Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 by Victoria Harris (review)

Victoria Harris’s new book examines the lives of prostitutes in German society from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War. Harris investigates change and continuity in the experiences of these women and revisits popular assumptions about the connections between political regimes and the regulation of sexual mores and practices. She argues, for instance, that legal changes did not always have the social ramifications we might expect and should be viewed in the longer continuum of commercialized sex transactions rather than held up as unique results of the period in which they were implemented. Furthermore, Harris introduces the book as a necessary corrective to a scholarship that for too long has used “prostitute” as a synonym for either “victim,” “criminal,” or “deviant” and seeks instead to reintroduce the corporeality of prostitution back into a discussion that has been recently dominated by discourse analysis.

The book is meticulously researched, drawing on police and medical records from Leipzig and Hamburg. The chapter design is intriguing and well emphasizes Harris’s intent of placing the everyday lives of prostitutes at the center of her analysis. Chapter 1 uses voluminous data to argue that, in many ways, the sex trade was a profession like any other and that the life trajectories of young prostitutes varied little from other women in their socioeconomic position: they worked after leaving their parents’ home until they married, and they re-entered the prostitution trade in response to unexpected economic crises. Hence, for many German women, prostitution was a “logically chosen career option” (46) that tended to be temporary and “remained a consistently viable means of achieving economic remuneration” in the years between 1914 and 1945 (55). The women Harris presents in this chapter are often resourceful and confident, law-abiding, and not necessarily the ostracized social pariahs historians make them out to be.

Chapter 2 focuses on the social “milieu” in which German prostitutes worked in this period, something that Harris claims to be novel in the historiography. Her reading of police records in search of pimps, procurers, and patrons led Harris to conclude that historians have misinterpreted the power hierarchy of the sex trade. Instead of a patriarchal and class-exploitative system, Harris presents prostitution as a “relatively mainstream, largely female-led economy, which operated in conjunction with, and inside of, a larger urban community” (97). Likewise, the chapter sketches a convincing picture of the urban geography of prostitution. The brothels, streets, homes, bars, hotels, and massage parlors she describes were firmly part of the cities of Leipzig and Hamburg and encourage us to discard stereotypical views of a profession hidden from middle-class sight.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine how German society viewed prostitutes and provide the book’s first concrete explanation of the varied and changing inscription systems. Readers who are new to the field may wish to turn to this section first if they are looking for a primer on the maze of laws and regulations that was the German regulation system. The chapters also draw links between the efforts of police officials and moral purity organizations and the “grassroots” efforts of concerned citizens to reform the sex trade in this period. In studying the increasingly central role of social welfare workers, she finds more continuity than rupture between Weimar and the Third Reich, arguing that there was “an overwhelming continuity of purpose” regarding the rehabilitation and/or imprisonment of “deviant” women before and after 1933.

Perhaps the greatest significance of this book is that it will force scholars to be more precise when discussing the modern history of female prostitution. Readers who are expecting (based on the dates in the book’s title) new insight into the nature of wartime prostitution, however, may be disappointed. Likewise, Harris discusses broad themes, but her research is limited to two German cities. Furthermore, a surprising gap in this book is a...