In 1905, Just A Year After He Began Publishing his father’s works in twenty-one volumes, Friedrich Fontane, son of Theodor, published Tagebuch einer Verlorenen: Von einer Toten. Herausgegeben von Margarete Böhme (Diary of a Lost Woman: By One Who is Dead. Edited by Margarete Böhme). It sold 90,000 copies within a year, within two years reached its hundredth edition, and by the 1920s had sold around 1.2 million copies, not counting sales of the translations into fourteen languages. In 1918, Richard Oswald directed film versions of Tagebuch einer Verlorenen and of Dida Ibsens Geschichte (The Story of Dida Ibsen), the sequel Böhme published in 1907. G. W. Pabst’s film with Louise Brookes in the title role appeared in 1929. A luxury edition of 1907, marking the hundredth issue of the novel, was republished in 1988. Suhrkamp brought out an edition in 1994, but at the time of writing no German edition is in print, though the original English version of 1907 has just been reissued. Böhme never came out as the author, and in 1935 even gave up the copyright rather than admit to authorship.

Within a year of the publication of Böhme’s novel in Berlin, Josefine Mutzenbacher, Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, von ihr selbst erzählt (The History of a Viennese Prostitute, Told by Herself, 1906) was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies in Vienna by Fritz Freund, a small publisher specializing in erotica. Seemingly more up front than Böhme’s anonymous lost woman, Josefine Mutzenbacher is in fact a fictional character whose apparently shameless admission of authorship of her life’s history added to its piquancy. Although suspicion fell initially on Arthur Schnitzler, the author is generally held to be Felix Salten, a well-known figure in the Viennese literary scene, the rumor of his authorship having been promoted by Karl Kraus after a spectacular falling out between the two men. Josefine Mutzenbacher is a widely read pornographic classic. It has spawned many imitations and inspired numerous films, as well as Fifi Mutzenbacher (2000), a parody in seven episodes by Wolfgang Bertrand, performed by Helmut Qualtinger. After its first appearance the novel came out in various editions through the decades; though exact figures are hard to come by, one critic suggests a figure of 1.3 million copies in circulation.