Breidel:,Das süsse Mädel' zwischen Sozia

What connects the famous author Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), a member of the Jung-Wien group in his youth, who received multiple awards during his lifetime and is now firmly established in the literary canon, with the Jewish factory worker, journalist, and writer Else Feldmann (1884–1942 in the Sobibor concentration camp), who has been marginalized from cultural heritage and is still too little regarded by research? It is perhaps the most famous type of femininity in the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler's work and one of the almost exclusively male-imagined female figures of Viennese modernism: the 'sweet girl.' In this type of young women from socially marginalized backgrounds, who work in poorly paid jobs and have sexual relationships with various men, societal reality and sexual discourse are specifically intertwined. The 'sweet girl' illustrates the explosive interplay of patriarchal gender norms, socio-economic factors, and individual agency, which is explored in this study not only from a literary perspective but also in a culturally historical and critical context.