Smith’s book is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship about the history of prostitution in modern Germany. With the intent of moving beyond the standard dichotomy of victim/villain, Smith uses myriad sources to sketch a vibrant picture of women in Berlin’s sex trade from the Kaiserreich to the end of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, she argues that cultural texts (popular novels, plays, social-hygiene films, police records, and sociopolitical essays) should be read not only as reflections of their historical time periods but as important shapers of contemporary debate and discourse.
For instance, Chapter 1 uses two Otto Erich Hartleben plays, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Berlin, 1900) and August Bebel’s influential Die Frau under der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1879) to examine fin-de-siècle debates about bourgeois marriage, “free love,” and prostitution. Smith concludes that although the authors use the sex trade to criticize the institution of bourgeois marriage,...