meadows, an out-of-work, runaway servant-girl, a little thing of whom there was nothing to be seen but two inveigling mouse-eyes gazing out from under her kerchief.”27 The victim narrative flourished in publications of the interwar period. For instance, in 1931, the well-known Jewish journalist and writer Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948) published Der Prager Pitaval. Nearly fifty years after his execution, the trope of Hugo Schenk’s sway over “innocent” maidservants again found its way into a pithy article titled “Eine Frau, die auf ihren Mörder wartet (A woman waiting for her killer).” The article recited the story of a chambermaid named Klara who had escaped Schenk: In her youth, Klara worked as a nanny for a Viennese woman living in Hannover. In the summer of 1883, the family traveled to Vöslau. There, Klara met a man and become engaged to him. After her return to Hannover, she gathered her documents and savings in preparation of her travel to Vienna. Her groom urged her to come quickly. He introduced himself as an engineer; however, later he told her that he was a Prince Wilopolski. Klara wrote to him that she was on her way to Vienna. The two decided to meet at a railway station; however, when she reached the station, he was not there. Klara then went to a hotel, Zur Goldenen Spinne, as she believed it was her groom’s residence. Following this, she went to the post office only to discover that her letter had not been collected. Believing that her betrothed was either ill or traveling, Klara waited at the hotel for a few days before returning to Hannover. There, she waited for her groom to contact her.28 The author of the article claimed that Klara was still waiting for her princegroom to return to her and make her his princess as was promised in his many

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correspondences. Apparently, Klara had in her possession six railway tickets dated between July and December 1883, two roses, a ring with a white sapphire, five letters, and a postcard that she held in hopes that her groom would return. The letters were signed by a certain engineer, Hermann Siegel. The author identified the man to be Hugo Schenk. Schenk, he argued, after the murder of Josefine Timal, had traveled to her sister’s place in Vöslau to avail himself of the address of Katharina Timal. It was around this time that he met and seduced Klara. The author was not certain when the other meetings took place.29 The article concluded with the remark that Klara had waited for forty-two years and was convinced that her groom would return to marry her.30 The appeal of violence toward the perpetually innocent, passive, and romantically inclined maidservant has had an uninterrupted voyeuristic tenure. For instance, in 1974, the Schenk case, along with four other cases, circulated in München as a small pocket book called Justitia: Sensationelle Kriminalfälle; Der Dienstmädchenmörder von Wien (Justitia: Sensational criminal cases; The maidservant murderer from Vienna).31 Explicit details of the case appeared again in Leomare Qualtinger’s 1986 book Die berühmtesten Kriminalfälle aus dem alten Österreich (The most famous criminal cases from old Austria) and in Michael Kirchschlager’s 2007 work Der Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk: Österreichs grosse Kriminalfälle (The girl murderer Hugo Schenk: Austria’s big criminal cases).32 Further, in 2012, the Viennese author, Helga Schimmer published a book titled Mord in Wien: Wahre Kriminalfälle (Murder in Vienna: true criminal cases), which comprised descriptions of some infamous and gruesome criminal cases in Viennese folklore. The case of Hugo Schenk featured in the book under the title “Geschäftsmodell: Meuchelmord (Business model: Assassination)” is one of them. The case of Elizabeth Báthory is another.33 The tale of Báthory, the countess who bathed in young servant girls’ blood to retain eternal youth, is the subject of copious TV documentaries and movies, and many authors claim that the tale has inspired endless amounts of vampire fictions.34 For example, in October 2008, a crime documentary series called Martina Cole’s Ladykillers aired in the United Kingdom.35 The documentary series hosted by British crime author Martina Cole comprised six hour-long episodes, each detailing an individual female serial killer. The sixth episode of the series recites the tale of the allegedly lesbian Countess Báthory. Replete with dramatic reconstructions, this adaptation of the tale details the case of the historical countess who, along with her son and son-in-law, lured young servant girls into her castle only to torture and kill them. In the same year, the horror movie Bathory, advertised as the “most successful film of all time in Slovakia” in its theatrical poster, interprets the countess as someone akin to a scientist and a medical healer who conducts autopsies and experiments in her cellar.36 In this version, György Thurzó,37 following a dispute with the countess, attempts to find incriminating evidence against Báthory by torturing the servants in the house. Neither the version that dramatizes

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Báthory’s lustful tortures of servants nor the version that portrays Thurzó torturing servants to obtain incriminating evidence against their mistress empowers women in the domestic service industry. These depictions only create voyeuristic satisfaction for the viewers and a fascination with the perpetrators of the crime. But more importantly, these depictions render harmless, two-dimensional, and childlike those women who are capable of agency, reason, and self-determination. In the age of mass media, these gory voyeuristic images perpetuate paternalistic narratives on a global scale. In 2018, the Indian film industry released an anthology titled Lust Stories.38 The movie contains four short films, each addressing the experience of female sexuality in twenty-first-century India. The liveaway housemaid Sudha is the central character of the short film directed by Zoya Akhtar. The scene opens with Sudha having sex with her employer, a bachelor named Ajith. Ajith’s parents arrive shortly after to visit for some time, and Ajith ignores Sudha in their presence. However, Sudha continues to come to his house every day and perform all the household tasks diligently. One day, a family arrives with their daughter. It is revealed that the daughter and Ajith have been seeing each other for a while. Sudha silently listens from the kitchen as she prepares tea for the families. She serves tea to the families as well as to Ajith while he romances the daughter his bedroom. The families finalize the marriage, and Sudha is silently heartbroken. The scene closes with Sudha leaving the apartment after a day’s work and life continues as usual. The short film contains all the elements of the victim narrative that informs our perceptions of domestic service: the employer’s use of his maidservant as a sexual outlet, her endless daily toils in the household, her silent suffering, and the return to the mundane routine of life following the subtle abandonment of the working-class woman for a middle-class wife. This pity-provoking story may as well have featured a live-in maidservant in nineteenth-century Vienna or a hotel chambermaid in the twenty-first-century United States and we would not know the difference. Such paternalistic narratives that are easily packaged and imported to dramatically different socioeconomic and cultural contexts underpin tendencies to dehumanize and paint, with a broad brush, extremely diverse communities: either as inexcusable criminals or pity-provoking victims.39 They do not permit us to appreciate the complexity of human experience that confounds the boundaries of these categories. Scholarship on domestic worker activism has recognized the drawbacks of stereotyping working-class women’s experiences. Katherine Gibson, Lisa Law, and Deidre McKay underscore “the limitations of dominant representations of these women as ‘heroes’ of national development or ‘victims’ of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labor migration.”40 Echoing their words, I contend that culture changes dramatically, but it is also remarkably persistent. In the context of an increasingly globalized world, the appreciation of nuance is the best chance at meeting the challenges that plague the human species.

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Notes 1. “Die Blutgräfin: Die Schlafzimmer-Geheimnis eines vertierten Weibes,” Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, 24 September 1928, 3. “In den ersten zwei Wochen nach ihrem Dienstantritt was es der Kathi sehr gut gegangen. Plötzlich wurde sie einmal in der Nacht geweckt und von der alten Kammerzofe Dorothea Szöcs ins Schlafzimmer der Gräfin geführt, dessen merkwürdige Zugang sie schon damals mit schrecklichen Ahnungen erfüllte. Die Gräfin schrie sie an, warum sie den Rittersaal gestern so nachlässig aufgeräumt habe. Dafür müsse sie nun bestraft werden. Auf einen Wink der Herrin entkleidete die alte Dorothea das Mädchen und schlug es mit einer Peitsche blutig . . .” 2. Oleg Berting, “Das Stubenmädchen der Frau Komissär,” Wiener Bilder, 12 August 1928, 11. “Das neue Stubenmädchen Katja hielt seinen Einzug; es war ein so entzückender Fratz, daß sogar das bisher nur den Reizen der eigenen Gattin zugängliche und im übrigen stark eingedorrte Herz des Kommissärs in Flammen geriet. Als er Katja im Speisezimmer allein begegnete, begann er ihr Liebeserklärungen zu machen und seine Stimme klang vor Aufregung wie ein heiser gewordener Frühlingswind. Aber Katja lächelte nur, sah ihn kokett an und lief davon. Am Abend schlich der Kommissär ihr Zimmer und entwickelte ihr dort in den glühendsten Worten die amtlich beglaubigten Anschauungen über die freie Liebe. Aber Katja flüsterte nur ängstlich: ‘Nein, nein, ich kann nicht, was wird die gnädige Frau sagen?!’ ‘Es gibt keine “gnädigen Frauen,” es gibt überhaupt keine Herrschaften, jetzt sind alle gleich,’ ereiferte sich der Kommissär und versuchte Handgreiflich zu werden. Aber Katja entwand sich ihm geschickt und stieß ihn zurück. ‘Ich werde dir schon zeigen, was es heißt, sich gegen seine Herrschaften aufzulehnen, du dumme Gans!’ schrie der Kommissär außer sich und wollte seinen Angriff erneuern.” 3. While I refer here principally to female servants, some scholars have referred to the detrimental effect of this perception on male servants as well. For instance, see Raffaella Sarti, “Fighting for Masculinity: Male Domestic Workers, Gender, and Migration in Italy from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present,” Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 16–43. 4. Bericht des Vereines: Über das Vereinsjahr 1912, 9. “Männer und Frauen aller Nationen und Konfessionen müssen wissen, daß, um den ungeheuren Bedarf der Männer in den Bordellen und den anderen Prostitutionsbetrieben an lebender Ware zu decken, Tausende und aber Tausende mittelloser, unwissender, leichtsinniger und leichtgläubiger Mädchen ständig durch List und Vorspiegelungen aller Art in Abhängigkeit von Kupplern, Mädchenhändlern (beiderlei Geschlechtes) und Zuhältern geraten und mit allen Mitteln der Gewalt, durch Roheit und Verbrechen der moralischen und physischen Vernichtung preisgegeben werden.” This construct of passivity continues to inform sex work law globally to this day. See also, Nautz, “Der Kampf,” 47–60. 5. These debates had started in 1883, but in 1910, the push for change backed by Social Democrats and feminists was considerable. See Richter, “Die Produktion,” 68–74. 6. “Die neue Dienstordnung für das Hauspersonal,” Oesterreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung, 7 December 1911, 2–5. 7. F. Dürr, Dien neue Dienstbotenordnung für Wien: Ein praktisches Belehrungs- und Nachschlagebuch für Dienstgeber, Hausfrauen und Hauspersonal (Vienna, 1912), 11. 8. Ibid., 21. St.G. §411, §413 and §421. 9. Ibid., 22–23. 10. Ibid., 26.

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11. Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004), 179–81. 12. Ibid., 180. 13. Richter, “Die Produktion,” 102–3. 14. Ibid., 104–6. Some researchers argue that the previous codes had paternalistic overtones solely because they were drafted by upper-class men. The fact that Popp participated in the drafting of the 1920 law negates this argument since the law also makes paternalistic assumptions. 15. Ibid., 111. “. . . Hausgehilfinnen nach dem Hausgehilfengesetz eben nicht nur Arbeitnehmerinnen waren, sondern gleichzeiting weiterhin Haushaltangehörige, von denen Treue und Loyalität verlangt wurde.” 16. McEwen, Sexual Knowledge, 46–48, 54–90. 17. Ibid., 23; Jay Michael Layne, “Uncanny Collapse: Sexual Violence and Unsettled Rhetoric in German-Language Lustmord Representations” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 1–4. 18. “Der Lustmord in der Binderau,” Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, 21 October 1911, 2. 19. “Der Lustmord in der Binderau,” Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung, 17 August 1910, 4–5. 20. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11- Vr-Strafakten: 7601/1910, Letter to the k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft in Wien, 17 March 1910, Folio no. 4. See also Spector, Violent Sensations, 167–71; Nathaniel Wood, “Sex Scandals, Sexual Violence, and the Word on the Street: The Kolasowna Lustmord in Cracow’s Popular Press, 1905–1906,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 2 (May 2011): 243–69. 21. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11- Vr-Strafakten: 7601/1910, Letter to the k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft in Wien, 17 March 1910, Folio no. 5. Amber Aragon-Yoshida, “Lustmord and Loving the Other: A History of Sexual Murder in Modern Germany and Austria (1873–1932)” (PhD thesis: Washington University at St. Louis, 2011), 83–84. 22. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11- Vr-Strafakten: 7601/1910, Befund und Gutachten, 20 February 1911. 23. Aragon-Yoshida, “Lustmord and Loving the Other,” 87. 24. Ibid., 164. 25. Ibid., 90. 26. Elder, Murder Scenes, 95. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11- Vr-Strafakten: 7601/1910, Letter to the k.k. Staatsanwaltschaft in Wien, 17 March 1910, Folio no. 6: “dem liederlichen Lebenswandel ergeben und pflegte unter anderen nach den Prater zur Anknüpfung von Männerbekanntschaften aufzusuchen.” 27. Musil, Man without Qualities, vol. 1, 81. 28. Egon Erwin Kisch, “Eine Frau, die auf ihrem Mörder wartet,” in Justitia: Sensationelle Kriminalfälle: Der Dienstmädchenmörder von Wien (München, 1974), 13–23. 29. Ibid., 15–23. 30. Ibid., 22–23. 31. Justitia: Sensationelle Kriminalfälle, 1–23. 32. Leomare Qualtinger, Die berühmtesten Kriminalfälle aus dem alten Österreich (Vienna and München, 1986), 147–98; Kirchschlager, Der Mädchenmörder Hugo Schenk, 95–146, 187–96. 33. Schimmer, Mord in Wien, 15–23, 128–34. 34. Susanne Kord, Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror (Cambridge, 2009), 54–70.

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35. Sean Crotty, “Elizabeth Báthory,” Martina Cole’s Lady Killers, Free At Last TV, UK, 17 November 2008. 36. Bathory: Countess of Blood, dir. Juraj Jakubisko (2008; UK: Metrodome, 2008), DVD. 37. Most historical evidence of the Báthory case comes from the depositions accumulated by the judge who incriminated her, the prominent Hungarian nobleman György Thurzó. See Kord, Murderesses, 56. 38. Lust Stories, dir. Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar (2018; Netflix, 2018). 39. Jill Nagle, for instance, argues that the stigma associated with prostitution governs parameters of female sexual behavior. See Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York, 2010). 40. Katherine Gibson, Lisa Law, and Deidre McKay, “Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 3 (2001): 365–86.

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d Archival Sources Amtsbibliothek der Landespolizeidirektion Wien Bibliothek der Gesellschaft der Ärzte in Wien Dokumentation Lebensgeschichtlicher Aufzeichnungen, Institut für Wirtschaft und Sozialgeschichte, Wien Universität Filmarchiv Austria Josephinische Bibliothek Wien Josephinische Sammlungen Kriminal Museum, Wien Landespolizeidirektion Wien Archiv Prostitution und Mädchenhandel Vereins und Versammlungswesen Lesesaal Altes Buch, Universitäts-Bibliothek Wien Österreichisches National Bibliothek Österrreichisches Staatsarchiv Archiv der Republik Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv Ministerium des Innern Ministerium des Innern Präsidiale Sammlung Frauennachlässe, Wien Universität. Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, Wien Wien Museum Karlsplatz Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv Landesgericht für Strafsachen Wiener Stadt- und Landes- Bibliothek, Rathaus

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Newspapers and Periodicals Allgemeine Kellner-Zeitung Allgemeine Wiener medizinische Zeitung Arbeiter-Zeitung Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung Central-Blatt der Wiener Kellner-Verreines Chronik der Zeit Das interessante Blatt Der Bund: Zentralblatt des Bundes österr. Frauenvereine Der herrschaftlich Angestellte Der Kleine Hausadvokat Der Stammgast: Allgemeine Gast-und Kaffeehaus Zeitung Die Presse Figaro Gastgewerbliches Central-Organ Gastwirthschaftlicher Reformator Gemeinde-Zeitung Gerichtshalle Grazer Tagblatt Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt Iris: Original Pariser und Wiener Damen-Moden-Zeitung Morgen-Post Neue Freie Presse Neue Illustrirte Zeitung Neuigkeits Welt-Blatt Oesterreichische Hotel- und Restaurant-Revue Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung Oesterreichisch-ungarische Buchhändler-Correspondenz Oesterreichisch-ungarische Gasthaus-Zeitung Oesterreichisch-ungarische Kaffee- und Gasthaus-Zeitung Oesterreichisch-ungarische Kellner-Zeitung Österreichische Dienstpersonal-Zeitung Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung The Labour Gazette The Literary Digest Volksblatt für Stadt und Land Vorwärts Welt-Blatt Wiener Bilder Wiener Caricaturen Wiener Moden und Hauswesen-Zeitung

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INDEX

d ABGB. See Universal Civil Code age, of servants, 206n123 agriculture and forestry (economic sector), 78–80 allegemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. See Universal Civil Code Allgemeine Österreichischer Frauenverein. See General Austrian Women’s Association Alltag und Traum (Tichy), 8 anti-Mädchenhandel movement, 156–58, 161–64, 197 hospitality industry impacted by, 159–60 newspapers inciting, 194 police coordinating, 135, 202n45 antisemitism, 169, 247n123 of Christian Socials, 15, 92 of Schrank, 160, 199n15 victim narrative linked with, 161 white slave trade and, 198n11 AÖF. See General Austrian Women’s Association Argentina, 194, 199n11 art, servants foregrounded in, 31–32 Assistance Association for Stately Servants (Unterstützungsvereines der herrschaflichen Diener), 204n88 Association for the Erection for Servant Asylums (Verein zur Errichtung von Dienstbotenasylen) (VED), 61, 72n69 “Austria, Disturber of the Peace” (article), 11 Austrian Hospitality Worker (Österreichischer Gastgewerbe-Angestellter) (association), 96

Austrian League for the Fight Against White Slave Trade (ÖLBM), 160–62, 190, 192–94, 208n150 Austrian Society for the Fight against Venereal Diseases (ÖGBG), 127 autobiographies, of servants, 23n61 Baldwin, James, 2 Barach, Rosa, 76–77 Báthory, Elizabeth “Blutgräfin” or “blood countess,” 239, 255–56, 259n37 Bauer, Franz, 217, 242n23 Baumberger, Katharina, 184–85 Baumgarten, Anton Josef, 128–29, 202n54 Beinhauser, Richard, 132–33 bejel (nonvenereal syphilis), 114–15 Benz, Heinrich, 184–85 Beyfuß, Rudolf, 87, 105n56 The Beyfuß Report, 84–94 Beytrag zur Schilderung Wiens (Neuberger and Riggler). See Contribution to the description of Vienna Binder, Cäcilie, 141 Blumauer, Alois, 31 “Bohemian procurement locales” (Böhmische Kuppel-Lokale) (article), 194 Bondy, Theresia, 232, 247n123 bourgeoisie, 3, 13–14, 173 ideal servant conceptualized by, 34, 41n43 maidservants contrasted with, 34–35, 41n42, 54–55 migrants distrusted by, 56

286

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Index

newspapers demonizing, 66–67 servants contrasted with, 165–66, 205n97 bourgeois women, 203n75 by “free” people, 35–36 itinerant maidservants referenced by, 167 maidservants influenced by, 60 Bradl, Veronika, 185 Brand, Johann Christian, 31 Burmeister, Anna, 131–32 Buxbaum, Katharina, 141 cashier, female, 100–101 Catholic organizations, for female servants, 60–61 census, in Habsburg Empire, 135–36 chambermaids, 32, 39n20, 219, 250 Pezzl describing, 33 Rautenstrauch criticizing, 28–31 terms for, 18 Chambermaids of Vienna (Stubenmädchen von Wien) (Oelenhainz), 32 The chocolate girl (Das Schokoladenmädchen) (Liotard), 32 Christian Socials antisemitism of, 15, 92 servant organizations encouraged by, 168 Servant Question addressed by, 15 Social Democrats criticized by, 83 Christian Unions (Christlichen Gewerkschaften), 204n89 clandestine prostitution, 97, 127 coffeehouses associated with, 90–91 servants charged with, 100 Vagabond Law targeting, 126 Codes. See Servant Codes coffeehouses, 90–91, 100–101 Cohen, Gary B., 15 Collegium of Doctors (association), 144n9 Collegium of Professors (association), 144n9 commerce (economic sector), 78, 79 commercial sex industry, 17, 139, 178, 183, 190 Commission of Social Reform, 46 Constantinople, trading in girls in, 201n34 Contribution to the description of Vienna (Beytrag zur Schilderung Wiens) (Neuberger and Riggler), 31

Cooperative of Coffeehouse Owners, 90–91 Cooperative of Innkeepers, 86–87, 99 Cooperative of Licensed Employment Agencies, 176–77 criminal courts, servants subject to, 43 Crivelli, Maria, 238–39 culture. See specific topics Czerny, Marie, 142 dearth of servants (narrative), 171–73, 206n113 demographic feminization, of servant occupation, 13–14, 74 migrants increased by, 101 Morgenstern demonstrating, 78–80 by Servant Code, 29 in urban centers, 78 urbanization influencing, 84 deportation, of women, 134 Deutschen Nationalkomitee zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels (organization), 201n45 Diamand, Adolf, 159 Die Dienstboten in Wien (Schildbach). See The servants in Vienna Dienstbotenbuch (government document), 70n34, 132–33, 140–42 police regulating, 138–39 servants receiving, 54, 85–86 women classified by, 140 Die Dienstboten-Mörder Franz und Rosalia Schneider (Fritz). See The servant murderers Franz and Rosalia Schneider Dienstboten-Zeugniss (character reference system), 69n13 Dienstvertrag. See service contract Djuris, Anna, 225 Domestic Association of Hospitality Workers (Hausvereines der Gastgewerbe-Angestellten), 97–98 The Domestic Revolution (McBride), 7 domestic service, 5, 22n38, 198n8, 252–53 as bridging occupation, 102n6 factory work contrasted with, 102n15 Jewish women refraining from, 103n17 prostitution contrasted with, 186 scholarship on, 7–8

Index

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287

Economo, Richard, 133–35 Eder, Josefine, 218–19, 222 Ehrmann, S., 127 1810 Codes, 13, 48–50, 56, 231–32 on employers, 68n12, 150n89 false accusations not punished under, 64 on illness, 69n18, 150n89 Josephine Servant Codes replaced by, 43–44 paternalism retained by, 67 populists reforming, 251–52 Provisional Servant Codes elongated by, 57–58 servants redefined by, 47, 135 on service personnel, 85 Eitelpös, Katarina, 188–89 Elsner, Fredrick, 134 employers abuse perpetrated by, 173–74 1810 Codes on, 68n12, 150n89 maidservants mistreated by, 64, 66 servants and, 38n16, 48 Veronesi abused by, 155–56 enlightened rationalism, Vienna developing, 143n5 “Equal Rights for All” (article), 155 Europeans, against white slave trade, 195

Hügel centering, 117–18 Lueger against, 96 male servants contrasted with, 79–82 migrants as, 77–78 narrative against, 89, 93–94, 99 newspapers against, 94 “New Woman” contrasted with, 254 paintings humanizing, 32 police targeting, 126 prostitution linked to, 89 prostitution regulation targeting, 90 syphilis in, 119 Vorwärts on, 98–99 waiter organizations opposing, 88–89, 92–93 feminists, placement agencies criticized by, 231 feminization. See demographic feminization, of servant occupation Figaro (newspaper), 59 Finger, Ernst, 127, 148n65, 202n54 Fischer, Moritz, 192–93 Fockt, Carl Theodor, 222–23 forestry, agriculture and (economic sector), 78–80 Franciscan Codes. See 1810 Codes Francis I (emperor), 67n2 Franz Josef I (Emperor), 113, 236–37 “free” people bourgeois women influenced by, 35–36 Habsburg Empire antagonizing, 25, 36–37 Servant Question about, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 1–2, 9–10 Fritz, C., 220, 229

factory work, domestic service contrasted with, 102n15 “Fate of the workers” (“Lebensschicksal der Arbeiter”) (Popp), 171 Fauner (municipal officer), 44 female cashier (Kassierin), 100–101 female servants (Mädchenbedienung), 28. See also chambermaids; maidservants Catholic organizations for, 61 data collection on, 123 hospitality industry not hiring, 100

Gablik, Suzi, 11–12 Gasser, Helene, 23n61 von Geissau, Anton H., 31 General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeine Österreichischer Frauenverein) (AÖF), 164–66, 203n66 Genossenschaften (hospitality industry cooperatives), 104n44 George, Alys X., 6 Germinie Lacerteux (de Goncourt, E., and de Goncourt, J.), 170

unemployed servants classified by, 137 Drawings of common people especially sellers (Zeichnungen nach dem gemeinen Volke Besonders der Kaufruf in Wien) (Brand), 31 Dub, Josef, 194–95 Dumollard, Martin, 240

288

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Index

Gesetz über den Dienstvertrag der Hausgehilfen (law code), 252–53, 258n14 Gesundheitsbuch. See health book, for prostitution Giles, Judy, 8 Gräffer, Franz, 56 Grandjean, Moritz Anton, 61–62 Gressl, Sophie, 184 Gugitz, Gustav, 29 Haarreißer, Johanna, 227–28 Habsburg Empire, 18–19, 27–28, 43, 56, 78, 197. See also Lower Austrian government; Vienna census in, 135–36 collapse of, 3–4 under Francis I, 67n2 “free” people antagonized by, 25, 36–37 Penal Codes of, 16–17, 117, 201n36 physicians in, 144n8 police reorganized by, 116–17 serfdom in, 207n131 servants in, 5, 7, 69n21 statistics promoted by, 113 vagrants criminalized by, 37n2 Haid, Marie, 95 Hakkarainen, Heidi, 6, 72n59 Hartleben, A., 220–21 Haugeneder, Josefine, 228 “Ein Hausbesitzer als Mädchenhändler” (article). See “A landlord as a Mädchenhändler” “Haussklavinnen” (Popp). See “House slaves” Hausvereines der Gastgewerbe-Angestellten. See Domestic Association of Hospitality Workers health book, for prostitution (Gesundheitsbuch), 140, 147n58 health insurance, for servants (Wiener Dienstboten-Krankenkassa), 130, 151n96 Heimstätte für lernende und erwerbende Mädchen und Frauen des Mittelstandes. See Hostels for Learned and Working Middle-Class Girls and Women Hermann, Benedict Franz, 75 Hermann, Josef, 112

Herrdegen, Johann, 164–65, 231 Der Herr und der Diener als Beytrag zur richtigen Behandlung, Veredlung und Verbesserung der Dienstboten männlichen und weiblichen Geschlechtes (Karl). See The master and the servant as a contribution on the correct treatment, refinement, and improvement of the servants of male and female gender Herz-Marien-Kloster (placement services), 200n30 hierarchy, of servants, 75 Higgs, Edward, 175 High Court Order (1853), servants redefined by, 85–86 Höchsmann, Emilie, 218–22 Hofer, B., 109n122 hospitality industry. See also waiters; waitresses anti-Mädchenhandel movement impacting, 159–60 Beyfuß influencing, 105n56 female servants not hired by, 100 placement agencies influenced by, 84 police regulating, 93, 97 Trade Order impacting, 87–88 waiter organizations dignifying, 86 hostels, for servants, 44, 67n4 Hostels for Learned and Working MiddleClass Girls and Women (Heimstätte für lernende und erwerbende Mädchen und Frauen des Mittelstandes), 72n69 Hottwagner, Marie, 224–25 “House slaves” (“Haussklavinnen”) (Popp), 174 Huebmer, Georg, 76 Huebmer, Johann, 76 Hügel, Franz Seraph, 117–19 Hugo Schenk and accomplices or a modern Bluebeard (Hugo Schenk und Genossen oder Ein moderner Blaubart) (Fockt), 222–23 Hungary, Servant Codes excluding, 58 Huth, Regina, 150n91 identity, servant occupation oversimplified into, 177, 196

Index

illness, of servants, 69n18, 150n89 illustrations, of crimes, 229–30, 241nn9–10, 246n103 Imperial General Hospital, servants treated at, 114, 129, 130, 140–41 Imperial Statistical Commission, census by, 135 independent trades (economic sector), 79 industries (economic sector), 78, 79 International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Trade, 202n45 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 1–2, 9 itinerant maidservants (cultural construct), 18–19, 25, 36, 51, 56, 253 bourgeois women referencing, 167 culture foregrounding, 58–59 statistics legitimizing, 142–43 Jeremias, Marie, 159 Jewish women, domestic service refrained from by, 103n17 Joseph II (emperor), 28 Josephine Servant Codes, 26–28, 43–44 the Josephinum (hospital), 114, 143n6 Jungwirt, Hermine, 64–65 Kampffmeyer, Paul, 195 Karl, Johann, 52 Kassierin. See female cashier Die Kassierin vom Silbernen Kaffeehaus (Langer), 100–101 Ketterl, Theresia, 216–17 Kininger, Vinzenz Georg, 32 Kleinrath, Rosalie, 226 Klima, Magdelene, 133–34 Krajcir, Theresia, 187 Krankenkassa. See health insurance, for servants Kunte, Agnes, 66 “A landlord as a Mädchenhändler” (“Ein Hausbesitzer als Mädchenhändler”) (article), 178–79 Langer, Anton, 100–101 “Lebensschicksal der Arbeiter” (Popp). See “Fate of the workers” Leimsieder, Mizzi, 99

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289

Leopold I (emperor), 25 Leopoldine model, of social organization, 36, 49 liberalism, Schorske critiquing, 1–2, 5–6 Liotard, Jean-Étienne, 32 literacy, of servants, 62 Löschenkohl, Johann Hieronymus, 32 Lower Austrian government AÖF petitioning, 166 hostels criticized by, 44 placement agencies impacted by, 87 servants categorized by, 45–46 Lueger, Karl, 96, 109n122 Luft, David S., 6 Lust Stories (film), 256 Lutz, Helma, 8 M., Theresia, 30 Mädchenbedienung. See female servants Mädchenhandel. See anti-Mädchenhandel movement; prostitution; trading in girls Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung (Schrank), 160 maidservants, 17–18, 21n36, 31, 51–52, 118–19, 160. See also itinerant maidservants bourgeoisie contrasted with, 34–35, 41n42, 54–55 bourgeois women influencing, 60 choice demonstrated by, 171, 181 commercial sex industry and, 178 employers mistreating, 64, 66 fallen, 170–71 Freud confronted by, 1–2, 10 inexperience characterizing, 218–19 intellect of, 237–38 male servants contrasted with, 74 newspapers depicting, 59, 62–63, 219–20 Popp characterizing, 170–71 prostitution associated with, 127 prostitution regulation and, 120 religious education for, 55 “rescue of,” 187–91 Schenk, H., targeting, 215–17 Schneiders’ targeting, 226–27 sexuality of, 59 surveillance of, 133–34

290

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Index

venereal disease associated with, 121–22 victim narrative portraying, 65, 227–28, 237, 240, 251 as witnesses, 227–28, 238 male servants, 257n3 “disappearance” of, 75–84 female servants contrasted with, 79–82 maidservants contrasted with, 74 Manhard, Rosine, 229 The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) (Musil), 9–11, 253 Maria Theresa (Empress), 26 “Marien Stiftung for the Education of Good Maidservants Recognized as the Most Urgent Need” (Schulz), 55 marriage, of servants, 37n6, 50 marriage swindler (trope), 214–23, 244n59 The master and the servant as a contribution on the correct treatment, refinement, and improvement of the servants of male and female gender (Der Herr und der Diener als Beytrag zur richtigen Behandlung, Veredlung und Verbesserung der Dienstboten männlichen und weiblichen Geschlechtes) (Karl), 52 masters, police supporting, 43 Matula, Rosia, 150n91 McBride, Theresa, 3, 7, 102n6 McClintock, Anne, 8 medical community, 112, 115–17, 125. See also physicians; surveillance, medico-police menstruation, physicians misunderstanding, 248n138 Merta, Anton, 128 migrants, 3, 100, 156–57, 206n121 bourgeoisie distrusting, 56 demographic feminization increasing, 101 as female servants, 77–78, 206n124 under surveillance, 86 in Vienna, 13, 23n53, 102n10 military (economic sector), 79 Mojziz, Barbara, 187–88 Monnier, Anton Ritter von Le, 121 Montane, H., 106n70 Morgenstern, Hugo, 78–80, 166 Moser, Josef, 187–88

Musil, Robert, 9–11, 253 Nationalist identity groups, 196 Natzler, Johanna, 234 Nawratil, Franziska, 214, 234–39 Neuberger, J., 31 Die neue Magd and Die alte Magd (Grandjean), 61–62 Neumann, Moritz, 178–80 newspapers, 95, 98–99, 168–69, 229–30 anti-Mädchenhandel movement incited by, 194 bourgeoisie demonized by, 66–67 against female servants, 94 maidservants depicted by, 59, 62–63, 219–20 marriage swindler propagated by, 216–17 for servants, 62–63, 66–67 trading in sex written on by, 157–58 for waiters, 94 “New Woman,” female servants contrasted with, 254 1912 Servant Code, servant occupation not professionalized by, 252 Nusser, Eduard, 116 Obermayer, 161–62 occupation, servant. See servant occupation Oelenhainz, Friedrich, 32 Oesterreichische Kellner-Zeitung (newspaper), 94–95 Ofner, Julius, 164–65 ÖGBG. See Austrian Society for the Fight against Venereal Diseases ÖLBM. See Austrian League for the Fight Against White Slave Trade On chambermaids in Vienna (Ueber die Stubenmädchen in Wien) (Rautenstrauch), 28–31, 39n19 organizations, of servants, 168–69 Österreichische Hauspersonal-Zeitung (newspaper), 168–69 Österreichischer Gastgewerbe-Angestellter (association). See Austrian Hospitality Worker paintings, female servants humanized by, 32

Index

panderers, women supplied by, 210n176 Parametritis (disease), 150nn91–92 Patek, Andreas, 182 paternalism, 12–13, 47, 256 autonomy conflicting with, 9–10 1810 Codes retaining, 67 in Gesetz über den Dienstvertrag der Hausgehilfen, 252, 258n14 World War I eroding, 252 Patterson, Orlando, 3 Peer, Josefine, 253–54 Penal Codes, of Habsburg Empire, 16–17, 117, 201n36 Pezzl, Johann, 32, 33 physicians, 163 diseases classified by, 114–15 female, 202n56 in Habsburg Empire, 144n8 menstruation misunderstood by, 248n138 prostitution discussed by, 146n31 against venereal diseases, 125–26 Pitaval (literary genre), 216, 241n11, 245n59 placement agencies, 53, 166, 176–77, 200n30 Domestic Association of Hospitality Workers opening, 97–98 feminists criticizing, 231 Herrdegen criticizing, 164, 165 hospitality industry influenced by, 84 Lower Austrian government impacting, 87 ÖLBM against, 192–93 surveillance of, 158 trading in girls and, 160–61 wages paid to, 63 placement agents, murders by, 223–30 Podpera, Franz, 217, 242n23 police, 64–66, 142–43, 183–84, 208n150, 224–26, 232–33. See also surveillance, medico-police anti-Mädchenhandel movement coordinated by, 135, 202n45 Bradl apprehended by, 185 Dienstbotenbuch regulated by, 138–39 Dub investigated by, 195 female servants targeted by, 126

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291

Habsburg Empire reorganizing, 116–17 hospitality industry regulated by, 93, 97 Leopoldine model bolstered by, 49 masters supported by, 43 medical community aligning with, 112 Monnier reforming, 121 Nawratil investigated by, 234–35 Neumann investigated by, 178–80 private life controlled by, 69n21 prostitution investigated by, 123–24, 159 servants regulated by, 45–46, 48, 50, 53–55, 138–39 Svejda arrested by, 188 trading in sex investigated by, 131–35 Zobel interrogated by, 187 Popp, Adelheid, 167, 170–71, 174–75 populists, 163–66 1810 Codes reformed by, 251–52 Servant Question focused on by, 167–68 surveillance enabled by, 197–98 victim narrative portrayed by, 169–70, 231–32, 239 Porzer, Josef, 251 pregnancy, of servants, 69n18 Pressburger, Richard, 236–37 Process des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seiner Genossen (Hartleben). See Trial of the girl Trial murderer Hugo Schenk and his accomplices property ownership, of servants, 81–82 proprietors, for brothels, 182 prostitution, 16, 170–71, 192, 194, 203n59. See also clandestine prostitution; trading in girls; trading in sex domestic service contrasted with, 186 family enabling, 200n27 female servants linked to, 89 health book for, 140, 147n58 maidservants associated with, 127 occupations before, 124, 147n61, 149n87 organizations against, 192 parents disapproving of, 184–85 physicians discussing, 146n31 police investigating, 123–24, 159 syphilis blamed on, 112 terms for, 17 Trade Order forbidding, 193

victim narrative portraying, 180, 210n178 waitresses associated with, 106n66, 106n70 women and, 152n125 Prostitution in Vienna and Paris (Die Prostitution in Wien und Paris) (Schlesinger), 120 prostitution regulation female servants targeted by, 90 maidservants and, 120 medical community supporting, 116–17, 125 statistics lacked by, 125 surveillance created by, 121 working-class women impacted by, 118 Die Prostitution und deren Regulirung in Wien (Hügel), 117–18 Provisional Servant Codes, 57–58 Quetelet, Adolphe, 113 Rautenstrauch, Johann, 28–36, 39n18, 39n20, 55–56 regulation, prostitution. See prostitution regulation Reigen (play), 122 relatives, as servants, 101n2 Ridler, Franz, 225 Riegler, Helene, 140 Riggler, M., 31 Rigler, Edith, 102n15 von Rokitansky, Carl, 114 Roma people, settlement programs for, 37n4 Rosinak, Therese, 134 Röstner, Theresia, 180 Rublack, Ulinka, 249n157 Rural Servant Codes, 26 rural servants property ownership by, 81–82 servant codes differentiating between urban servants and, 26–27, 38n9, 47, 50–51 sex ratios of, 80 Ruß, Hedwig, 214, 232–34 Sarti, Raffaella, 13

Saturn-Film (company), 59–60 Sauer, Elisabet, 181 Schenk, Hugo, 214 Höchsmann marrying, 221 maidservants targeted by, 215–17 marriage swindler popularized by, 223, 244n59 Schlossarek contrasted with, 218, 220 sensationalist literature about, 244n55 Tagwerker describing, 218 women swayed by, 222–23 Schenk, Karl, 215, 217–18, 220 Schildbach, Johann Gottlieb, 35–36 Schlesinger, Wilhelm, 120 Schlossarek, Carl, 215, 217–18, 220, 242n23 Schmidt, Theresia, 93 Schmitter, Carl, 34 Schneider, Franz, 214, 223–31 Schneider, Rosalia, 214, 223–31 Schnitzler, Arthur, 122 Das Schokoladenmädchen (Liotard). See The chocolate girl Schönstein, Gustav, 55–56 Schorske, Carl, 1–2, 5–6 Schrank, Josef, 89, 106n66, 157, 160, 199n15, 223 Schuhmeier, Franz, 156 Schulz, Georg, 55, 214–15 Schwagner, C., 230 Second Vienna Medical School, statistics in, 113–20 Sengoopta, Chandak, 6 serfdom, in Habsburg Empire, 207n131 Servant Codes, 38n7, 252. See also 1810 Codes demographic feminization increased by, 29 Hungary excluded from, 58 Josephine, 26–28, 43–44 Provisional, 57–58 servants protesting, 82–83 Theresian, 27 urban servants and rural servants differentiated by, 26–27, 38n9, 47, 50–51 The servant murderers Franz and Rosalia Schneider (Die Dienstboten-Mörder

Index

Franz und Rosalia Schneider) (Fritz), 229 servant occupation. See also demographic feminization as catchall term, 17–18, 172 as exploitative, 8 identity oversimplifying, 177, 196 1912 Servant Code not professionalizing, 252 trading in girls connected with, 142 as transitory, 75–76, 137 Servant Order (1688), 25–26, 37n3 servant organizations, Christian Socials encouraging, 168–69 Servant Question, 12, 14 about “free” people, 197 Christian Socials addressing, 15 populists focusing on, 167–68 Social Democrats and, 206n117 servants. See specific topics The servants in Vienna (Die Dienstboten in Wien) (Schildbach), 35–36 service contract (Dienstvertrag), 48–49 service personnel, 1810 Codes on, 85 settlement programs, for Roma people, 37n4 sex industry, commercial, 17, 139, 178, 183, 190 sex ratios, among servants, 79, 80–81, 82 Sigmund Ritter von Ilanor, Carl Ludwig, 114, 115, 124–25, 145n15 Sinha, Nitin, 2 Sketches of Vienna (Skizze von Wien) (Pezzl), 32–33 slaves, servants compared with, 174 Social Democrats, 14, 64–65, 98, 155–56, 168–69, 173 Christian Socials criticizing, 83 Servant Question and, 206n117 Sonnenfels, Josef Freiherr von, 46–47 Stanley, Amy, 8 Stany, Johanna, 179–80 Statistical yearbook for the city of Vienna (Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien), 130–31 statistics, 81, 112 Habsburg Empire promoting, 113 Hügel clarifying, 119

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itinerant maidservant legitimized by, 142–43 prostitution regulation lacking, 125 in Second Vienna Medical School, 113–20 Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien. See Statistical yearbook for the city of Vienna Steidl, Annemarie, 77 Stoiber, Johanna, 226–27 Stranovsky, Helene, 227 strikes, by servants, 83 Strotzenberger, Anna, 175 Ein Stubenmädchen (Löschenkohl), 32 Stubenmädchen von Wien (Oelenhainz). See Chambermaids of Vienna Sturm, Lisi, 62–64 Styblik, Marie, 185–86 suicide, by Kunte, 66 surveillance, medico-police data collection standardized through, 116 of maidservants, 133–34 migrants under, 86 ÖLBM increasing, 193–94 of placement agencies, 158 populists enabling, 197–98 prostitution regulation creating, 121 of servants, 128 trading in girls investigated through, 208n150 of unemployed servants, 122–23 victim narrative justifying, 162 Svejda, Gottlieb, 188 syphilis in female servants, 119 nonvenereal, 114–15 prostitution blamed for, 112 system of robot (serfdom), 174, 207n131 Tagwerker, Linz S., 218 teachers, servants contrasted with, 175–76 Thurzó, György, 255–56, 259n37 Tichy, Marina, 8 Trade Orders, 87–88, 90, 193 trading in girls (Mädchenhandel), 17, 202n54. See also anti-Mädchenhandel movement in Constantinople, 201n34

294

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Ueber die Stubenmädchen in Wien (Rautenstrauch). See On chambermaids in Vienna unemployed servants, 49, 50 domestic service classifying, 137 at Imperial General Hospital, 130 police surveillance of, 122–23 Universal Civil Code (allegemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) (ABGB), 56–57 Unterstützungsvereines der herrschaflichen Diener. See Assistance Association for Stately Servants urban servants property ownership of, 81 servant codes differentiating between rural servants and, 26–27, 38n9, 47, 50–51 sex ratios of, 80

Veronesi, Aloisia, 155–56 victim narrative, 254 antisemitism linked with, 161 maidservants portrayed by, 65, 227–28, 237, 240, 251 populists portraying, 169–70, 231–32, 239 prostitution portrayed by, 180, 210n178 Schrank deploying, 157, 223 surveillance justified by, 162 victims, servants portrayed at, 15, 16, 19 Vienna, Habsburg Empire, 4–5, 9–10, 23n53 enlightened rationalism developed in, 143n5 migrants in, 13, 23n53, 102n10 population increasing in, 145n20 servants increasing in number in, 172–73 women’s organizations in, 61 Vienna and the Viennese (Wien und die Wiener) (Stifter), 51 Vienna Medical School, 144n8 Vienna University, 148n65 The Viennese maidservants murderers (Die Wiener Dienstmädchen-Mörder) (Schwagner), 230 Viktoria (chambermaid), 30, 39n20 violence, voyeurism and, 215–16, 240, 254, 256 Voigt, Christian, 253–54 Vorwärts (newspaper), 98–99 voyeurism, violence and, 215–16, 240, 254, 256 Vyleta, Daniel, 6

Vagabond Law (1885), 126 vagrants, servants as, 26, 28, 33–34, 37n2, 49 VED. See Association for the Erection for Servant Asylums venereal diseases, 127–28, 144n12. See also syphilis maidservants associated with, 121–22 medical community classifying, 115 physicians against, 125–26 Verein zur Errichtung von Dienstbotenasylen. See Association for the Erection for Servant Asylums

wages placement agencies paid, 63 of servants, 205n109 of waiters, 105n62 waiter organizations, 84–85, 97 female servants opposed by, 88–89, 92–93 hospitality industry dignified by, 86 waitresses criticized by, 94–95, 98 working-class women undermined by, 99–100 waiters associations for, 109n117 newspapers for, 94

placement agencies and, 160–61 punishments for, 201n36 servant occupation connected with, 142 surveillance investigating, 208n150 trading in sex, 156–57 Joseph II vacillating on, 28 newspapers writing on, 157–58 police investigating, 131–35 trafficking, 17, 23n65 von Treitschke, Heinrich, 2 Trial of the girl murderer Hugo Schenk and his accomplices (Process des Mädchenmörders Hugo Schenk und seiner Genossen) (Hartleben), 220–21 Truxa, Celestina, 162

Index

wages of, 105n62 waitresses, 109n122 prostitution associated with, 106n66, 106n70 recruitment of, 180–81 waiter organizations criticized by, 94–95, 98 Weber, Karl, 186 Welser, Margarethe, 188–89 white slave trade, 196, 198n7 antisemitism and, 198n11 Europeans against, 195 organization against, 201n45 Wickenhagen, Mina, 131–32 Wiener Dienstboten-Krankenkassa. See health insurance, for servants Wiener Hausfrauenverein (placement services), 200n30 Wien und die Wiener (Stifter). See Vienna and the Viennese Wingfield, Nancy M., 6, 16, 123 Wittmann, Josef, 141–42 women. See also bourgeois women; chambermaids; female servants; maidservants choices of, 15–16 commercial sex industry recruiting, 183 deportation of, 134 Dienstbotenbuch classifying, 140 Jewish, 103n17 ÖLBM excluding, 161 panderers supplying, 210n176

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prostitution and, 152n125 records of, 16–17 Schenk, H., swaying, 222–23 ZÖLBM rescuing, 190–91 working-class women, 101 prostitution regulation impacting, 118 Schnitzler depicting, 122 waiter organizations undermined by, 99–100 World War I, paternalism eroded by, 252 Yates, Susan, 8 Zampis, Anton, 52–53 Zeichnungen nach dem gemeinen Volke Besonders der Kaufruf in Wien (Brand). See Drawings of common people especially sellers Zentralkomitees der Österreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels (ZÖLBM), 162–63, 164, 190–91. See also Austrian League for the Fight Against White Slave Trade Zentralvereins für das Hauspersonal Österreichs (ZHÖ), 168–69 Zimmerman, Susan, 148n74 Zimmermann, Albin, 233 Zobel, Barbara, 187 ZÖLBM. See Zentralkomitees der Österreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels Zuckerbäcker, Hugo, 188 Zwirner, Marie, 132–33