The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses. 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. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.Īfter a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. 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. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper. The world needs its dunghills, he argues.
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. It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada. 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. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?” “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. 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. 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. 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. 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 from which she’s been cast out.
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.
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. Ad for The Red House from The New York Times, 1932.Ĭatching 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.