The Back Side of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: The Infamously Infantile Sexuality of Josefine Mutzenbacher CLEMENS RUTHNER La Mutzenbacher, as we called the heroine of the forbidden classic of our puberty years, was as Viennese as schnitzel and as Austrian as the Imperial national anthem. (Hillary E. Holt, 1967; qtd. in Josefine Mutzenbacher 511) On the novel in question, published in 1906 and its author’s identity still a matter of conjecture and debate, opinions differ widely. While some hold it to be the only renowned contribution to erotic world literature in the German language (Widmer 21; Wiener 361), others, following a repeated and contested judgment in German courts (Farin; Glaser; Hage; Schneider), take it as a prime example of unacceptable (child) pornography. However it is seen, this legendary livre maudit must count as one of the widely read novels in German, which had a considerable influence on the sexual social- ization of generations of Central European men – with an estimated 1.3 million copies in circulation and 150,000 of the modern soft-cover version sold by 1985 (Weinzierl 25). Die Mutzenbacher, as the anonymously pub- lished text is usually called, still seems to retain its “underground” effect. Almost like a bad caricature of a “Jugendbuch,” it is still read under the desk by high school students today as it was a century ago; yet it is still only rarely discussed by academics. Or does the novel already belong to the genre of “patinated” pornography, as Horst A. Glaser (8) has suggested: a piece of harmless erotic slapstick from the “good old days” of Schorske’s “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” merely a collector’s item “für Liebhaber”? This contribution will seek to clarify these issues further in order to offer a short introduction to the novel and to foster discussion. It attempts to read this closet key-text of “Jung-Wien” as a symptom of a pedophile cryptodiscourse that has been largely ignored in cultural historiography. Thus the nature of the novel radicalizes the question of the problematic “double life” of the erotic/pornographic genre. Such literature not only undermines bourgeois aesthetics and notions of public decency with its uncensored focus on the theme of desire. It has also, since the Enlightenment, frequently pursued didactic, sociocritical, and even politically subversive strategies.