Aggteleki (now Kiss József) Street, which was run by Fáni Lichtenfeld; on Magyar Street, run by .... Ágoston Dumitreánu, the chief doctor of the Budapest police.
1 Prostitution in Budapest in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century1 Markian Prokopovych Author Original for Jean-‐Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodriguez Garcia and Paul Servais, eds., The Kinsie reports. The League of Nations and its Investigation into Traffic for Prostitution in the 1920s (Geneva: supported by the Institutional Memory Section of the United Nations Office, forthcoming) Historical background Similarly to the other parts of Europe, prostitution in Austria-‐Hungary was increasingly recognised by reformers and “respectable” society as a phenomenon of massive proportions and a cause of alarm during the nineteenth century. It is not surprising, then, that the perception of the nature of prostitution, the underlying social and cultural factors fostering it, as well as its consequences for the social order were similar to other parts of Europe. Prostitution was seen as a necessary evil that could not be eradicated, and its apparent unprecedented expansion to the public spaces of Vienna and Budapest a natural consequence of particularly rapid urbanization. Regulationism predominated over other approaches as a policy within government and municipal structures. Naturally, the exact nature of the implemented policies was also shaped by local traditions of municipal governance and the police, and by cultural norms. In comparison with Vienna, which was a Catholic stronghold and where the attempts at introducing regulatory norms and legislation was for decades strongly opposed by the clerical elite that saw it as a policy “legalizing the whores”, late nineteenth-‐century Hungary and its capital city traditionally practiced a much more laissez-‐faire attitude in line with other initiatives of the ruling Liberal government. Thus while the system of regulation was similar to that of Cisleithania, the enforcement of this regulation was different in a sense that the Hungarian authorities were given fewer powers of coercion and control.
The first attempts to control prostitution in Hungary were recorded during the 1848 revolution,
when the Hungarian government requested its army to make weekly checks of the “girls” it frequented. In the decade following the crashing of the revolution, prostitution thrived in pubs, coffee houses and streets of the Hungarian capital. Of somewhat better repute were the so called courtesan houses (kéjnőtelepek), in which not only the residence but also the employment of prostitutes was secured. This 1
I would like to thank Susan Zimmermann for her careful reading and critique of the draft of this article.
2 laid foundations for the establishment of formal brothels in Hungary, which differed from other, earlier institutions of sex trade such as the courtesan houses, flophouses and baths in that they possessed a specifically designed meeting place, the salon. The existence of brothels was formally recognised by the guidelines of Pest municipal government from 31 October 1867, the year of the Austrian-‐Hungarian Compromise. After the issuing of regulations, it was attempted to convert every courtesan house into a brothel and to confine every prostitute within it. Naturally, from that point onwards the brothels were also to function within the mainstream market society, and had to put up with competition, pay their taxes and accept regular supervision of the municipal police. Prostitutes were issued medical identity cards and the police decided, in each particular case, how much a brothel should ask for its services and how big the government levy should be. In each legal instance that concerned the brothels it was again the police who decided on the outcome. This often resulted in the blossoming of corruption between the top of the police and the madams. Additionally, residents of public houses were also often made fully dependent on their owners due to the need to borrow clothes and other items necessary for the trade. Since most of prostitutes came from a poor background, very few of them were in the position to pay their debts to the house and leave if they so desired. They often worked in a Spartan environment and many of the brothels were quite apart from their romanticised ideal of purple plush furniture and piano music that they have acquired later and elsewhere. Tough competition also meant the need to regularly change the women “on offer”, which in turn resulted in an increase of a turnover of prostitutes between different establishments and also, importantly, in a more active circulation (and sometimes a trafficking) of women to other places within the Monarchy and beyond. The known cases confirm the hypothesis that while transnational and transatlantic movement of men and women active in the sex trade somewhat subsided with the signing of the international agreements of 1904 and 1910 and the subsequent imposition of national legislations, internal circulation remained much more common. In this situation, Budapest with its reputation of booming entertainment industry, entrepreneurial spirit and a large number of brothels and street prostitutes often functioned as a main source of supply and demand. Hungarian prostitutes were known to have operated in Vienna and Prague, but also in Hamburg, further west in Argentina and Brasil, and further East in Constantinople, Alexandria and the Russian Empire. Similar to the case with Polish women, the pejorative term “hungara” (and also its equivalent in several Slavic languages, “vengerka”) came to connote a cheap prostitute of Hungarian origin abroad. The contemporary discussion of the issue of white slave trade was also strongly influenced by the growth of anti-‐Semitism
3 in Hungary; the press reports thus routinely exaggerated the proportion of “Jewish traffickers” in the transnational and transatlantic prostitution networks. Map 1. Budapest’s central districts with recorded prostitution (on a 1929 map)
4
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the brothels of Budapest proliferated in the
predominantly Jewish VI Ditrict of Terézváros, which was also renowned for its entertainment industry, on Király, Mozsár, Nagymező and Ó Street. In the neighbouring VII District of Erzsébetváros, the notable locations were on Akácfa, Dob and Dohány Street and across the ring boulevard Erzsébet körút on Hársfa Street, and in the poor VIII district near the Eastern (Keleti) Railway Station, on and around Konti (today Tolnai Lajos Street), Bérkocsis and Nagy Fuvaros Streets. The latter area was also a place where shipping companies specialising in transatlantic migration ran cheap hotels for an overnight stopping in Budapest on the way towards the European ports of departure. Further research would be necessary to assess whether the two networks – of transatlantic migration and of prostitution – overlapped in any way as their proximity to each other and to the railway station is clearly evident. On the other hand, more expensive services, or “cockerel houses” (kakasos házak) as they were known, such as the most renown Maison Frida, were available in the city center, beyond the inner ring road Múzeum körút along Magyar, Bastya, Képíró and Királyi Pál Streets. The most prominent establishments was the brothel on Aggteleki (now Kiss József) Street, which was run by Fáni Lichtenfeld; on Magyar Street, run by the Rose of Pest (Pest Rózsája, real name Rozália Schumayer); on Hímző Street belonging to Rézi Luft; several more houses in the inner city run by Jeanette Waldau and Martha Niemeyer, and finally a brothel of Fanny Reich, the wife of Budapest’s notorious police cheif Elek Thaisz. According to police reports, even some of these “better” establishments, such as the brothel on Aggteleki Street, contained large store rooms divided into several compartments with “thin wooden walls" and were, therefore, a far cry from the luxury services they claimed to be offering.
From the middle of the nineteenth century and until the new legislation of 1885, prostitutes
were operating in brothels while an even larger number worked on the streets and in rented flats. According to Thaisz, who based his estimate on the records of the municipal police, over forty brothels functioned in Budapest in 1878, which employed 281 prostitutes. At the same time, the police recorded about 900 prostitutes walking the street and over 700 in the unregistered brothels known to the authorities in the very same year. Investigations conducted by the police and independent sources further confirm the proliferation of street prostitution. Covert (unregistered) prostitution was mostly concentrated in the same or the nearby areas to the ones that hosted the majority of brothels: in houses on the main thoroughfares surrounding the VI and VIII ditricts, on Múzeum körút, Andrássy and
5 Rákóczy Street and Baross Square. Later on, it also spread to the greater ring, Nagy-‐körut, Váczi körut (now Bajcsy-‐Zsilinszky Street) and along Kossuth Lajos Street.2 Map 2. Recorded locations of prostitution in Budapest in the early 20th century (on a 1929 map)
Major areas of street prostition: A. Inner ring road (Károly körút – Múzeum körút – Vámház körút); B. Rákóczy út and Kossuth Lajos út; C. Outer ring road (Teréz körút – Erzsébet körút). D. Andrássy út; E. Váczi körut (Bajcsy-‐ Zsilinszky út); F. Baross tér; G. Rottenbiller utca (mostly homosexual prostitution); H. City park (Városliget, mostly homosexual prostitution). Streets with existing brothels until 1928: VI Ditrict (Terézváros): 1. Király utca; 2. Mozsár utca; 3. Nagymező utca; 4. Ó utca. VII District (Erzsébetváros): 5. Akácfa utca; 6. Dob utca; 7. Dohány utca; 8. Hársfa utca. VIII District (Józsefváros): 9. Aggteleki utca; 10. Bérkocsis utca; 11. Konti utca (today Tolnai Lajos utca); 12. Nagy Fuvaros utca. Inner City District (Belváros): 13. Bastya utca; 14. Királyi Pál utca; 15. Magyar utca.
2
Information on homosexual prostitution is very scarce. However, according to some reports it prospered on a party overlapping territory: Dohány Street, Baross Square, Rottenbiller Street, Erzsébet Square and the City Park (Városliget).
6
According to historian Mihály Szécsényi there were 104 illegally functioning courtesan houses in
addition to the officially registered brothels in the city centre in 1878. While the intention had been to eventually legalise most of them, the authorities clearly lacked the resources and the intention to do so, and the number of both registered and covert prostitutes , if we are to trust press and police reports, seems to have increased within a decade. From 1885 onwards, when the police launched a curb on brothels, sex for sale was on offer increasingly in Budapest’s famous music halls, the so-‐called orpheums, and later in varietés and cabarets (for example, Jardin de Paris and Jardin d'Hiver), but also in some coffee houses, hotels, inns, and baths (in particular, in the garden of the Lukács Bath). Contemporary accounts speak of the fame of Budapest as a center of prostitution that surpassed that of its historic places of interest in the eyes of tourists. Some prostitutes were also employed elsewhere and practiced their trade only during the evening hours or at night. Many of them were young maids and seasonal workers, and some were also married. In 1894, there were over 500 prostitutes in the registered forty-‐four brothels, while there was an even larger number, over 600, of registered streetwalkers. From 1909 the police kept account of and issued health cards, the so-‐called “yellow cards” (sárga lapok) not only to registered prostitutes but also to all waitresses, maids, hotel maids and other women who were only suspected to work as prostitutes. All this resulted in the situation when, in 1912, the number of street prostitutes was a double of those operating in brothels (769 to 321), while at the same time the number of brothels, like in other cities in Central Europe, was significantly lower than a decade before (twenty-‐one). Legislation and Societal Reaction The regulation law of 1876 simply adapted the approach of the earlier one from 1867 in that prostitution was the concern of the police only inasmuch as it constituted a threat to public health and order. In 1881, the authority of the municipal police to protect “public morals” was expanded. In 1885, János Török replaced Elek Thaisz as Budapest’s police chief and, in consequence, the policy towards prostitution changed, as well, and the police closed down thirty-‐six brothels on the allegations of corruption. The new regulation, also introduced in 1885 to replace the earlier 1876 law, thus marked the end of the brothel era and the transfer of sex trade to other locations, such as orpheums, hotels, baths and cafes. The Statute of 1885 for the first time recognised prostitution outside of brothels (the so-‐ called “discreet” prostitution) as an existing phenomenon, the regulation of which became the task of the police authorities. Once recognised as an existing phenomenon, a number of restrictions on the code of dress and behaviour were set to registered prostitutes: for example, “roaming the streets” and
7 “disturbing public peace” in any other way, wearing their hair loose or “conspicuous disclosure” of busts in public were prohibited. Additionally, operation was forbidden in the vicinity of schools and churches, on the Danube promenade and on the main boulevards, Andrássy, Váci and Fürdő Streets. Even more effort than the one dedivated to the curbing of registered brothels and other in-‐door venues the was directed against street prostitution. Covert (unregistered) prostitution was a matter of increasingly strict police control, and, in case of the breach of law, could result in compulsory medical examination or being sent to an asylum or prison. Both unregistered prostitution and the break of various rules attached to registered prostitution, Susan Zimmermann has shown, had consequences which were practically identical to the treatment of undeserving paupers and vagabonds in that the authorities treated them as undesirable and attempted to remove them from public areas. In those cases when their legally defined place of origin and belonging was a community other than Budapest the authorities would remove them from the capital altogether. An entire relocation transport system by rail for the “undeserving poor” existed in Hungary since the 1860s that deported offenders of public order back to their places of origin. This relocation system was part of a larger policy of poor relief operated by the local and the national governments. At least as early as the late 1860s the health card system was in function in Budapest, which was seen at the time as the best way to tackle clandestine street prostitution by way of offering women “discreet” registration and subjecting them, at the same time, to regular medical examination. From the 1890s onwards, detectives in civilian clothes were roaming the streets in order to monitor unregistered street prostitution. Medical treatment of venereal diseases was made compulsory already in 1881 and a Disinfection Institute (Fertőtlenítő Intézetet) was established in 1892. After 1893, Budapest authorities introduced compulsory sanitary inspection of all hotels in the city, thereby subjecting all female hotel employees to regular medical checkups in an assumption that they might be prostitutes. The main concern, of course, was the health and wellbeing of their male customers, and generally the alarming spread of venereal diseases among the urban population. Regular raids of select bars and other suspicious establishments were made, and those women who were detained and found to have venereal diseases were forcibly sent to a hospital. In that year, there were fourteen police doctors for over 1,100 registered prostitutes. The new prostitution regulation from 1909 concerned patrolling not only streets but other areas of public space: coffee houses, hotels, dens, dance halls, orpheums and dance schools. Cases of police misjudgment, which exposed any “suspect” woman to the same procedure by mistake, were reported in the press and lamented by activists. In this context,
8 Zimmermann and others note, the criteria for “appropriate” behaviour in public space were so strict and the definition of prostitution so fluid that in fact every woman could potentially be subjected to a similar procedure if they refused to conform to gendered middle-‐class norms and modes of behaviour in public. Apart from having initiated, reluctantly, the monitoring of white slave traffic after having acceded to the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic in Paris in 1904 and 1910, which was only passed as a law by the Hungarian Parliament in 1912, the police limited itself to further regulationist measures. Other approaches, which questioned the adequacy of fin-‐de-‐siècle double morals allowing men much more sexual freedom, were in Hungary almost exclusively limited to the liberal-‐progressive feminist movement, such as the Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesület), founded by a small group of women around Vilma Glücklich in 1904. In contrast to other movements in the region, the Feminist Association as an organization did not campaign for abolitionism. While individual representatives repeatedly declared themselves publicly against the system, they saw general poverty and ignorance as the main causes of prostitution and therefore argued for more economic independence for women in modern society, for greater awareness about the nature of sexual relations and for progressive sex education. They believed that with the advent of modernism new types of relationship would emerge that would eventually make prostitution redundant. However, even their politics, aimed at least in principle at the prevention of prostitution through promoting women’s paid work and economic independence, were somewhat ambivalent. The Feminist Association supported the new ethics of partnership-‐based intimate relationships between women and men, void of the double-‐standard, and promoted these new ethics as a normative standard of behaviour for all women, including prostitutes and former prostitutes. By implication, this meant that prostitutes and other women who were not willing to accommodate to this standard or who continued to behave differently remained outside of the reform horizon. Factors such as the typically for Central Europe higher social status of a prostitute in comparison to that of a female factory worker or a maid, and the fact that some lower class young women would actually work as prostitutes after work in order to make ends meet or for other reasons was beyond the eyesight and rhetoric of the Feminist Association. Other, more traditionalist women’s groups suggested that the solution to the double morals issue was to try to restrict the sexual freedom for men, and attempted to “improve” the morals of the prostitutes by providing them with different values in the first place. Other prominent people involved in the discussion were Leó Liebermann, a medical doctor and a founder of the Association for the Protection Against Venereal Diseases (Venereás Betegségek Elleni Országos Védõ Egyesület, founded in 1913) and Ágoston Dumitreánu, the chief doctor of the Budapest police. The lack of the outspoken abolitionist
9 movement resulted in the survival of brothels and street prostitution in Budapest for almost a decade longer than in other cities of Central Europe. In the increasingly restrictive political atmosphere of the Horthy regime, the nationalist-‐conservative government of István Bethlen also changed its policy towards prostitution in the 1920s as part of their efforts to consolidate the political system of interwar Hungary. After the new prostitution law of 1926 no new permissions to run brothels were issued, and from 1 May 1928 all the existing permissions were withdrawn, as well. This marked the end of the liberal approach to prostitution that characterised Budapest and Hungary during the previous decades. Bibliography A nő és a társadalom. A Feministák Egyesülete és a Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete hivatalos közlönye. Vol. I. (2), 1 February 1907. Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-‐1939 (Schocken Books, 1983). Melissa Hope Ditmore, Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Vol. 1, 195-‐96. Judit Forrai, A budapesti prostitúció szabályozásának története 1820-‐1926. Dissertation for the degree of the candidate of sciences, Budapest, 1994. Judit Forrai, “A budapesti prostitúció múltjából”, in: Lenke Fehér and Judit Forrai, Prostitúció, prostitúcióra kényszerítés, emberkereskedelem: kézikönyv a megelőzés és áldozat-‐segítés oktatásához (Budapest, 1999). Judit Forrai, ed., Civilization, Sexuality and Social Life in Historical Context : the Hidden Face of Urban Life (Budapest, 1995). Judit Forrai, “Kávéházak és kéjnők”, Budapesti negyed 12-‐13 (1996), 110-‐120. Mary Gluck, “Jewish Humor and Popular Culture in Fin-‐de-‐Siecle Budapest”, Austrian History Yearbook XXXIX (2008) 1, 1-‐21. László Kiss, "Egészség és politika -‐ az egészségügyi prevenció Magyarországon a 20. század elsõ felében", Korall 17 (2004), 107-‐137. Gyula Krúdy, A vörös postakocsi és más elbeszélések (Budapest, 2010).
10 Henrik Lenkei, A mulató Budapest (Budapest, 1896). Elizabeth Loentz, Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Cincinnati, 2007), 130. János Miklóssy, A budapesti prostitúció története (Budapest, 1989). Mulatók Lapja, 16 February 1890. András Sipos, Várospolitika és városigazgatás Budapesten (1890-‐1914) (Budapest, 1996). Mihály Szécsényi, "Prostituáltak tipikus bűncselekményei Budapesten 1917-‐1918-‐ban", in: Csaba Katona, ed., Tanulmányok az 50 éves Bana Jocó tiszteletére (Győr, 2006), 135-‐143. Mihály Szécsényi, "Vázlat a budapesti garni szállók történetéről", in : József Bana, ed., Piroslámpás évszázadok. Exhibition of Győr County City Archive (Győr, 1999), 55-‐61. Kornél Tábori and Vladimir Székely, Az erkölcstelen Budapest (Budapest, 1992). Kornél Tábori, Garasos szerelem, A budapesti prostitució titkaiból. A közbiztonság almanachja (Budapest, 1914). Gyula Víg, A régi pesti varietékről (Budapest, 1930). Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna, 1999). Susan Zimmermann, Divide, provide, and rule : an integrative history of poverty policy, social policy, and social reform in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy (Budapest and New York, 2011). Susan Zimmermann, Prächtige Armut: Fürsorge, Kinderschutz und Sozialreform in Budapest. Das "sozialpolitische Laboratorium" der Doppelmonarchie im Vergleich zu Wien, 1873-‐1914 (Sigmaringen, 1997). Susan Zimmermann, "Making a living from disgrace: the politics of prostitution, 1860-‐1920," CEU History Department yearbook 1994-‐1995, edited by Andrea Pető (Budapest, 1995).
