Scott Spector is professor of history and German studies at the University of Michigan.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-19664-0 (cloth)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-19678-7 (paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-226-19681-7 (e-book)
DOI : 10.7208/chicago/9780226196817.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spector, Scott, 1959 author.
Violent sensations : sex, crime, and utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 18601914 / Scott Spector.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-19664-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-19678-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-19681-7 (e-book) 1. Sex crimesEurope, CentralHistory19th century. 2. Sex crimesPress coverageEurope, CentralHistory19th century. 3. Sex crimesAustriaViennaHistory19th century. 4. Sex crimesGermanyBerlinHistory19th century. 5. Sex crimes in literature. 6. HomosexualityEurope, CentralHistory19th century. 7. Lust murderEurope, Central19th century. 8. Blood accusationEurope, CentralHistory19th century. 9. Marginality, SocialEurope, CentralHistory19th century. 10. Civilization, Modern19th century. I. Title.
HV 6593. E 8515S66 2016
364.153094315509034dc23
2015030353
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
On the Border
When we call the period around 1900 the fin de sicle or describe its cultural tendencies as decadent, we invoke a glamorously censorious appraisal of the turn of the twentieth century in metropolitan Europe. The mood evoked by these terms is confirmed by a constellation of familiar and sensational images associated with the period: femmes fatales and sensational slashers, destitute and dangerous new urban districts, criminal violence and sexual excess. An equally strong instinct drives us to associate the urban European milieu of the turn of the twentieth century with a spirit of triumph of science and reason, with the emergence of new expert knowledges, and with a prideful confidence, bordering on arrogance, in progress. Both of these mental picturesthe sensational and the scientificwere strongly and simultaneously present in the self-image many urban central Europeans had about the lives they were living. How are these apparently opposing visions linked as part of a single way of looking at the world and ones place in it? Instead of concurrently running but contradictory clichs of modernity, taken together these strands and the tensions among them have the character of a single myth: a way of seeing others and oneself through a symbolically laden system of image and narrative suggesting origins, essences, and destinies.
What was perceived at the time as the new metropolisthe great city as a life experience different from the way life had ever been lived beforeis the stage for this study, and the metropolises in particular focus are Vienna and Berlin.development of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality, as well as of the political emancipation movements these conceptions inspired. One thinks for instance of the birth of the science of sexology, the earliest articulations of homosexuality as an identity, the concomitant movement to abolish persecution of sexual minorities, and the first-wave feminisms of the turn of the century, to name a few. At the same time, these cities became host to fantasies of violence associated with what may be called marginal, liminal, or border figures: the pervasive image of the dangerous and erotic femme fatale, reports and fictions of sexual murder and the violent underworld of prostitution, the surprising and forceful reemergence of the blood libel, scandals involving the homosexuality of public figures, and representations of homosexual rings or secret associations. These prurient fantasies hold a startlingly prominent place in the periods high culture (including literature and philosophy), science (especially sexology, urban sociology, and criminology), and popular culture (including fiction writing as well as sensational court cases reported in the popular press). This book is an attempt at a synthetic analysis of this explosion of disparate but intricately linked discourses.
The phrase violent sensations refers most directly to the cultural fantasies contained in dramatic courtroom scenes, scandals, and broadly disseminated tales of serial, sexual, or ritual murder. It is meant, at the same time, to signal a new-fashioned apprehension of an interior, unconscious self that was subject to violent feelingfurtive but powerful, even insurmountable sexual or criminal impulses. These fantasies of a primal self take many different forms in the chapters that follow. Similarly, exactly how and to what degree producers and consumers of these fantasies were engaged with this figure of the violent self differ from text to text as they do among genres and periods.
To regard these disparate and contradictory phenomena together, as part of a single and complex cultural moment, promises to cast them all in a different light, but it can also be expected to raise difficult questions. It may even begin to suggest the counterintuitive question of what positive work these texts and practices may be doing. What affirmative or even utopian potential could be entailed in the creation of liminal figures and the production of fantasies of radical violence pertaining to them? The more intuitive assumption of the role such figures played is that as marginal figures, they served to validate and empower centered identitiesthe normal, the respectable, the The elaborate and repetitive marking of such othersespecially sexualized ones, such as the homosexual, the prostitute, and the Jewis easily explained by this thesis. The association of such figures with fantasies of radical violence, on this view, is not only a feature of this marking process but an ominous indication of where all this cultural work was heading. It is obviously not possible to disprove this kind of interpretation, and there is clearly something valuable to the observation that damaging sexist and homophobic fantasies emerge out of patriarchal societies. But this functionalist viewlet us call it the marginalization thesisobscures many of the most prominent and also most surprising features of the historical phenomena analyzed in the pages that follow.
It will take a book to persuade a reader of the degree to which the marginalization thesis is an insufficient explanation of the cultural meaning of these fantasies or, for that matter, their function. Their intimate bonds to the enlightenment projects of the same period in which they emerged also requires more ample illustration, analysis, and argument than a preface can manage. The chapters below each explore a complex of such linkages, paradoxes, and mutual reflections; to introduce the themes to come it will be useful to outline them in brief.
