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.

[16] The publisher's preface – formatted as an obituary and excluded from all English translations until 2018 – tells that Josefine left the manuscript to her physician before her death from complications after a surgery.

The story is told from the point of view of an accomplished aging 50-year-old Viennese courtesan who is looking back upon the sexual escapades she enjoyed during her unbridled youth in Vienna.

Contrary to the title, almost the entirety of the book takes place when Josephine is between the ages of 5–13 years old, before she actually becomes a licensed prostitute in the brothels of Vienna.

Although the German-language text makes use of witty nicknames – for instance, the curate's genital is called "a hammer of mercy" – for human anatomy and sexual behavior, its content is entirely pornographic.

[27] In 1931, a bookseller called Josef Kunz was convicted in Vienna for a public act of obscenity because he had published a new edition of the novel, and the copies of the book were confiscated.

[28] In 1971, however, the Supreme Court of Austria decided that there is no longer reason to punish a publisher for distributing the novel because there are artistic tendencies in the work.

However, the significance of the case came to eclipse Josefine Mutzenbacher as an individual work, because it set a precedent as to which has a larger weight in German Law: Freedom of Expression or The Protection of Youth.

The Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (BPjM or "Federal inspection department for youth-endangering media") collates books, movies, video games and music that could be harmful to young people because they contain violence, pornography, Nazism, hate speech and similar dangerous content.

The case concerns whether the intrinsic merit of the book as a work of art supersedes the potential harm its controversial contents could have on the impressionable minds of minors and whether or not it should be "indexed".

[33] The BPjM maintained that the book was pornographic and dangerous to minors because it contained explicit descriptions of sexual promiscuity, child prostitution, and incest as its exclusive subject matter, and promoted these activities as positive, insignificant, and even humorous behaviors in a manner devoid of any artistic value.

In 1978 a third publishing house attempted to issue a new edition of Josefine Mutzenbacher that included a foreword and omitted the "glossary of Viennese vulgarisms" from the 1969 version.

The court's ruling forced the BPjM to temporarily remove the Rowohlt edition of Josefine Mutzenbacher from its list of youth-endangering media.

[31] According to the BPjM, one reason was that, because of the archaic language and parodic style of depiction, the book was no longer considered to conduce its readers to imitate the abusive sexual practices described within.

The BPjM also noted that according to current scholarly opinion, the book shows remarkable literary merit, for instance, by tending to present new perspectives to autobiographical works of literature.

[38] In 1976 the heirs of Felix Salten – more precisely, his granddaughter Lea Wyler – demanded the German publishing company Rogner & Bernhard to stop distributing the novel Josefine Mutzenbacher and to pay royalties.

[40] Ten years later, in June 1986, the heirs instituted an action at the Munich Landgericht court against Rogner & Bernhard, claiming that Salten's authorship could be proven, although they only provided circumstantial evidence.

[51] He was inspired to write the novel after being astounded at both the prevalence of child abuse stories in the German press and having read Josephine Mutzenbacher's blatantly unapologetic depiction of the same.

In Auch Fummeln will gelernt sein, the male lead ("Peter Planer") plays a sexually dysfunctional army officer who is about to be married.

Teil, is routinely cited as one of the best films to emerge from pornography's so-called golden age, thanks to Billian's inventive direction and the unselfconscious charm of Patricia Rhomberg.

Billian's Das Haus der geheimen Lüste (1979) is an unrelated pornographic feature in nineteenth-century costume that has been reissued as a Josephine Mutzenbacher film.

For Mutzenbacher, Ruth Beckermann filmed a hundred men reading from and reacting to Salten's novel in what was supposedly a casting call for a new movie adaptation.

[4][59][60][61][62][63][64] In 2002 the German actor Jürgen Tarrach and the jazz group CB-funk performed a live rendition of the texts of Josephine Mutzenbacher and Shakespeare set to modern music composed by Bernd Weißig and arranged by the Pianist Detlef Bielke of the Günther-Fischer-Quintett at the Kalkscheune [de] in Berlin.

[65][66][67] In January 2005, Austrian actress Ulrike Beimpold gave several comedy cabaret live performances of the text of Josephine Mutzenbacher at the Auersperg15-Theater in Vienna, Austria.

[74] My father was a very poor journeyman saddler who worked from morning till evening in a shop in the Josefstadt, as the eighth district of Vienna is called.

In order to be there at seven in the morning, he had to get up at five and leave half an hour later to catch the horse-drawn streetcar that delivered him after one and a half-hour's ride at a stop near his working place.

Rich people did live in the outer districts to the north and northwest, but the western and southern suburbs constituted what we called the "workers' ghetto".

One was a dark-haired young fellow with sad eyes who made a scant living as a locksmith's apprentice and hardly ever washed his sooty face.

My mother had taken my two brothers to a nearby empty lot that was covered with wild grass and shrubbery where the boys could play, and my father was not yet home from work.

One of these lodgers, whom I remember particularly well, was an apprentice locksmith, a dark, sad-featured young chap who had tiny black eyes and a face that was always covered with soot.