Meisel-Hess’s sexological treatise Die sexuelle Krise: Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung (The Sexual Crisis: A Social-Psychological Investigation, 1909) not only locates the New Woman at the forefront of societal transformation but also characterizes the New Woman writer as a positive instigator of change through her ability to envision the world differently. This essential and uncompromising envisaging, according to Meisel-Hess, includes the representation of women in fiction: “Die Literatur, die vorbildlich und formenbildend auf das Leben wirkt (voraus wirkt), wird eingedenk eines neuen elementaren und dennoch durchaus lebensfördernden Frauentypes, der schon da ist und noch deutlicher werden wird, es lernen müssen, den Erdgeist seiner gefährlichsten Requisiten zu entkleiden und ihm die bauende Kraft des Weibes zuzugestehen” (SK 148; Literature, which exercises a constructive or formative influence upon life, must learn from the study of a new type of woman, elemental and yet life-giving, a type that already exists and is destined soon to become more pronounced—must learn to divest the earth-spirit of its most dangerous qualities and to endow it with all the constructive energies of womanhood: SC 139; translation modified for clarity). These modern depictions of the New Woman in literature, she claims, would challenge and destabilize standard representations of women as either femmes fatales or femmes fragiles and would portray women as “führend, rettend, reinigend” (SK 148; leading, rescuing, purifying).

For Meisel-Hess, it is the ardent woman who is best able to make these substantial, groundbreaking changes in literature and research, through her ability to anticipate what is to come: “Das inbrünstige Weib in Kunst und Forschung ist Trägerin und Deuterin der Ahnung” (SK 272; In art and in research the ardent woman is the receiver and interpreter of intuitions; SC 240). In Die sexuelle Krise, Meisel-Hess not only sets out to influence the emerging interdisciplinary field of sexual science through her feminist interventions but also reserves space in her sexological study for feminist literary analyses. She writes that literature by women has often led to important societal reckonings, citing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Nobel Laureate Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder (1889, Lay Down Your Arms, 1892) as catalysts for the anti-slavery movement and the international peace movement respectively (SK 269).

A year after the publication of Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit, Meisel-Hess published the final book of her sexological trilogy, Die Bedeutung der Monogamie (The Meaning of Monogamy, 1917). Although the ideas expressed in this supplement are very similar to those found in her previous book, the tone of the book is calmer, written with much less agitation and intensity. Additionally, Meisel-Hess continued to work on various literary projects during this time: a novella titled “Kriegstrauung” (Wartime Wedding), which she mentions in Die Bedeutung der Monogamie (BM 51), and a novel with the title “Der magische Strom: Ein bürgerlicher Familienroman aus Österreich-Ungarn” (The Magic Current: A Bourgeois Family Novel from Austria-Hungary). Neither of these literary works was ever published. Therefore we can only speculate on their contents. Drawing on the motif of regeneration as expressed in Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit, the 336-page typed manuscript of “Der magische Strom” could very well tell the recurring story that takes shape in her 1916 sexological study, but this time in the form of a fictional novel. If the novel indeed takes up the metaphor that she constructed in her sexological study, the magical current represents both an individual and a societal cleansing, instigated by the altruistic act of forgiveness on the part of the female protagonist. Meisel-Hess submitted the manuscript to various publishers, including the J. G. Cotta’sche Buchverlag in September 1917, but did not, to the best of my knowledge, receive any positive responses leading to an eventual publication of the book. It is difficult to assess whether this had to do with the quality of her submission, the topic at hand, or the mere fact that paper was hard to come by during the late war years. In fact, in other correspondence she had with publishers of various kinds, the paper shortage as well as the shortage of typesetters is cited as a significant issue at the time. On March 19, 1918, Meisel-Hess gave a public reading of a section of her book-in-progress titled “Scenes from Dalmatia” in the Schubertsaal in Berlin, which received a negative review in the press. Nonetheless, in a 1919 letter to Eugen Diederichs, Meisel-Hess seems quite confident that her novel would be published before long.

After over a decade in Vienna, where she completed her schooling, audited courses at the University of Vienna, and built a reputation for herself as a speaker and a writer, Grete Meisel-Hess made a courageous life change and, as a single woman, picked up and relocated to a completely new urban setting in Berlin. This move made it possible for her to participate in the expanded opportunities available in the German capital city and seek out a lifestyle suited to her personal and professional interests as a New Woman. The initial move took place in 1906, becoming official two years later when she decided to give up her Viennese apartment and transport her remaining belongings to Berlin. During her time in Berlin, Meisel-Hess lived mainly in Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, Friedenau, and Steglitz: municipalities located to the west of Berlin proper that were later incorporated into the growing metropolis of Berlin in 1920. After her move to Berlin, Meisel-Hess became a regular patron of the Café des Westens, known affectionately as the Café Größenwahn (delusions of grandeur café or the café megalomania), on the Kurfürstendamm in Charlottenburg until it closed its doors in 1915. There she engaged in animated discussions with other writers and intellectuals at the time and made networking connections that helped her set herself up as a journalist, such as interacting with Franz Pfemfert, who is known to have founded and edited the literary and political journal Die Aktion in the Café des Westens itself. After living in a number of rooms and boarding houses during her initial years in Berlin, Meisel-Hess eventually secured her own apartment, but she continued to move residences quite frequently in the years following her second marriage, choosing to remain in either Friedenau or Steglitz.

It is more than likely that Meisel-Hess was still in a relationship with Victor Tausk when she first moved to Berlin in 1906. Tausk, who had been living in Berlin since the start of the year in 1906, lived on and off in Berlin until he moved back to Vienna in 1908 to study psychoanalysis under Freud, while simultaneously starting his medical studies. His “intermezzo” with Meisel-Hess, as Victor’s spouse Martha Tausk called it, was over for certain by early 1907.

Similar to the way she challenged the notion of l’art pour l’art in literature, especially in her 1911 novel Die Intellektuellen, Meisel-Hess’s second book of her trilogy on sexology, Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit: Die sexuelle Krise in ihren Beziehungen zur sozialen Frage & zum Krieg, zu Moral, Rasse & Religion & insbesondere zur Monogamie (The Nature of Sexuality: The Sexual Crisis in its Relations to the Social Question and to War, to Ethics, Race, and Religion, and Particularly to Monogamy, 1916), is based on her viewpoint that “der Geschlechtsakt um des Geschlechtaktes willen geübt, / das l’art pour l’art in der ‘Liebe’” (WdG 617: the sexual act practiced for the sake of the sexual act, / art for art’s sake in “love”) is leading to the downfall of society. For Meisel-Hess, it was a monogamous and loving relationship between two individuals combined with responsible procreation between a woman and a man that she believed would bring about societal improvement and evolutionary progress. Das Wesen der Geschlechtlichkeit takes up many of the arguments Meisel-Hess articulated in her earlier writing, such as sexual selection, racial hygiene, colonization, and the importance of motherhood protection as a central tenet of the women’s movement, but in this book Meisel-Hess also reevaluates and questions some of her earlier feminist theories and beliefs. At times, both the tone and the content of her writing demonstrate a dramatic shift in perspective. In this chapter I focus on the context surrounding these changes, particularly Meisel-Hess’s own personal experiences in the midst of great societal upheaval, including two years of war that had already deeply affected European society.

The dedication of the book is especially revealing, as is the epigraph at the beginning of the introductory chapter, both of which allude to death and devasting destruction in the midst of the First World War and the hope of rebirth and renewal, especially as it relates to sexuality and the relationship between the sexes. This second book in her trilogy on sexology is a sizable study comprising 666 pages and published in two volumes. Although she originally thought the book would appear shortly after the 1909 publication of Die sexuelle Krise (SK x), it took seven years for the book to come to fruition.

Vienna at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, often referred to as fin-de-siècle Vienna or Vienna 1900, is characterized as overflowing with influential and vibrant intellectual innovation expressed through new advances in the creative arts, architecture, philosophy, science, and medicine. It was at this time that Freud was experimenting with dream analysis, hypnosis, and the talking cure while his so-called Doppelgänger Arthur Schnitzler brought the inner workings of the mind to the field of literature. It was also at this time that Klimt was creating his golden portraits; Arnold Schönberg was developing his theories of atonality in music; Theodor Herzl was shaping his ideas regarding political Zionism; and the architect Adolph Loos was declaring that ornament was a crime. Professor Ernst Mach, who held a chair at the University of Vienna in the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences, was quite popular among students from a wide range of disciplines, blurring the boundaries between the disciplines of philosophy and science, particularly in his discussions of sensory perceptions, inner experience, and changes in perspective. The pacifists Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Hermann Fried received the Nobel Peace prize, in 1905 and 1911 respectively, for their work in promoting peace. Meanwhile, as in most other urban centers at the time, an organized women’s movement was gaining strength and social-democratic ideas had gained political traction. It was in this atmosphere that Grete Meisel-Hess (1879–1922) emerged as a modernist feminist writer.

Grete Meisel-Hess supplied a feminist, Jewish voice to modernist discourses in the early twentieth century. Born in Prague to Jewish parents who later resettled in Vienna, Meisel-Hess became a significant literary presence in Vienna after the publication of her first novel, Fanny Roth: Eine Jung-Frauengeschichte (Fanny Roth: A Story for Young Women), in 1902. Her fiction as well as her sexual theories were influenced by many of her contemporaries, such as Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, yet she also indirectly criticized their conceptions of gender and sexuality in her own works. Shortly after publishing her second novel, Die Stimme. Roman in Blättern (The Voice: A Novel in Sheets of Paper, 1907), Meisel-Hess officially relocated to Berlin, where she set herself up as a journalist while continuing to publish her fiction.

Viennese modernism (die Wiener Moderne) commonly refers to the intellectual atmosphere in Vienna between 1890 and 1910 and to the experimental cultural products and theories that emerged in fields as diverse as literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy, linguistics, and the sciences, including new emerging medical sub-disciplines such as psychology and sexology. In the field of literature, the term literary modernism is often used interchangeably with the concept Jung-Wien (Young Vienna). This term seems to have come into being quite circuitously during a visit by Henrik Ibsen to Vienna in 1891. Piecing together excerpts from Hugo von Hofmannthal’s diary with reflections made by Hermann Bahr several decades later, the modernist scholar Gotthart Wunberg relates that the seventeen-year-old Hofmannsthal referred to “uns Jungen in Wien” (us young ones in Vienna) when he visited Ibsen in his hotel. This choice of words, according to Hofmannsthal, led to a perceived misunderstanding with Ibsen. Whereas Hofmannsthal used the words to express his admiration for Ibsen and his belief that a new generation of artists revered Ibsen and saw him as a leader in the quest for the emancipation of (and from) the self (Selbstbefreiung), Ibsen assumed that Hofmannsthal was referring to an association of young artists whose only concern was creating and producing works of art. According to Wunberg, this exchange was most likely relayed to the writer and literary critic Hermann Bahr, whom Hofmannsthal met for the first time the following week. Bahr’s reflections on Ibsen’s visit written several decades later imply that this was not only the beginning of a new literary term, but also a new consciousness that united various diverse Viennese authors: “Damit war Jungösterreich öffentlich erschienen. Aus den Händen Ibsens übernahm ich es” (With that Young-Austria was publicly coined. I accepted it from the hands of Ibsen).

The idea that the origin of the term Jung-Wien stems from Ibsen’s visit to Vienna is both noteworthy and ironic. First, Ibsen was not only an iconic symbol of modernism, but his writing represented a literary style that many Viennese modernists were attempting to challenge and move beyond. Second, the term, as used by Hofmannsthal, connotes that it was a male movement (“uns Jungen” in the sense of “us boys”), as well as a youthful and innovative one.

Who was the New Woman of the early twentieth century and what did she signify? Was it a constructed trope or a lived reality? How did this personified image differ in the early years of the twentieth century from the New Woman of the Weimar Republic in Germany or the First Republic in Austria? And what did it mean to be new? How was the “new” perceived compared with the “old,” that is, how did the New Woman compare to the generations of women who came before? Much of the scholarship on the image of New Woman in German-speaking contexts has concentrated on the New Woman in the Weimar Republic in Germany as expressed through literature, film, pop culture, as well as real people in their daily lives of work and leisure.

With greater access to birth control, increased employment opportunities, voting rights, and new forms of entertainment and amusement, women in the Weimar Republic lived life differently from those women who came before them. Julia Roos, for example, describes the New Woman as not only sexually liberated, but as “young, unmarried, and childless, [who] earned her own income, and wore her hair cropped short in the androgynous Bubikopf (pageboy) style.” Helen Boak also reaffirms the image of the economically dependent and sexually liberated New Woman with her Bubikopf and “short skirt over her androgynous figure,” while also explaining that this construct of the New Woman was complex, multifaceted, and dynamic rather than static. Not only did the image of the New Woman proliferate broadly through advertising, film, and photography, but, according to Katie Sutton, it was “rarely understood as a single or homogenous [sic] ‘type.’” The image of the New Woman in the Weimar Republic was taken up across socioeconomic classes and signified a blurring of gender that also affected men as well as women. Furthermore, it challenged heteronormative structures and expectations, especially in conjunction with the sex-reform movements, particularly the work of the homosexual-rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld and his work on transgender issues, cross-dressing, and the “Third Sex.”

Yet, although the construction of the New Woman has been most widely studied in the context of the German Weimar Republic, it was not limited to that time or place.

THE #METOO MOVEMENT provides a powerful platform to collect and publicize the testimony of victims of sexual harassment and violence. It has provided a platform for formerly invisible victims of sexual assault, empowered women and young girls, and addressed persistent cultural blind spots about gendered violence. To date, #MeToo has supported white middle-class women, actresses, women of color, incarcerated women, female domestic workers, and female veterans. Yet #MeToo excludes accounts of sex workers, thereby implicitly discrediting their experiences of abuse and perpetuating the still widespread societal belief that prostitutes cannot be sexually harassed or raped since they are women who are always consenting. The historical persuasiveness of that view is reflected in jurisdiction skewed against prostitutes, as legal scholar Barbara Sullivan documented. Some argue that not only the exclusion of professional sex workers from the debate but also the #MeToo movement's explicit support of Survivor's Agenda, an organization that lobbies for the legalization of sex work, is alarming and antithetical to their proclaimed goal of strengthening women's rights. The fluid boundaries between voluntary and coerced sex work and life as a prostitute are subjects of Teresa Ruiz Rosas's 2013 novel, Nada que declarer, which raises questions that substantially enrich the #MeToo discourse.

Rosas's novel addresses the issue of legalized and allegedly well-regulated prostitution in Germany through the story of the eighteen-year-old protagonist, Diana Postigo, who was brought from Peru to Germany and forced into prostitution. While the story is fictional, Ruiz Rosas's work is well researched and reflects frequently employed recruitment methods and working conditions of some of those sex workers who offer their services in brothels. In the novel, the author draws on her intimate familiarity with her country of origin, Peru, and her knowledge of Germany, her country of residence since the early 1990s. In both places, Ruiz Rosas has been involved in raising awareness about gendered violence, human trafficking, and exploitation in the prostitution industry.

This chapter investigates the systematic murder of Muslim clerics beginning from 2012 to the end of 2016 as an entry point to understanding how the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime re-articulated the Muslim conundrum. It argues that the murders fit within the attempt of the state to support Old Kampala-based Islam as a centre of Muslims’ representation vis-à-vis Kibuli and other emerging centres of Muslim leadership. It shows that historical Muslim ‘problems’, such as social-political-economic marginalization, which the NRM inherited, influenced the political status and role of Muslims within the NRM regime while in turn cultivating a special role for state agents within the Muslim publics. Following from the previous deliberations, this chapter demonstrates the consequences of the attempt of various Muslim elites to articulate a particular interpretation of Islam that imagined political jihad as the antidote to Muslim historical social-political-economic marginalization, which invited state responses that turned Muslim violence into an internal civil war.

By situating the questions, ‘who are the Muslims’ and ‘how do they express Islam?’ it demonstrates how the NRM transformed the Muslim question from representation to belonging – understood as allegiance to NRM patronage of Muslims, This was born within the 1986 revolution, but intensified in the 1990s when the regime sought to thwart Muslim militancy (ADF) from its political gains in Buganda. Intra-Muslim schisms therefore also contributed to state intervention. The theoretical contribution of this chapter is to question the assumption that violent state action against forms of ‘religious radicalism’ from social groups arises from the state’s desire to subdue political opposition, negating the internal agency and capacity for radical actions arising from particular forms of religious expression. Following Asad, my contribution fuses ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ explanations for violent action to demonstrate that the appeal to ‘religious’ expressions has consequences for ‘secular’ power. Unable to marshal a spirited force to thwart its ‘enemy’, ‘religious’ agency invites the intervention of secular power to inscribe and continue instances of domination. As Foucault emphasized, violence here becomes its own victim.

This chapter also speaks to some legacies of the colonial era that continued and intensified under NRM governance.