Catching up with my friend the Dutch translator and publisher (Van Maaskant Haun) Meta Gemert, I learned about a neglected Austrian best-seller from over 100 years ago that’s beginning to experience a comeback: Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus, which was published in English in 1932 as The Red House. The English version, published in the U. S. by The Macaulay Company and in the U.K. by T. Werner Laurie, sold poorly and quickly disappeared, which is why the only way to get your hands on a copy is via Inter-Library Loan.
Jerusalem, born Else Kotányi to Hungarian Jewish parents in Vienna in 1876, was a pioneer in her interest in the sociology and economics of the sex trade, and The Red House was the result of her study of the operations of Vienna’s brothels. The book centers on Milada, who comes to the Red House, an apartment house in Vienna’s red-light district, when her mother Katherine, comes to the city from a small town in Bohemia after being cast out as an undesirable. Though she has a chance to send Milada away to a convent school, Katherine sees no point in trying to better her daughter’s lot: “Why should she be any better than her mother?” she asks.
Katherine dies when Milada is still young, but the girl becomes a fixture as the house changes hands and becomes more of an upscale brothel in the hands of Else Goldscheider. Mrs. Goldscheider introduces Milada into the business in her teens, first serving wine in the house’s lounge and later turning her into a working girl at the age of sixteen. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?”
One of the house’s regulars, Horner, takes a liking to Milada and tries to educate her in the realities of how prostitution operates as an integral element of “decent” society. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada.
It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. But if you take it in your hand it discharges a dark brown fluid and your prying nose is rewarded for its curiosity by a most malevolent stench.
The world needs its dunghills, he argues. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper.
Milada acts as Jerusalem’s eyes and ears inside the world of prostitution in Vienna, noting the range of clients, from middle-class merchants to dashing young noblemen to self-righteous city fathers. She also learns how Mrs. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.
After a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. Goldscheider sells the business to Miss Miller, a former housekeeper for a country parson and a woman ill-suited to the task emotionally and practically. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses.
The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. Jerusalem saw the sex trade not only as a feminist but also as one familiar with Marxism, and Nelly Spizzari — with “more energy and less conscience than all previous owners” — represents capitalism at its most brutally efficient and exploitative:
Under the Spizzari System The Red House speedily lost its unique position among establishments of its kind. Rapidly it sank to the lowest grade. Mrs. Spizzari had no understanding of, nor indeed any use for, the atmosphere of middle class respectability which had been the main attraction in The Red House. She had no use for girls who would have fitted in such surroundings, for she demanded of them services that the former Red House inmates, down to the most reckless of them, would have refused with shudders.
Spizzari takes advantage of the desperate poverty of some Viennese families to procure new girls cheaply and in their early teens:
One pet enterprise of the energetic Spizzari was to buy very young girls from inhuman parents who gloated over the purchase price, whether as straight cash or a monthly rent. With these innocent unfortunates in her power, Mrs. Spizzari would perform all sorts of manipulations, operating on them herself, cutting and stitching. She had a special technique of virgin-exploitation, which she managed to keep hidden from the medical inspector….
Into this toxic environment comes a young doctor, Gus Brenner, a well-intentioned crusader from a good family. Though he avoids the attempts of some of the girls to seduce him, he and Milada fall in love. In the hands of a typical romantic novelist of the time, Brenner might have become the knight in shining white armor who rescues Milada. In the hands of the scientifically-minded Jerusalem, however, such matches are only the stuff of fantasies. If Milada does manage to escape from the Red House, it is not without carrying her share of emotional and psychological scars.
Der heilige Skarabäus became a best-seller in continental Europe, being translated into Hungarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It took over two decades, however, for the book to reach English readers, and then in an apparently abridged version. The Macaulay Company edition of The Red House runs to just over 300 pages, while catalogue records show that the original Austrian edition came to well over 600.
Though coming after the Jazz Age, the English version, titled The Red House, still seemed too controversial for Anglophones. “Readers who can stomach the subject of this novel will find it exceedingly well done,” wrote one brief review in The Spectator. “Those who cannot (the theme is prostitution) are advised to leave it alone.” The New York Times’ review acknowledged that, “The moral tone of the book is unquestionably sincere and lofty, its revelation of conditions convincing in every detail, and its aunguished protest driven home with terrible and arresting truth.” Still, the reviewer cautioned, “There seems small likelihood of a book so exclusively indigenous and alien to the American reader’s ken meeting with a kindred acclaim in its English version.”
Soon after, the book fell into disfavor in Austria and Germany, but for political rather than critical reasons. In questioning the moral integrity of good bürger society, Der heilige Skarabäus was quickly banned by the Nazis and Jerusalem’s work joined that of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig on their bonfires.
By that time, however, she was no longer Else Jerusalem, having divorced her first husband and married an academic named Viktor Widakowich. She and Widakowich emigrated to Buenos Aires. Though she found Argentina largely lacking in cultural life, it soon become too difficult to consider returning to Europe and she died there in 1943.
Only recently has the book been resurrected for German-language readers. Austrian publisher Albert Eibl released a new edition, with an afterword by Professor Brigitte Spreitzer of the University of Graz, from his Das Vergessene Buch (the Forgotten Book) press. You may recall my mention of Eibl’s rescue of Maria Lazar’s novel Leben verboten!, which was published in English (also in an abridged version) in 1934 as No Right to Live.
Daniel Elkind published an article about The Red House in Lapham’s Quarterly earlier this year: House Warning: Revisiting Else Jerusalem’s critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and exploitation. As Elkind writes, “The double standard Jerusalem exposed in her novel persists: it is still more acceptable to hire a sex worker than it is to be one.” Blogger Edith LaGraziana (Edith of Graz, a pseudonym) also wrote about the book back in 2016: The Red House by Else Jerusalem