Josephine Mutzenbacher

Josefine Mutzenbacher

Title page from 1906
Author	Anon. (attributed to Felix Salten)[1][2]
Original title	Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt
Translator	Anon.
Country	Austria
Language	German
Genre	Erotica
Publication date	1906
Published in English	1931/1967/1973/2018
Media type	Print
Pages	383
OCLC	757734607

Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself (German: Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt) is an erotic novel first published anonymously in Vienna, Austria, in 1906. The novel is famous^[3][4][5] in the German-speaking world, having been in print in both German and English for over 100 years and sold over 3 million copies,^[6] becoming an erotic bestseller.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Although no author claimed responsibility for the work, it was originally attributed to either Felix Salten or Arthur Schnitzler by the librarians at the University of Vienna.^[11] Today, critics, scholars, academics and the Austrian Government designate Salten as the sole author of the "pornographic classic".^[12][13][14] In 2022, a stylometric analysis showed that Felix Salten is the most probable author of the novel, the final pages excluded.^[2]

The original novel uses the specific local dialect of Vienna of that time in dialogues and is therefore used as a rare source of this dialect for linguists. It also describes, to some extent, the social and economic conditions of the lower class of that time. The novel has been translated into English, Swedish, Finnish, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and Japanese among others,^[15] and been the subject of numerous films, theater productions, parodies, and university courses, as well as two sequels.

A critical, annotated edition of the German-language text was only published in 2021.^[16]