Today, I was lucky to have been part of a tiny walking tour entitled Josefine Mutzenbacher – on the paths of lust in old Vienna. Josefine Mutzenbacher was a famous 19th Century Viennese whore, but she was completely fictitious. There’s more on that story over at AstridL’s Pages.
Our guide, Rotraud Turanicz, took six of us from the Vienna Poetry Academy on a lively tour in English through the history of Vienna’s (im) moral lives.
The group included Ayu Utami,
an Indonesian writer and Libor Havranek, who has just translated Ayu’s prize-winning novel, Saman, into Czech. I don’t want to steal Rotraud’s thunder, so rather than tell you all the secrets we discovered thanks to her passionate and witty walking presentation that lasted a full two hours, I’ll just say, come to Vienna and take the tour. It’s an experience.
