Sacher-Masoch's Utopian Peripheries

Das Wesen Osterreichs ist nicht Zentrum, sondern Peripherie. -Joseph Roth Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the controversial Austrian author of "Venus im Pelz" (1870) and countless other erotic novellas, is little known for his political utopianism. I seek to read Sacher-Masoch not only as a writer with a distinctive Utopian vision of a multi-cultural, property-free, communal Empire, in contrast to the Habsburg state's self-serving image as a politically stable Central European country, but also as a "colonial" writer, focused on the Austrian Empire's ethnic diversity and gender conflicts. As Sacher-Masoch foresees it, the German language would serve as a common denominator to allow the various Habsburg nations to communicate with each other more effectively. Accordingly, much of his work espouses a paradoxical Germanlanguage Pan-Slavism, when he writes: Wir werden das Oesterreicherthum vertreten als eine politische Nationalitat, in der sich die naturlichen Nationalitaten, jede im vollen Genuse ihrer Rechte und Freiheiten, vereinen lassen. (Sacher-Masoch: Materialien 337) Despite the controversial political implications of his "Germanic" Pan-Slavism, his exciting, page-turning novellas, set at the colonial borders of the Hapsburg Empire, have usually been read in the context of sexual transgressions and dominating female figures, of which "Venus im Pelz" is merely the most prominent example. More recently, Barbara Hyams, Michael Gratzke, Barbara Mennel and others have explored the relationship of Sacher-Masoch's sexual politics and his political aesthetics in their groundbreaking works.1 However, his radically Utopian political program is less often considered: for instance, Albrecht Koschorke argues in his influential literary biography Sacher-Masoch: Die Inszenierung einer Perversion (1988) that the most truthful revelation of Sacher-Masoch's determinism lies in the nihilism, asceticism and renunciation of his protagonists. Koschorke brings in a verdict of depravity when he writes: Unversehens geht der Impetus einer grundsatzlichen Gesellschaftskritik in Demonstration einer sundenfallmasgen Anlage der Welt und der Menschen unter. Schon der Titel Das Vermachtnis Kains verleiht der diagnostizierten Schlechtigkeit eine religiose Weihe. (55) And shortly before in the same context: Wenn auch die Weltanschauung, die Sacher-Masoch skizziert, manches zu seiner Zeit ausnehmend Fortschrittliche weitertragt, wenn sich dort Spuren von Stirners Der Einzige und sein Eigentum mit Ideen eines slawischen Urkommunismus-man hat hierin eine Geistesverwandtschaft mit Tolstoi sehen wollen-kreuzen, so bleibt der Grad der intellektuellen Durchdringung der plakativ aufgezeigten Miftstande doch aufterordentlich gering. (54) Hence, Koschorke sees Sacher-Masoch's social criticism and political convictions as no more than ornamentation adorning the insidious aestheticism of cruelty in his gory stories. This has been addressed by literary scholars such as JohnNoyes (1994), Michael O'Pecko (1994) and Kai Kauffmann (2001). Their research has shown, for example, that Sacher-Masoch's politics are "always coextensive with private, and particularly, sexual power relations" (Noyes, "Historical Perspective" 16). A reading of his seminal novellas reveals that Sacher-Masoch's playful imagination posits an enactment of gender reversals and sexual negotiation that allows the author and his readership to explore the boundaries of permissiveness within the societal order at the borders of the Habsburg Empire. Whereas his masochistic protagonists seek to obtain pleasure by disavowing and suspending reality, his empathie description of multiethnic society in Galicia portrays the sadistic institutional power tormenting peasants and minorities such as Jews. The suspension in fantasy allows Sacher-Masoch not only to invert sexual power relationships, but also to stylize the periphery as a repository of deeply held fears of emasculation. …