VIENNA HAS EARNED an outsized reputation as a metropolis known for its pioneering attitudes about sexual practices and sexual health. This reputation was accentuated by the theories of Sigmund Freud, who did not back away from his sexual models even when his disciples—most famously Alfred Adler—vehemently abandoned them. In the 1920s the city served as a destination for sexually forward-thinking individuals and institutions. International sexual reform associations, many of them connected to Vienna in some way, called for “victory of sexual truth over sexual superstition” and “victory of sexual justice over sexual injustice.” Progressive sex researchers called for a fundamental change in attitudes and regulations having to do with sexual practices, hoping to overcome “prudery” and reactionary ideas of morality and sexual repression as proscribed by the hypocritical bourgeoisie and by those political and social institutions still dominated by the Catholic Church. Sexuality should no longer be a private matter but considered with its social hygienic, medical, and political aspects.

The researchers, leaders, and institutions of Red Vienna promoted the viewpoint that sexuality is both a matter of gender and a matter of class. As early as 1906, Felix Salten's anonymously published erotic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher, known for its explicit depiction of sexual practices, thoroughly connects sexual experiences, child abuse, and prostitution with housing and living conditions of the poor. The increasing spread of sexually transmitted diseases during World War I and their disastrous effects led doctors, psychoanalysts, and Social Democratic politicians to turn their attention to the sexual lives of workers. Already during the war, they discussed social policy programs and state regulation of sexual health. A network of public counseling centers within the Municipal Health Office was gradually established in Red Vienna beginning in 1919 to provide counseling on marriage, family, maternity, and sexual matters from a very strict social hygienic perspective. There was a large selection of popular scientific talks, films, and books aimed above all at educationally deprived working women, mothers, and adolescents. The workers’ press also reported regularly on the modern- day “sexual problem,” “sexual emergency,” and “sexual emotional disorders.”