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

Abstract

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) is generally known as a minor erotic novel that inspired German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to invent the psychopathology of “masochism.” This article examines the novel’s “Eastern” aesthetics, showing that Venus in Furs is a case study not in “deviant” sexuality, but in the construction of an imaginary “East” that refracted contemporary imperial anxieties and Pan-German ambitions in Austria-Hungary and post-unification Germany. In its framing of “the East” not primarily as a physical locale, but as an imaginary realm full of rejuvenating sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic resources to be mined by “German” conquerors, Venus in Furs unwittingly prefigured the aestheticized “East” of Nazi colonialism. (MV)