delirium clemens

 
“What does ‘Bambi’ have to do with a Viennese prostitute of the 19th century? What is the ‘cushion method’ or even a ‘porcelain ride’? These and similar questions are answered in the guided walk ‘Josefine Mutzenbacher – the paths of desire in Old Vienna’. Curious?”

The Viennese tourism industry is pretty inventive: they have come up with a Mutzenbacher Walk, a guided tour following the footsteps of one of the most famous (fictitious) sex-workers of fin-de-siècle Vienna.One the one hand, the dark side of the Habsburg capital is revealed to the visitors: the contemporary socio-cultural issues of prostitution, sexuality, and bigotry (see the Spittelberg, the former red-light district of the time below); on the other hand, seriously problematic aspects of the Mutzenbacher novel (its paedophile layers) are ignored for nice business, it seems. Also the quoted article is rather uncritical > text & photos
(c) wieninternational.at 2012

On the socio-historical ‘reality’ of prostitution in fin-de-siècle Vienna > essay

This entry was posted on 5 September 2012 at 08:00 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Austria, Fin-de-siècle, guided tours, Josefine Mutzenbacher, Literature, pornograpgy, prostitution, sexuality, tourism, Vienna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.