Contested Passions: Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Modern Austrian Literature and Culture by Clemens Ruthner and Raleigh Whitinger (review)

Contested Passions is a collection of essays on Austrian sexuality, most of which were originally presented at the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association 2007 conference. As the editors frame it in an excellent foreword to the collection, the “long” twentieth century is a useful way to think about the themes of sexuality, eroticism, and gender in Austrian culture, in that such a periodization invites the reader to reflect back on the science and literature of the late nineteenth century and think forward all the way to films and plays that have appeared since the end of the millennium. The thirty essays presented here stretch from the decadence and dirty talk of the fin de siècle to the debates over pornography surrounding some of Austria’s most recent artistic works. Although some historical essays pepper the collection, the vast majority of them are literary criticism.

Contested Passions is arranged chronologically, and the section covering the turn of the twentieth century is, not surprisingly, the largest. Gustav Klimt and Arthur Schnitzler are well represented, but so are more unusual topics, such as the psychoanalyst and free-love proponent Otto Gross and the pornographic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher. The interwar period is dominated by essays on Robert Musil, although it also contains a fascinating look at gender and sexuality in films of the Austrofascist era. The postwar period is set up for the reader with an excellent historical essay on sexuality and the media in the “family-friendly” era of the 1950s, and the contemporary section emphasizes Albert Drach and Elfriede Jelinek as well as body art and pornography in film. Taken as a whole, these essays more than prove the editors’ claims that Austrian culture uses sexuality, eroticism, and gender as ways to probe the hypocrisy of our modern personal and political systems.

Several essays in Contested Passions use gender as a category of analysis. Susanne Hochreiter and Antonia Eder, writing about Otto Gross and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, respectively, call attention to the weight of Johann Bachofen’s theory of Mutterrecht lent to new interpretations of femininity. Masculinity, in turn, is interrogated by Imke Meyer in relation to Schnitzler’s use of melodramatic themes for male characters, which inverted the gender relationships of the day. It is also explored in Sebastian Hüsch’s comparison of power and irony in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Markus Hallensleben invites us into the world of avant-garde art with an exploration of Valie Export’s body art. Finally, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz’s clear and engaging essay on gender and pornography in Drach and Jelinek unveils patriarchy and repressive politics as the real topics of each author.

Sexuality as a media product appears in multiple essays in this collection. Martin Huber documents the reception of Otto Weininger through the media lens of Karl Kraus. Robert von Dassanowsky introduces us to a wealth of mixed messages about female sexuality in an essay on films from the Austrofascist period. Franz X. Eder’s historical essay on the media’s selling of “healthy” sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s offers a welcome correction to the idea that those years were simply ones of repression. Ultimately, Annika Nickenig’s essay on Jelinek also approaches sexuality, and especially sexual violence, as something that is “witnessed,” packaged, and processed for the reader in ways that are unsettling.

Alterity and Otherness within the realm of sexuality are important starting points for a number of essays in Contested Passions. Anna Babka uses postcolonial and queer studies as avenues for exploring Josef Winkler’s Friedhof der bittern Orangen in an essay that breaks down clear oppositions between “minorities.” Alexandra Strohmaier applies the same theoretical tools to explore the racial readings of masochism in the late Habsburg Empire. And Katherine Arens tells the familiar story of Mayerling from the perspective of the family of Maria Vetsera, reversing the power...