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Keely Stauter-Halsted. The Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. 379, illus.

this second volume broadens the focus not just in terms of language and geography, but in terms of the various disciplines in the arts and sciences that were reflected in what was published. The journal’s managing editor, Isidor Singer, used the metaphor of “Spring” to characterize the potential that existed within the monarchy for transcending the divisive forces of nationalism, antisemitism, and misogyny that bedeviled political life to an increasing degree, hoping that political culture would instead be informed by innovation in a wide variety of artistic approaches—not a retreat into the aesthetic realm. Singer promoted the transnational, multiethnic, and multilingual ideals of Austria-Hungary, turning Die Zeit into a forum for a wide variety of inquiries into the arts, sociology, politics, philosophy, and religion, with a special emphasis on relations between emerging centers of modernism and their relations with the imperial capital. The volume under discussion here takes a balanced and critical approach: The fourteen essays address the central question of cultural transfer and translation in a series of inquiries into particular representative individuals who published in Die Zeit (e.g., Ivan Franko, Tomáš Masaryk, Georg Brandes) and how they articulated a particular strain of artistic modernism. The section of critical essays is followed by a representative sample of original pieces that appeared in the journal between 1894 and 1904, and the volume concludes with a very useful listing of the secondary literature on authors who were published in Die Zeit. The collection’s best essays tease out the fraught nature of the enterprise itself, that an implicit hierarchy (Germanand Vienna-centric) undermined the autonomy and appreciation of Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, South Slav, and Polish centers of artistic and scientific activity, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes overtly: “they [the authors] follow the political and cultural preconditions, the dependencies and stereotypes and the cultural hierarchies (dominance and subordination) which determined the nature of mutual relations and the opportunities for dialogue and indicate the interconnections or mere coexistence of various contexts” (382). Taken together, the essays thus perform an important service: They show the centers of creativity in Austria-Hungary to be part of a complex network of mutual benefit and influence, while at the same time emphasizing the capacity for Vienna-centric bias—seen most potently in the battles over language—to undermine the potential for cooperation and understanding. The volume itself is easy-to-use and logical in its conception and execution, and will be a welcome addition to academic libraries, while also being a useful resource for advanced students and scholars of Central European literary and artistic modernism.