Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) and the Imagination of “The East” in German-Speaking Europe

The Legacy of Sacher-Masoch’s “Eastern” Aesthetics

Early in Venus in Furs, the tortured aesthete Severin reminisces about his student days to Wanda, a beautiful widow he is trying to seduce.1 He paints a picture of “wild disorder,” describing closets full of books “bought secondhand from a Jew in Servanica” and floors littered with “globes, atlases, phials, astronomical charts, animal skeletons, skulls and busts of famous men.” His studies are similarly “indiscriminate” and consist of forays into “chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, jurisprudence, anatomy and literature” and readings of “Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, the Koran, the Cosmos and the Memoirs of Casanova.” Severin traces his intellectual promiscuity, and the physical “chaos” it produces, to psychosexual causes—his “unbridled imagination” and “supersensuality.” He is haunted by thoughts of his “ideal woman,” who appears to him “on a bed of roses surrounded by Cupids, in a décor of skulls and leather-bound books,” looms “in Olympian garb, with the severe white face of the plaster Venus,” or adopts the features of his “pretty aunt,” with her “thick tresses of brown hair,” “laughing blue eyes,” and, most importantly, her “kazabaika trimmed with ermine” (175–6).

Part of a long monologue that explains how Severin came to love furs and the cruel “Messalinas” who wear them, this confession is a study in eclecticism. Works by Ossian, known already in Goethe’s day to be a forgery (Lavender and Bergström 16), are sandwiched between indisputable literary classics, while Severin’s cherished image of the “ideal woman” is as clichéd and counterfeit as a “plaster Venus.” Even more striking than his intellectual and aesthetic omnivorousness is Severin’s performance of multiethnicity. Like his books, which originate from points as distant and unknown as the Arab world—and as proximate and familiar as Servanica, a predominantly Jewish street in Sacher-Masoch’s own birth city of Lemberg (Lviv)—his perfect woman is by turns a generalized Classical Venus, a specific Roman Empress (Messalina), and a close relative, his “pretty aunt.” A culturally hybrid figure, this imaginary Domina wears a Ukrainian kazabaika or short, fur-trimmed jacket, just like the aunt who first taught Severin to both fear and love the whip (174). The aunt’s very name, Countess Sobol, which means “sable,” evokes one of the Russian Empire’s most famous exports and the impetus for its first contacts with the West (Etkind, “Barrels of Fur” 166). The original “Messalina” in Severin’s life thus synthesizes an antique sexuality supposedly unspoiled by the cold and rational influence of the Germanic north with the passion for dominance Sacher-Masoch attributed to Austria’s Slavic neighbors. Her syncretism typifies the ethnically diverse, sexually conflicted, and anxiously nostalgic empire of Sacher-Masoch’s time.

Recent scholarship on Sacher-Masoch has demonstrated the inseparability of his exoticizing “Eastern” aesthetics from his sexual preferences. For Larry Wolff, Sacher-Masoch’s Eastern European settings and characters form the “crucial fur lining” to more “fundamental fantasies of slavery, flagellation, and abasement” (“Introduction,” Venus in Furs). Ulrich Bach sees in Sacher-Masoch’s novels “an inextricable link between private, inverted gender roles and public, ethnic conflicts in the paracolonial setting of Eastern Europe” (“Sacher-Masoch’s Utopian Peripheries” 203). Anne Dwyer goes further, arguing that “Sacher-Masoch’s particular brand of fetishism,” with its fevered attention to ethnic and religious minorities, “is a form of resistance to the procrustean bed of national identity” (“Multilingual Pleasures” 138). Even those of Sacher-Masoch’s contemporaries who, like the German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), saw him primarily as a mascot of pyschopathology, acknowledged the importance of Eastern Europe as a crucible that “conditioned [his] personal and literary anomalies” (Wolff, The Idea of Galicia 114). It is no coincidence that, in designating the “perversion” of masochism, Krafft-Ebing used the Slavic rather than the German half of the author’s last name.

Building on established links between Sacher-Masoch’s sexual obsessions and the vicissitudes of life in the declining Habsburg empire, this article considers the long legacy of the author’s imaginary East. Venus in Furs, in particular, transcends the fetishism of geographically proximate ethnic “others” that is a trademark of fin-de-siècle ethnographic fiction.2 Alone among his peers, Sacher-Masoch lent his name, however unwillingly, to a sexual “disorder,” propelling masochism beyond the cultural realm into legal, medical, and political discourse. Examining Venus in Furs in its fullest cultural-historical context reveals in it a dense knot of anxieties that, alongside other intellectual threads—some that existed before Sacher-Masoch’s time, and some that appeared only after—reached their fullest expression in Nazism.

My intention is not to suggest, in the manner of William Montgomery McGovern’s From Luther to Hitler (1941), that the roots of Nazism lie in the curlicued aesthetics of a philosemitic soft-core pornographer whom even fellow writers had trouble taking seriously. Rather, I propose that, in their fusion of sexual idiosyncrasy and geopolitical fantasy, the “Eastern” elements of Venus in Furs surprisingly prefigure the pernicious artistry of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. An apparently “minor” work—both in the colloquial meaning of “often overlooked,” and in the somewhat opposed sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”—Venus in Furs displays the inflamed attention to Eastern frontiers, the perverse legalism, and the transformation of politics into aesthetics (Benjamin) that characterized Hitler’s megalomaniacal modernist dystopia.3 No secret repository of “Nazi” thought avant la lettre, Venus in Furs nonetheless offers an early view into a conceptual vein later mined by the “reactionary modernists” (Herf), pan-Germanists, and “male fantasists” (Theweleit) of German-speaking Europe in the decades leading up to 1933.

Fin-de-siècle Sexology at the Intersection of Law, Medicine, and Ethnography

The medical concept of masochism emerged during the explosion of sexological discourse in German-speaking Europe around 1900. As sex came under scientific scrutiny, its study acquired legal and political implications; no longer a merely private concern, sexuality could now be made legible to the state. In Berlin and Vienna, which by 1900 would supplant Paris as major centers of sexological research, the discipline began to converge with criminology and population studies. Earlier works by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Benedict Augustin Morel (1809–1873), and Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), author of Criminal Man (1876), had helped popularize the notion that “incorrect” sexuality could threaten the welfare of nations by causing what they called “degeneration” (Oosterhuis 27–8; Wetzell 28). Degeneration theory, popularized through Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), further cemented the link between sexuality and race or ethnicity. A half-decade before Nordau published his treatise, Krafft-Ebing already opined that “anomalies of the sexual functions” were far less likely to afflict “primitives” than “civilized races” (Psychopathia sexualis 32). He and his colleagues helped reframe sexual mores as products of hereditary and environmental factors rather than matters of individual taste or religious transgression.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, race and ethnicity also emerged as central concerns within discussions of legal reform, particularly after German unification in 1871. A newly unified Volk needed a cohesive code of law since, as Jacob Grimm had written in 1814, “the law is, like language and custom, a characteristic of the Volk,” an “element of culture through which the spirit of the Volk speaks” (qtd. in Laufs 159). These völkisch tendencies coincided with arguments by legal reformers like Franz von Liszt (1851–1919) for expanding the state’s ability to target individuals (Wetzell 74). Meanwhile, degeneration theorists were claiming that human populations, like animal species, had to guard themselves against internal decay in order to triumph in the Darwinian contest among nations (Oosterhuis 28). Sexual deviations represented one area of possible geopolitical weakness and had to be rooted out through improved legal controls (McEwen 9).

From the perspective of defenders of the German Volk, the new discipline of sexology could not have coalesced at a better time: the capitals of German-speaking Europe were becoming loci of cutting-edge scientific research; concerns about the health of the nation were at an all-time high; and, finally, German legal codes badly needed updating following the country’s unification. The heightened attention to “delinquent” sexuality had as a corollary a reconceptualization of even “normal” sexual activity—and, by extension, all individual lifestyle choices—as legitimate areas for state intervention (Noyes 88). With legal theorists, sexologists, journalists, and authors of fiction all policing the borders of acceptability, literary aesthetics could be instrumentalized for scientific and policy ends.

As a professional sexologist who was also a prominent forensic psychiatrist, Krafft-Ebing was at the forefront of this interdisciplinary cross-pollination. His compendium of psychosexual perversions, New Research in the Area of Psychopathia sexualis (1886), became an instant and enduring bestseller, with fourteen editions published between 1886 and 1903. Though the sub-classifications were many, the two overarching types of “perversion” outlined in the volume were sadism (in which the subject derives sexual enjoyment from hurting others) and masochism (in which the subject derives sexual enjoyment from being hurt). Krafft-Ebing explicitly based the latter designation on the works of Sacher-Masoch, who “frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings” (86–7). Psychopathia sexualis cast sadism and masochism not as individual preferences, but as widespread trends with potentially global consequences. For Krafft-Ebing, individual sexuality was the setting in which bourgeois morality and civilization shaped biologically determined instincts (Oosterhuis 56–7).

Why did Krafft-Ebing’s compendium, whose most titillating passages were deliberately written in Latin to “exclude the lay reader” (Psychopathia sexualis vii), and which was intended as a legal and medical manual suitable for use in court, borrow its central concept from literary fiction? Krafft-Ebing took from Sacher-Masoch not only his name, but his quotation-heavy style and Orientalized fantasies of the Slavic East—neither of which were confined to the book’s Latin portions. The “literariness” of Psychopathia sexualis resulted from Krafft-Ebing’s choice to base his examination and classification of sexual anomalies not on brain anatomy or neurophysiology, but on the narrative case study. Only through conversation or correspondence with real-life “perverts” could the hereditary and environmental factors that underpinned sexual preferences come to light. For Krafft-Ebing, it was not the physiology of the body that held the key to understanding human sexuality, but the characteristics of the mind: its perceptions, emotions, and fantasies (Oosterhuis 116–117).

Through their anonymous letters or in-person meetings with the doctor, Krafft-Ebing’s patient-autobiographers effectively wrote themselves into medical discourse. By citing his patients verbatim, Krafft-Ebing turned his medical encyclopedia into a tissue of quotations as dense and varied as any of Sacher-Masoch’s stories. The sexologist’s putatively scientific volume thus itself became a salacious work of fiction of the type degeneration theorists worried was corrupting the Volk. More than a mere historical curiosity, an error of tone or genre in a fledgling science still searching for its disciplinary boundaries, the storytelling of Psychopathia sexualis demonstrates the proximity of mythmaking to supposedly enlightened objectivity in the German-speaking fin de siècle.4 The volume’s hybridity is symptomatic of the blurring among academic (particularly bio-racial), aesthetic, and popular realms in German-speaking culture, which produced what Anson Rabinbach has called the “cultural synthesis fusing diverse and incompatible elements” that became a hallmark of Nazism (“Temporary alliance” 176).

“The East” as an Imperial Fantasy in Germany and Austria

The sexology of Krafft-Ebing and like-minded colleagues contained not only literary, medical, and legal elements, but also a heavy dose of imperial-colonial aesthetics. As Krafft-Ebing defined them, masochism and sadism were nationally or ethnically inflected terms. Sadism, which referred to the writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), was already coded as “French” and therefore “foreign.” Masochism, though named after a living author who spoke and wrote in German, was even more so through its association with specifically “Eastern” sexual practices. “There are some nations, viz., the Persians and Russians,” Krafft-Ebing noted, “where the women regard blows as a peculiar sign of love and favor. Strangely enough, the Russian women are never more pleased and delighted than when they receive hard blows from their husbands” (Psychopathia sexualis 23). These blows, he claimed, were delivered by the instrument most “customary” in Russia—a whip that married men allegedly procured “immediately after the wedding, among other indispensable household articles” (Psychopathia sexualis 23).

Krafft-Ebing was not alone in regarding Slavic peoples as inherently masochistic. Perhaps the first Western European to make this association was Sigismund von Herberstein (1486–1556), who traveled to Russia as an ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire on behalf of the Habsburgs. He wrote of the Russians, “It is in the nature of these people that they should vaunt their bondage more than their freedom” (Description of Moscow and Muscovy 39). Herberstein’s Notes on Muscovite Affairs (1557) was for years an authoritative Western European source on Russia, contributing to the persistent cliché of a hereditary propensity toward slavery among Slavic peoples. From a Western imperial perspective, mastering or assimilating Eastern territory would require conquering the “perversions” of its inhabitants. Left medically unanalyzed and juridically untouched, these threatened to consume not just the individuals involved, but, by contaminating osmosis, the nation itself.

Only recently unified, Germany was especially prone to anxieties about territorial and ethno-national integrity. Similar worries assailed the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1866 following Prussia’s defeat of Austria in an effort to maintain Austria’s status as a “great power.” Both new nations were eager to join the other European “greats” in acquiring colonies, whether overseas or on the continent. The importance of colonization to ambitions of Großdeutschtum led, for instance, to its inclusion as an explicit objective in the new German constitution of 1871. Within a decade, “the acquisition of colonies and the projection of global power” had become virtually synonymous with the broader goals of “achieving national cohesion and spreading German culture” (Baranowski 13). Yet Germany’s imperial aspirations were stymied by its late arrival on the colonial scene: by the late nineteenth century, the world’s most promising colonies were already occupied by the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, or Americans. Of all the territories the Germans attempted to seize between 1884 and 1900, only Southwest and East Africa became settler colonies. At the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles rolled back these gains, reverting all of Germany’s former holdings to British, French, South African, or Japanese control (Sandler 5–6).

Austria-Hungary’s imperialism was even more limited in scope. Roiled by internal tensions inherited from the period before the dual monarchy was established—for instance, the “violent insurrection and bloody massacres” Sacher-Masoch witnessed during his childhood in 1840s Galicia (Wolff, the Idea of Galicia 113)—Austria-Hungary was unable to secure any overseas holdings at all. Instead, it practiced what Alexander Etkind, in reference to the Russian Empire, has called “internal colonization,” in which “the characteristic phenomena of colonialism, such as missionary work, exotic journeys, and ethnographic scholarship” were “directed inwards” as a “colonization of one’s own territory” (Internal Colonization 251). By writing in German about “Slavic exoticism,” authors like Sacher-Masoch supported imperial objectives by confirming “contemporary prejudices concerning the barbarism of Eastern Europe” (Wolff, “Introduction,” Venus in Furs).

The perpetual frustration of Germany and Austria-Hungary’s colonial ambitions in physical terms lent an outsize importance to their imaginary aspects. As territory, geopolitical clout, and access to new markets and resources—what we might, following Rabinbach, call the “profane” goals of pragmatic statecraft—proved increasingly unreachable, the “sacred” or ideological dimension of imperialism expanded to compensate. The decades between German unification and the First World War accordingly saw the emergence of Pan-Germanism, which redefined Germanness in racial and biological rather than ethno-cultural or territorial terms—in effect privileging invisible genetic factors over tangible features like language, custom, or geography as “proofs” of nationality (Baranowski 42). In Austria-Hungary, which had not “participated in national emancipation and had not achieved the sovereignty of a nation state,” Pan-Germanism found an enemy in the similarly “tribal” Pan-Slavism (Arendt 227).

Prevailing over universalist currents like pan-Europeanism, which sought to “preserve the peculiarity of the multicultural empire” (Gusejnova 75), Austro-Hungarian Pan-Germanism promoted vigilance against an internal “Eastern” threat. In Germany, the “barbaric East” was conceived as an external danger to be remedied through “continental consolidation of ethnic Germans in one polity” (Baranowski 42). Unlike Bismarck’s imperial vision, which had promoted a mercantile colonialism focused on the tropics (Smith 648–9), the German Pan-Germanists pushed “an expansion that merged political and ethnic boundaries.” The Deutschtum of the future would be groß not because it included non-contiguous territories like East Africa, but through the annexation of nearby lands, including parts of Poland and the Baltics, the Habsburg empire, “Romania, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium, and Holland” (Baranowski 43). To realize this vision, Germany would have to arrogate and empty already populated lands, especially those located to its east—that is, to expand into what came to be called Lebensraum. This term, coined in 1897 by the geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), combined an emphasis on colonizing “the East” with racialist ideology. A Social Darwinist, Ratzel believed that migration into “new spaces” would revitalize the Volk by granting it “new social, economic, and cultural opportunities that might otherwise be contained within static borders” (Lower 20). In the struggle for resources that would ensue when “fitter” populations imposed themselves on their purported racial inferiors, “technology, social organization, and intellectual skills” would allow the “better” human specimens to prevail (Lower 20).

In contrast with earlier colonial projects, aspirations to Lebensraum tended to focus specifically on Germany’s eastern neighbors. One of Ratzel’s most influential followers, the geographer Ernst Hasse (1846–1908), specifically advocated Grenzkolonisation (as opposed to colonization of more distant lands) as the more desirable option for an expanded German state. Ratzel and Hasse’s ideas lived on in the geopolitical philosophy of Karl Haushofer (1896–1946), in turn a teacher of the leading Nazi Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) and, later, a close advisor to Hitler (Zivkovic 6). Along with antisemitism and völkisch nationalism, colonialism was important enough to Nazism to feature in its founding manifesto, Twenty-five Points of the German Workers’ Party Program (1920). Point One invoked Germany’s right to self-determination through “the expansion of Germany’s borders,” while Point Three demanded “land and territory (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population.” (cit. Lower 22)

In the face of pressing problems like runaway inflation, political infighting, and punitive reparations, Lebensraum advocates in interwar Germany prioritized the comparatively utopian goal of territorial expansion. The connection between annexing territory and fostering national prosperity remained speculative, animated less by geopolitical reasoning than by emotion and fantasy. The projected “cleansing” of Eastern territories of Slavic and Jewish “enemies” was understood first and foremost as a redemptive act, “a final triumphant resurrection over a past of unfulfilled aspirations” (Baranowski 5). It was this ideological dimension that enabled the “defensive brutality” of Nazi expansion, spurred by the perceived need to improve “the national health of the Aryan people” and the desire to “curb the Slavic menace coming from Russia” (Zivkovic 7). Like the mythical Dolchstoß, a nefarious plot by Jews and communists that had supposedly robbed Germany of victory in the First World War, Lebensraum—and with it, “the East”—was first and foremost an idea.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt wrote that “fundamental aspects” of the half-century preceding 1914 “appear so close to totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century” that the whole period may be regarded as a “preparatory stage for coming catastrophes” (123). For Arendt, a key link between the late nineteenth century and the catastrophe of Nazism was imperialism, which offered nation-states the tantalizing possibility of extending their “political power” without “the foundation of a body politic” (136). Yet the multiethnic nation-state is, in Arendt’s view, uniquely unsuited for the “unlimited growth” imperialists desire “because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely.” (126) The inevitable result of this tension is “the transformation of nations into races” and the related phenomenon of “continental imperialism” (Arendt 157). In the specific conditions of Europe after the First World War, this form of imperialism brought colonial practices previously reserved for distant lands back toward their origin point at the imperial center in a radical acceleration of what Arendt called the “boomerang effect” (223).

In line with George Mosse’s understanding of fascism as a “scavenger” that ingested bits and pieces of earlier political practice (Fascist Revolution 23), the machinery and vocabulary of Nazi murder first developed in the context of overseas colonialism—specifically during the German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in 1904–1908 (Kakel 34; Baranowski 49). Meanwhile, the ideological source material of Nazism lay in “a deep cultural, intellectual, ritual, liturgical, and ceremonial repertoire firmly established” in the nineteenth century (Rabinbach, “Temporary alliance” 174). The link between these practical and theoretical elements was precisely the “the East,” as a coveted prize and a fearsome menace embodying the twin threat of “restricted living space” and “Jewish Bolshevism” (Kakel 20). It is the application of continental imperialism to this largely imaginary realm that permitted Arendt’s foreshortened “boomerang effect.” In this framing, the first Nazi-era concentration camp, Dachau, becomes a temporal, geographic, and ideological transit point on a journey that began in Southwest Africa and concluded in the “Eastern” annihilation camps at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Oświęcim.5

“The East” as an Aesthetic Space: Sacher-Masoch and his Critics

At the end of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility (1935), Walter Benjamin famously noted that humanity’s “self-alienation” was now so advanced that “it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order,” a “situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic” (Illuminations 242). Expanding Benjamin’s definition of fascism as the “aestheticization of politics [Ästhetisierung der Politik],” we may notice that, in German fascism specifically, aesthetics had three functions. First, it was a measure of the Volk’s racial purity; hence the Nazis’ rejection of “degenerate” art and “Jewish” Zivilisation in favor of “Aryan” Kultur. Second, it was a mechanism for constructing or recognizing the perfect human being, a “sublimely petrified” neoclassical ideal (Michaud 211). Finally, aesthetics was a powerful tool of statecraft, the ultimate form of political legitimation that made Nazism no less a Gesamtkunstwerk than Stalinism (Rabinbach, Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor 125; Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin).

As was the case with the racialized colonial imagination that produced the idea of Lebensraum, the “good” Nazi aesthetics was definitionally reliant on its negative counterpart—the degenerate, Judeo-Slavic “East.” German and Austrian fascination with an Orientalized Slavic “other” accelerated in the late nineteenth century, not coincidentally the same era that saw the intensification of what Arendt called “pan-movements” in Austria-Hungary.6 This continental Orientalism drew on earlier currents—particularly ethnographic accounts of “Slavic barbarism” by Sigismund von Herberstein or the Marquis de Custine (1790–1857)—but also coincided with a more general aesthetic turn that followed the failed revolutions of 1848. Disappointed with the limited actionability of liberal ideals, Germans and Austrians began turning their attention inward, toward the self. It was this introspective, outwardly depoliticized mode that motivated Krafft-Ebing’s “perverts” to write the detailed letters he would incorporate into Psychopathia sexualis. In addition to its epistemological functions, the case study underpinned a psychologized aesthetics that offered refuge from “unpleasant social and political realities” (Oosterhuis 264).

Literature, too, became a laboratory for exploring anxieties about the law, ethnicity, and politics in an uncertain world. Especially popular was the ethnographic novella, a hybrid genre uniting the scientific catalogue with caricatured or fetishistic depiction of ethnic “others” (Sebald 42). Before Krafft-Ebing co-opted Sacher-Masoch’s artistic vision for his compendium of sexual perversions, the latter author was reflecting—and perpetuating—ambient geopolitical anxieties for the benefit of the German-speaking public. Born in then-Lemberg, now Lviv, to an Austrian police director and a Ukrainian noblewoman, Sacher-Masoch grew up speaking Polish, French, and Ukrainian and learned German only later, when his father’s work took the family to Prague. German-speaking critics of the 1860s treated Sacher-Masoch’s Slavic pride and his cosmopolitan identity with derision: one anonymous Austrian feuilletonist described him as “flirting with all imaginable tribes” while “writing against German interest” in a “broken” German intermingled with “Ruthenian” (Parasiten und Renegaten). A German reviewer of Venus in Furs “advised” Sacher-Masoch “not only to speak Russian, but also to write in Russian,” since in Germany there was “as little room for his books as there is for the Russian barbarism in whose name” Wanda “beats her lover” (cit. Farin 51).

An exponent of a “paradoxical German-language Pan-Slavism,” Sacher-Masoch was simultaneously too “Slavic” for the Germans and too “German” for the Slavs, who saw his choice to write exclusively in German as evidence of his commitment to Austrian political hegemony (Bach 201; 206). Even more problematic for both Pan-Germans and Pan-Slavs was the author’s obvious affection for Jews, already evident in his first novel, A Galician Story (1858)—part of a “consciously untimely homage” to the Jewish people that appeared “just as political antisemitism was becoming virulent in Vienna and Berlin” (Sebald, “Westwärts-Ostwärts”). Sacher-Masoch’s compassionate, if maudlin and stereotypical, portrayals of Jewish ghetto life gave detractors further cause to impugn his “German-ness” and led to accusations that he was Jewish himself (Kłańska 194).7

Critique had grown so barbed by the early 1870s that Sacher-Masoch felt compelled to respond, publishing a pamphlet pointedly titled “On the Value of Criticism” (1873). In apocalyptic tones that anticipated the doomsaying of degeneration theory, Sacher-Masoch railed against the decline of German-language literary criticism since the age of Goethe and Schiller. This cri de coeur failed to reconcile him with the Prussian and Austrian nationalists in the press, and the critical consensus on his value to German letters after his death in 1895 confirmed opinions expressed in his lifetime. “[Sacher-Masoch] was rooted nowhere,” wrote Hermann Bahr in 1897, continuing, “he could not turn to the great past of Austrian literature, because he was not at all Viennese. He hated Germans. He had outgrown the Slavic tradition. There was no culture that would have been appropriate for his talent” (“Leopold von Sacher-Masoch” 106). Another critic, Wilhelm Arent, declared that “long before Sacher-Masoch died spiritually, he had died as a literary figure” because of his devotion to “the most wretched pornography” (“Über Sacher-Masoch” 43).

Arent’s assessment suggests that, by the 1890s, Krafft-Ebing and his followers had succeeded in blurring Sacher-Masoch’s love of “Eastern” ethnicities with his alleged tendency toward “pornography.” Sacher-Masoch disagreed, considering himself a writer of historical fiction who focused on inter-ethnic power struggles in the context of empire. Venus in Furs, which Krafft-Ebing had called the “substratum” of masochism, was conceived as part of a six-volume opus called Legacy of Cain that would have treated the topics of love, property, state, war, work, and death. Sacher-Masoch completed only Love (1870) and Property (1877) before abandoning the project in the 1880s. What became Sacher-Masoch’s most (in)famous novel was thus meant to round out a comprehensive depiction of political and social conditions in the Austria-Hungary of his time. For Sacher-Masoch, the “plains and steppes” of “the East” were not a hotbed of “barbarism,” but the “cradle of freedom and religion,” a place where “the spirit and the heart rise up and rebel against the slightest repression and tyranny” (cit. Dolgan 270). Although he followed the likes of Herberstein and de Custine in considering what Krafft-Ebing called “the passion to play the slave” a feature of the Slavic national character, Sacher-Masoch saw it as an attribute rather than a fault (Psychopathia sexualis 125).

Had it not activated fears of ethno-sexual contamination, Sacher-Masoch’s writing might have passed as just another contribution to the mid-century fad for Russian novels. This fad began in the 1850s and ’60s with the translation of works by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), who taught Western Europeans about such “exotic” features of Russian life as serfdom (not abolished until 1861), peasant collectives, and Orthodox Christian ritual (Polubojarinova 229–30). Sacher-Masoch had long admired Russian and Ukrainian greats like Karamzin, Pushkin, and Gogol, but was especially drawn to the still-living Turgenev as a possible mentor and friend.8 He also felt a thematic affinity with the Russian author, whose story First Love (1860) had alerted him to the erotic-literary potentialities of corporal punishment (Polubojarinova 237). Before Krafft-Ebing forever linked his name to the masochistic “perversion,” Sacher-Masoch’s imitations of the Russian author earned him the admiring epithet of “the Galician Turgenev” (Dwyer 137)

Turgenev’s Western reception exoticized him as typically “Slavic,” while the gulfs of class and education separating him from his peasant subjects made him an internal colonizer in his own right. Nonetheless, his relationship to “the East” was more immediate than Sacher-Masoch’s—in particular because, unlike his imitator, he wrote about Russians in Russian rather than German. The “Slavic” material in Sacher-Masoch’s fiction, by contrast, could never be seamlessly integrated into its “German” context, coexisting with it as chaotically as the international bric-a-brac filling Severin’s student dwelling in Venus in Furs. Given the overheated nature of German nationalist discourse from the 1870s on, it is unsurprising that negative reviews of Sacher-Masoch’s works targeted these “seams” as evidence of anti-German degeneracy. Even those who admired Sacher-Masoch’s cultural hybridity tended to politicize it, as was the case with Pan-Europeanists like Heinrich (1859–1906) and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) (Gusejnova 74–5).

Especially revealing is the complimentary article by Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–1879), originally written in 1865 and published as a preface to the 1870 edition of The Legacy of Cain. Praising Turgenev as the “Shakespeare of the sketch,” Kürnberger admitted that, as a “Russian,” his utility to the German Volk was limited. Yet the writer most beneficial to German culture could not be a German, either. Only a German-speaking Austrian living in proximity to Slavic lands and drawing on a “youthful Slavic sensuality [Sensualismus]” could hope to “rejuvenate” German literature (Dwyer 142). For Kürnberger, the “Eastern sensuality” permeating Sacher-Masoch’s texts would trigger the Volk to “recognize its own property [Eigenthum]” regardless of the “strangeness” of the setting (“Vorrede” 40). “How would it be,” Kürnberger asked, “if instead of the great-Russian Turgenev we had a Little Russian, an East Galician, i.e., an Austrian, i.e., a German?” (“Vorrede” 40) In Kürnberger’s view, Austrian imperial subjects like Sacher-Masoch could help the German world expand its cultural and political reach to territories that, by temporary oversight, were under foreign sovereignty. Infusing German literature with Slavic elements would help it “conquer” new “Eastern lines of longitude” and “annex” to itself “new, fresh peoples of nature.” It is true that these peoples did not currently write in German, but they could increasingly be expected to do so “in the course of history” (“Vorrede” 49).

Kürnberger slides with chilling ease from cultural borrowing to territorial annexation, adding on, as an afterthought, the erasure of the Slavs’ ethnic identity with the coming of their benevolent Austro-German overlords. Through the apparently benign filter of aesthetic admiration, Kürnberger thus arrives at approximately the same place as Sacher-Masoch’s detractors. The difference between them is that, while critics like Arent and Bahr saw “the East” as merely threatening, Kürnberger instrumentalized it as a potential German “property” to be mined for spiritual, cultural, and physical resources—all while its people disappear “in the course of history.” In casting Sacher-Masoch as “an ‘oriental’ writer for the German-speaking public” (Bach 206), he effectively agreed with critics who assailed him for being insufficiently “German.”

At first glance, Kürnberger’s presentation of “the East” as an aesthetic resource for Germany and Austria seems to accord with Sacher-Masoch’s own. Yet the Lebensraum-adjacent use Kürnberger makes of Sacher-Masoch’s works moves far beyond the author’s conviction that “the various East European peoples could preserve an equality of political status under the umbrella of the Habsburgs’ rule” (Bach 204). As W.G. Sebald points out, Kürnberger’s “regrettable line of thought” actually makes clear “how incompatible the idea of an ecumenism of peoples and faiths, which was so important to Sacher-Masoch” was with “German-national expansionism” (“Westwärts-Ostwärts”). The next section will show that, whatever Sacher-Masoch’s personal beliefs or intentions, his work was of a piece with Kürnberger’s extractive understanding of “the East.” This understanding lived on in the next generation of German-speaking writers, many of whom continued to regard “the East” as a site of “divine redemption”—even where they hewed closer to the “degenerate” modernist aesthetics the Nazis subsequently decried than to the austere neoclassicism they favored (Bach 207).

After Germany lost its overseas colonies in the wake of the First World War, the regenerative aesthetic potential of “the East” merged with the notion of an imaginary, expanded German Heimat based on the supremacy of Blut und Boden (Sandler 4). Aestheticizing “the East” à la Kürnberger proved key to viewing its native populations and languages as merely incidental to a “natural” eastward creep of German culture. Hitler summed up the prevailing view in a speech given at Wolfsschanze shortly after the start of Operation Barbarossa: “The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It is our duty to place it where we want it to be” (Table-Talk 37).

(Ab)uses of “the East” in Venus in Furs

Venus in Furs, the paradigmatic expression of Sacher-Masoch’s “perversion” per Krafft-Ebing, is also his deepest engagement with Austrian imperial ethnography. At the same time, in spite of its long-lasting reputation for “degeneracy,” Venus in Furs unwittingly prefigures the eclecticism, legalism, and false-bottom rationality undergirding Nazi aesthetics. The novel is hybrid in every respect, from its title to the personal histories of its characters to its very form, which consists of loosely connected episodes, diary entries, letters, and elaborate framing devices. Its Slavic flavoring is established through names like “Wanda von Dunajew” and even the putatively Germanic “Severin,” whose root is actually the Russian word for “north,” sever. Even more important in establishing the novel’s “Eastern” aesthetics are Slavic-style attributes, including Wanda’s tight, fur-trimmed jacket (kazabaika) and a long whip with a short handle “like those they use in Russia on disobedient slaves” (183). Yet once Wanda and Severin codify their relationship via a “legal” contract, they leave the “barbaric” Slavic east for the relatively “civilized” Italy. Wanda selects this locale because, unlike “the Orient,” Italy is a “cultivated, sensible, Philistine society” where her enslavement of Severin will obey not the law of the land, which forbids slavery, but only her whims (197).

The novel’s reliance on quotation and pastiche redoubles its ethnic eclecticism. The text abounds with visual and textual citations, beginning with Venus herself, whose image derives from Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (1555)—itself a reference to classical forms. The novel’s central “perversion” is only partly rooted in Severin’s psychology; to a much greater extent, it is cobbled together from numerous extra- and intradiegetic texts from Hegel and Turgenev to Severin’s own “confession”; pictures; statues; and recitations of canned monologues (Koschorke 556–7). These “quoted pictorial and textual sources” contribute to the already pronounced “theatricality” of the scenarios (Böhme 17). The plot proceeds not through the unfurling of events, but through the repetition of frozen tableaux vivants, imitations of classical sculpture, and Slavic peasant scenes (MacLeod 640).

After Wanda insists that Severin copy out, in his own handwriting, a suicide note she wrote for him to indemnify her in case he dies by her hand, the pair sit beneath a large painting of Samson and Delilah. The Biblical heroine is depicted as “an opulent creature with flaming red hair” who “reclines half-naked on a red ottoman, a sable cloak about her shoulders” (221). A preview of coming attractions in Severin’s own life, the painting shows Delilah “[smiling] and [leaning] toward Samson, who has been bound and thrown at her feet by the Philistines” (221). Her “teasing, coquettish smile seems the very summit of cruelty; with half-closed eyes, she gazes at Samson,” who “regards her longingly, crazed with love. Already his enemy has laid a knee on his chest and is about to blind him with the white-hot sword” (221). Itself the backdrop to a scene of copying, this painting is full of both historical allusion and repetitions of images found elsewhere in the novel. The sables, for instance, recall both Severin’s “pretty aunt” and Wanda herself, while Samson’s “crazed” gaze replicates every look Severin casts in Wanda’s direction. Even the “Philistines” foreshadow Wanda’s designation of those modern societies that proscribe slavery as “Philistine,” colliding Biblical terminology with present-day legal realities.

These repetitive historical, visual, and literary intertexts create a sense of timelessness that elides narrative climax, forcing the plot into a state of “vibrating, ecstatic stagnation” (Koschorke 553). Although the dramatic punishment Severin endures at the hands of the Greek prince may seem climactic, it merely repeats an earlier scene, in which Wanda whips the enfeebled German artist whose portrait of her as Venus sparked the initial conversation between Severin and the frame narrator at the novel’s start. As Severin looks on, Wanda “ties [the artist’s] hands behind his back, winds a rope around his arms and another around his body,” posing him exactly the way she will later pose Severin to ready him for the Greek’s maltreatment (Venus in Furs, 243). The triumph of antique erotic “naturalness”—which, according to Severin, persists in the Austro-Hungarian “East”—over the supposedly constrained mores of the Germanic north is underscored in each case by careful mention of each victim’s German or Austrian nationality. The end result of the novel’s repetitions, especially as they interact with its episodic character, is that time itself seems to freeze in an endlessly referential historical present. But for how long? As we shall see, Severin’s attempt to escape imperial malaise through an aestheticization of daily life cannot last forever. In the end, he succumbs not to the dictates of his Domina but to the prosaic demands of running a country estate on the Eastern outskirts of Austria-Hungary.

Besides the suicide note Wanda has Severin forge, their relationship is codified in a contract that reflects what Gilles Deleuze, in the essay “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), called the “juridical aspect” of masochistic submission (76). Such documents “formalize and verbalize the behavior of the partners. Everything must be stated, promised, announced and carefully described before being accomplished” (Deleuze 18). Yet the legal language and structure of the masochistic contract contradict its purported aim, which is to “set the stage for a pleasurable self-destruction of the juridical subject”—an impossibility in the Western legal system, which “does not allow for self-initiated obliteration” (Noyes 70). This unenforceable contract exists not to protect the signatories but to emphasize the lawlessness of the proceeding. It also serves a pedagogical role, enabling the victim to “educate, persuade, and conclude an alliance with” his or her torturer (Deleuze 20). The pseudo-legalistic contract finds its truest expression in the “uniform” Severin compels Wanda to wear. The “Slavic” whip and kazabaika remind her that she is “an employee, a slave of the self-styled victim” (Smirnoff 65).

In its subversive legalism, the masochistic contract of Venus in Furs appears to flout the intensifying state scrutiny that private sexual activity endured in late nineteenth-century Europe. Within the novel, its purpose is seemingly to be signed and then forgotten: indeed, by the time the Greek comes to punish him, Severin has lost all influence over Wanda, contract notwithstanding, and cannot rekindle her interest even by threatening suicide. Yet despite failing to keep Severin and Wanda together, the contract is not altogether toothless. While its existence seems to mock rule of law, its collapse actually reinforces societal norms. Following his Italian journey, Severin reverts to what Krafft-Ebing would likely regard as male sexual “normalcy,” deriving satisfaction from domination over women rather than submission to them. The contract’s ultimate purpose is thus not to subjugate Severin to Wanda (or even the reverse), but to “cure” him of his “supersensuality”—at least theoretically.

The ritualistic bodily discipline exemplified in the rigid tableaux that Severin associates with Greco-Roman statuary, and seeks to recreate with Wanda, outlasts Severin’s love affair, contradicting his claim that she and the Greek have “cured” him. During his period of voluntary enslavement, Severin, then known as “Gregor,” donned a “Cracovian” servant’s livery, stayed in unheated rooms, went without food, and endured repeated bindings and beatings. Even after he and Wanda have parted ways, he pedantically follows a “rigorous philosophical and practical system” of reading and exercise that takes up most of his waking hours (152). At first glance, this “system” looks like yet another way for the rich and aristocratic Severin to indulge his dilettantish passions. But the frenetic pace, pedagogical nature, and obsessive, time-filling character of this activity renders it time-sensitive rather than timeless. Severin’s “minutely executed” schedule obeys not only the clock, but also the measurements of the “barometer, aerometer, [and] hydrometer” (152). No longer purely aesthetic, his readings now engage with practical matters like medicine (Hippocrates and Hufeland); political philosophy (Plato and Kant); and etiquette (Knigge and Lord Chesterfield) (148). Although his new “system” is still repetitive, it is no longer chaotic. Rather, it is part of a Foucauldean “partitioning” of time and space that aims to “establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition” (Discipline and Punish 149).

Anticipating the rationalization movements of the industrial age—and the Nazi-era Amt Schönheit der Arbeit in particular—Severin’s new lifestyle unites a nominal love of beauty with an equally nominal efficiency. Pulled forward in time by the relentless march of progress, his body is subjected to “power relations” that “invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 136–7). No longer an idle instrument of pleasure, Severin’s body becomes “a useful force” only when its various operations and functions come under disciplinary control (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 136–7). At the same time, he remains—through his uneasy memory of his “supersensual” past—a peculiarly aesthetic object of discipline, an “ornament of technically preconceived and constructed environments” who toils to no prescribed end. “Devoid of intentionality,” frozen in his imperial hinterland as he was once petrified inside a masochistic tableau, he has become a pseudo-rational “abstraction” (Rabinbach, Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor 152).

Though technically “cured,” Severin remains troubled. The man the frame narrator encounters chafes under a regimen that, despite its exhaustiveness, allows time for inexplicable fits of passion (148). Severin continues to be as alienated from his Galician community, where he is known as a “dangerous fool,” as he is from his own self (Dwyer 149). “Everywhere Severin turns,” John Noyes writes, “he finds a system of rationality that promises to bring order to his life. And yet the proliferation of rationalities has exactly the opposite effect” (Mastery of Submission 199). At the end of the novel, Severin divulges the rather Darwinian lesson he has learned from his youthful experience with Wanda. “The moral of the tale,” he says, is that “whoever allows himself to be whipped deserves to be whipped. But as you see, I have taken the blows well; the rosy mist of supersensuality has lifted” (Venus in Furs 271).

Venus in Furs is not, in fact, a story of emancipation that allows the reader to “explore the boundaries of permissiveness within the societal order at the borders of the Habsburg Empire” (Bach 202). Instead, it is an ethnically conditioned cautionary tale that emphasizes the inevitable triumph of Habsburg imperialism. The novel’s end sees the re-establishment of the gender and ethnic status quo, with the culturally “German” Severin holing up at his estate to dominate an unnamed “Slavic” subaltern socially, economically, and sexually (Venus in Furs 149–50). Despite his earlier willingness to play at reversed gender roles and dabble in sexual “depravity”—for which purpose he must notably leave Austria-Hungary for Italy—Severin emerges more disciplined and rooted in his imperial context than before. His brush with “Slavic perversion” not only did not destroy him; on the contrary, it helped him become the colonial master he was always meant to be. However sincere Sacher-Masoch’s sympathies with Jews, Slavs, and other oppressed Austro-Hungarian minorities, Venus in Furs does not challenge existing power relations. Intentionally or not, the novel positions Slavic territories as a useful imperial “periphery” whose tantalizingly “foreign” aesthetics serve to refresh an otherwise stagnant Germanic subjectivity.

“The East” after Sacher-Masoch: Coldness and Cruelty in the Twentieth Century

This essay has examined “the East” as a speculative aesthetic construct in Germany and Austria from the late nineteenth century forward, positing Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs as an early, influential site for the articulation of a proto-fascist “Eastern” mythology. Partly through the density of its intertexts, partly through its reception among literary critics and sexologists, a text frequently dismissed as a minor contribution to global erotica in fact drew together crucial strands of bio-racial, legal, and anti-technocratic thought. The novel’s ending sees the erstwhile “supersensualist” Severin reaffirming his commitment to colonial mastery, anticipating the conflation of aesthetic refinement and geopolitical ambition in fascism. For fascist ideologues, “national renewal” required a “conversion” of “materialism and science” into “an artistic outlook upon the world” (Mosse 119). The success of this “renewal” depended, in turn, on the attainment of territorial and bio-racial aims, specifically the annihilation of “global Jewry” and the annexation of Eastern Lebensraum (Baranowski 3). It took Nazism, with its “production of [the] political as a work of art,” to bring the late nineteenth-century vision of “the East” fully into being (Rabinbach, “Nazi Culture” 123). In the Third Reich, “the East” ceased to be a speculative construct and became a very real location—the seat of Nazi genocide.

One indication that the contours of a previously nebulous “East” were coming into sharper focus was the invention of the phrase “resettlement to the East [Umsiedlung nach dem Osten],” one of several bureaucratic euphemisms for mass murder. Besides the famous “Final Solution of the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage],” the list of circumlocutions included “special treatment [Sonderbehandlung],” “special lodging [Sonderunterbringung],” and “cleaning-up of the Jewish question [Bereinigung der Judenfrage].”9 Of all of these terms, only “resettlement to the East” had any connection with material reality, pointing to the final reification of this imaginary territory.

In practice, of course, “resettlement to the East” was also a lie, since it meant expulsion to a newly stateless “borderland” where deportees could be murdered on an industrial scale. Yet “resettlement” differed from apparently similar expressions because it referred to a specific locale, “the East,” that had at least momentarily presented itself as a possible “solution” to Europe’s pressing “Jewish question”—on the model, say, of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union.10 Like the absurd “Madagascar Plan,” part of the “vast emigration scheme” that predated the “inauguration of the killing phase” in 1941, the idea of “resettlement to the East,” however false and ephemeral, nonetheless referred to a real Nazi ambition: to simply expel the Jews vaguely “eastward” rather than taking the trouble of murdering them all (Hilberg 258).11 The Final Solution relied on an imagination of “the East” as a space rich in Lebensraum that could be colonized and made to flourish once “what Hitler called ‘the mildewed parts’ of the human race” were excised once and for all.

Nazi propaganda cloaked the suffering these measures would entail in aesthetic terms drawn from the already heavily aestheticized discourse of eugenics—a discipline that, by the interwar period, encompassed medical, legal, and philosophical elements along with hefty doses of sexual normativity and degeneration theory. A striking example of this interpenetration of scientific and aesthetic registers is the bestselling Man, the Unknown (1935) by Alexis Carrel, recipient of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine. From his authoritative perch as a Nobel Prize–winning physician, Carrel argued that “Man” was rapidly degenerating and urgently needed to remake himself by “humanely and economically [disposing]” of “defectives and criminals” in “small euthanasic institutions supplied with the proper gases” (cit. Michaud 125). Cheek by jowl with this bald endorsement of mass murder was a presentation of humanity as an artist, “both the marble and the sculptor” of its own refashioning. “To uncover his true visage,” Carrel wrote, “[Man] must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer.” (cit. Michaud 125) This self-destructive prescription is nothing if not masochistic, echoing Severin’s conclusion at the end of Venus in Furs that, in human power relations, “there is only one alternative: to be the hammer or the anvil” (271).