author
Hans Fehlinger
b. 1874
Known for writing about social policy and human sexuality in the early 20th century, this German-language author ranged widely across labor issues, population questions, and comparative studies of family and sexual customs. His books reflect the intense debates of his era and still give modern readers a window into how scholars once tried to understand society across cultures.
1 Audiobook
Sexual Life of Primitive People
by Hans Fehlinger
About the author
Hans Fehlinger, born in 1874, was an author whose surviving catalog shows a wide range of interests, from labor protection and trade-union history to population questions and cross-cultural studies of sexuality. Library and catalog records connect his name with works including Sexual Life of Primitive People, Internationaler Arbeiterschutz, Die österreichische gewerkschaftsbewegung, and Internationale Sozialpolitik.
Much of his better-known work in English comes through translation. Sexual Life of Primitive People, adapted from his German work on the sexual life of Indigenous and non-Western peoples, circulated internationally and helped make his name visible to later readers. Today, his books are often approached less as current scholarship than as historical documents that reveal the methods, assumptions, and social concerns of the early 1900s.
Reliable biographical details about his personal life appear to be scarce in the sources available here, so it is safest to remember him mainly through his published work. Even from that limited record, he stands out as a prolific writer who moved between social policy, ethnographic curiosity, and the reform-minded debates of his time.