In February 1934, Engelbert Dolfuss’s regime outlawed the Austrian Social Democratic Party and took over its various newspapers, many of which were “normalized” – integrated into a nationalist and anti-socialist, but also anti-Nazi, worldview.

One of these newspapers was the weekly Die Unzufriedene, founded in 1923 under the editorship of Eugenie Brandt to expose the oppression of working-class women – though it soon came to include kitschy serialized novels as well. Now, however, the paper was handed over to a male editor, Fritz Robert Kirchner; its new title, Das Kleine...