SACHER-MASOCH'S UTOPIAN PERIPHERIES
By Ulrich Bach
The heart of the Habsburg Empire lies at its periphery.
– Joseph Roth
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the infamous Austrian author of countless erotic novellas,
is little known for his distinctive political utopianism. Yet much of his work espouses a
paradoxical German-language Pan-Slavism. 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. Notwithstanding the controversial
political implications of his “Germanic” Pan-Slavism, his exciting, page turning novellas,
set at the colonial borders of the Hapsburg Empire, are usually read in the context of
sexual transgressions and dominating female figures, of which “Venus im Pelz” (1870) is
merely the most prominent example. Indeed, Sacher-Masoch’s aesthetics explore the
connections among love, power and gender roles. However, his radically liberal and
utopian political program is less often considered, as is underscored by the Germanist
Werner Michler’s, recent observation, that “the slim corpus of research literature on
Sacher-Masoch can be divided in works about the ‘masochism-complex,’ and, more
recently, works about Jewish themes” (109). For instance, the literary scholar Albrecht
Koschorke argues in his influential literary biography Sacher-Masoch: Die Inszenierung
einer Perversion (1988) that Sacher-Masoch's most truthful revelation of his
determinism lies in the nihilism, asceticism and renunciation of his protagonists.
Koschorke brings in a verdict of depravity when he writes:
Unexpectedly [Sacher-Masoch’s] impetus toward a fundamental social criticism
descends into demonstrations of the fallen nature of the world and of
humankind. Even the title, Vermächtnis Kains (Cain’s Legacy), lends a religious
consecration to his diagnosed vileness (55).
And shortly before in the same context:
Even if the philosophical position, which Sacher-Masoch sketches out, includes
many elements which in his day were exceptionally advanced, even if traces of
Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum cross paths in his work with ideas of a
Slavic proto-Communism -- some wanted to perceive here a spiritual kinship
with Tolstoy --, still the degree of his intellectual penetration of the obvious
deplorable state of affairs remains extraordinarily minimal (54).
Hence, Koschorke sees Sacher-Masoch's social criticism and political convictions as
sheer ornamentation to the insidious aestheticism of cruelty in his gory stories. More
recently, literary scholars such as John Noyes (1994), Michael O'Pecko (1994) and Kai
Kauffmann (2001) have reconsidered Sacher-Masoch’s political agenda. Their research
has shown, for example, that Sacher-Masoch’s politics is “always coextensive with
private, and particularly, sexual power relations” (Noyes 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 empathic description of multiethnic society in Galicia
portrays the sadistic institutional power tormenting peasants and minorities such as
Jews. The sexually charged colonial narratives also underscore Sacher-Masoch’s own
hybridity and liminality; he simultaneously identifies with the colonized Eastern
Europeans and with the colonial power of the Habsburg Empire!
2
In this chapter, I demonstrate how the novellas in Vermächtnis Kains despite, or
because of their bleak determinism and ever-present sexual transgressions, not only deal
with, but criticize the oppressive nature of class, race and gender clashes in the paracolonial space of Galicia and the often raw encounters between the colonizers and their
subjects.
Thus Sacher-Masoch anticipates contemporary empires with their many
metaphors of heterogeneity. As Russell Berman observed, the beginning of one of
Sacher-Masoch’s best known novellas shows that he was consciously writing colonial
literature for his West European readers:
“We drove out of the provincial capital Kolomea into the countryside.” With this
beginning of the "Don Juan of Kolomea" (1864), Sacher-Masoch announces the
colonial question by attaching a footnote to the name of the city, thereby
providing some geographic authenticity for his German and other West European
readers, who are presumably not familiar with the map of the expansive East: “A
province and provincial capital in eastern Galicia. Kolomea derives from Colonia
because the city is built on the classical ground of a former Roman settlement.”
The topic of the novella then is the Don Juan of the colonies or Don Juan as
colonial – the full constellation of race, gender, and power (Berman
Enlightenment 222f.).
Korschoke sees Sacher-Masoch as the gentle conqueror of exotic Galicia:
Just as the first ethnographers in Africa and Asia were colonial officers, so
Sacher-Masoch’s poetic discovery of the border province of Galicia follows its
administrative and technical exploration.
His writing addresses the human
consequences of developing a human and regional wilderness, structurally
similar to the political territorial control that had long been the mission of his
family. A development, moreover, which sought as its object to preserve the
3
charm of the undeveloped, and which sought to compensate synthetically for that
when it had been inadvertently lost (26).
Consequently, I seek to read Sacher-Masoch as an Austrian colonial writer, his
colonialism interior to the Austrian Empire and reflective of its ethnic diversity. He is as
a writer contributing to the Habsburg myth, a myth Joseph Roth’s protagonist so
eloquently bemoans in his eulogy of the monarchy Die Kapuzinergruft (1938):
[T]hat which is said to be unusual for Austria-Hungary is obvious. At the same
time I want to say that only for this crazy Europe of nation states and nationalism
does the obvious appear to be strange. In fact it is the Slovenians, the Polish and
Ruthenian Galicians, the Caftan Jews from Boryslav, the horse traders from
Bacska, the Sarajevo Muslims, the Maronibraters from Mostar, who sing “Gott
erhalte [Kaiser Franz].” But the German students from Brünn and Eger, the
dentists, pharmacists, hairstylists, art photographers from Linz, Graz, Knittelfeld,
those with goiters from the Alpine valleys, they all sing “Die Wacht am Rhein.”
Austria will be destroyed by this devotion to the Nibelungen, Gentlemen! The
essence of Austria isn’t its center but its periphery. Austria is not to be found in
the Alps, chamois is to be found there and edelweiss and gentian, but scarcely a
hint of a double eagle. The Austrian substance is nourished and over and over
replenished from the crown lands (17, my italics).
Furthermore as a writer with a distinctive utopian vision of a multi-cultural, propertyfree, communal Empire, in contrast to the Habsburg state’s self-indulgent image as a
politically indolent Central European country, as expressed in Robert Musil's Mann ohne
Eigenschaften (1930-43): “no man had an ambition for global economic or global
political power; one was situated in the center of Europe, where the old world axes
4
crossed; the terms ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ sounded like something still completely
untested and distant” (32f.). Hence, Sacher-Masoch's novels suggest an inextricable link
between private, inverted gender roles and public, ethnic conflicts in the para-colonial
setting of Eastern Europe. Sacher-Masoch’s texts can serve as a model for the use of
fantasy and utopia as a structural device to illustrate the psychological and social
conflicts of colonial borderlands.
*
Born in 1836, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch grew up in a noble family in
government service in East Galicia; at home Ukrainian was the predominant spoken
language. Although his family was a member of the Habsburg elite as it existed on the
fringes of the Empire, Sacher-Masoch, in his autobiography Souvenirs (1985),
emphasizes the multi-ethnic origins of his family:
My father’s family is originally Spanish. […] My grandfather was a government
official in the administration of Galicia, and drew to himself in that role so much
confidence and love that the Galician nobility accepted him into their ranks and
awarded him with the Indigenat. […] My mother, Caroline Edle von Masoch, was
the last survivor of an old Slavic family. My father therefore, as was the custom
in noble families, united her name with his with the approval of the Austrian
Kaiser, and since that time the family has been known as Sacher-Masoch (60).
Only when his father was relocated to Prague, in 1848, the year of revolutions, does he
learn the German language, and he then begins the study of the humanities at the
university there. He completes his doctorate and teaches for nearly ten years at the
university in Graz, without receiving the hoped-for recognition for his literary historical
5
writing. At the same time, his early novellas do find an interested circle of readers, so he
decides to become a full-time writer. Through a series of difficult love affairs, which
serve both as source and inspiration for his literary creativity, he gets into debt at this
time of his life and is forced to write a great deal and to change locations frequently. 1
Although he only returns to Galicia for two short stays, that East European border
country forms the locus for the preponderant number of his novellas. If one accepts the
descriptions of his Galician childhood, then Sacher-Masoch learns while still in the care
of his Ukrainian nursemaid of the “magnificent, melancholy songs, as they are sung by
the ordinary Russian peasants [and] the heartrending melodies which are equal to them
in force and poetry” (Souvenirs 61). In this respect, his literary creations embody an
individual-psychological attempt to give artistic form to the trauma of his geographic
uprooting.
Kauffmann,
moreover,
offers
the
opinion
that
Sacher-Masoch’s
autobiography produces a romantic exotic through the mythological synthesis of the
Spanish-Habsburg military, Slavic nobility and Ukrainian peasant class:
The Slavic people appear as primitive material, which first attains a civilized form
through the German-speaking representatives of Austrian literature and
administration. In this way, Austria’s cultural leadership and political control
within the Habsburg Empire is justified and assured” (178).
Thus, Kauffmann sees Sacher-Masoch’s poetic works as a tribute to the hegemonic
Habsburg ideology.
Still, Sacher-Masoch’s “counter-factual” writings deal with real
existing conflicts among the multi-ethnic Habsburgs, and only the questioning of the
myth produces the poetic space for transcending existing power relationships.
According to Karl Mannheim, ideology and utopia both share an essence
1
Lemberg, Prague, Graz, Vienna, Budapest, Leipzig, Paris and Lindheim/Hesse.
6
(Seinswirklichkeit) that is incongruent with the historical situation in which they exist,
and both evoke images transcending those of the present reality. Whereas utopia with its
vision of a better society ought to shatter and overcome the worldly situation, ideological
wish-pictures serve to maintain the status quo.
The perception of the terms
utopia/ideology depends on each subject’s position: a member of the ruling class is
inclined to judge utopian thought as unrealizable imaginings, whereas someone outside
of the power circle is more likely to view ideology as an incongruent mode of deception
by a society in which he or she has no sense of participation. Even though SacherMasoch did not belong to an underprivileged ethnic or social Habsburg population
group, he viewed himself as an outsider: “People have taken me to be nearly anything:
as a Jew, as a Hungarian, as a Bohemian, and even as a woman.” In this respect
Kauffmann’s ideological criticism overlooks the important utopian function of SacherMasoch’s ethnographic novellas. To realize the (utopian) aim of a liberal, multi-ethnic
Habsburg state, the individual-psychologically motivated depictions of conflicts first
have to transcend the then existent status quo.
Sacher-Masoch’s political convictions were marked by the concept of a Central
European ethnic ecumenism. He believed that the various East European peoples could
preserve an equality of political status under the umbrella of the Habsburgs’ rule. In
1866, after Austria’s exclusion from the German Federation, Sacher-Masoch became the
editor of the literary periodical Gartenlaube für Österreich (Austrian Arbor).2 SacherMasoch was then living in the provincial capital of Graz, where he took over the
periodical, which had originated there shortly before. His idea was to compete with the
most important German family periodical, the Gartenlaube of Leipzig. Concerning the
About Sacher-Masoch's role as editor of GfÖ see Oliver Bruck, “Die Gartenlaube für Österreich.
Vom Scheitern des Projektes einer österreichischen Zeitschrift nach Königgrätz,“ Amann et al.
Literarisches Leben 359-395.
2
7
editorial mindset, the goal of the Gartenlaube für Österreich was to promote Habsburg
national self-sufficiency in the face of the mighty Prussia through a simultaneous
regional
and
cosmopolitan
journalistic
reportage.
Alongside
regular
social
correspondence from Vienna, Paris, London and St. Petersburg, the journal offered
novellas in serial form from Adalbert Stifter, Karl von Thaler and Sacher-Masoch, most
of which dealt with themes from the periphery of the monarchy: [Take out these titles?
Integrate them in a new sentence?] “The Gypsies and the Southern Danubian Lands,”
“Bear Hunt in Galicia” and “Stag Hunt in Upper Styria.” Sacher-Masoch described the
editorial program thus:
The mission of the Gartenlaube für Österreich is therefore to rise above
partisanship, to be just to all ethnicities and to reveal to each ethnic group the
merits of the others, instead of ruthlessly uncovering the reciprocal flaws of each
to craft tragic humor into a contemptible polemic. Above all it will be the task of
our journal to cultivate the fallow fields in our fatherland: belletristic literature
and popular science. Mindset: a strict unitary approach, thus a free-thought
striving for progress, is to characterize our enterprise, so that it contributes to an
awakening of love for homeland, in contrast to a negating, foreign journalism,
and contributes further to the elevation of education generally and to the
empowerment of the common spirit of the ordinary people (Gartenlaube für
Österreich Vol. 1 No. 1 1866: 1).
It was his declared aim not only to fight vehemently against the Prussian state
with its militaristic, materialistic and anti-Semitic orientation, but also “to mediate
among the various ethnic groups in the monarchy, and to familiarize them with each
other” (Sacher-Masoch in Bruck 364). “Love for the homeland, for the people," he said,
"gave birth to the journal, the sympathy of the homeland, of the people, must keep it
8
fresh and spring-like! From now on it is the task of every genuine patriot to cast his gaze
inward, for the best way to learn to love one’s fatherland is to get to know it exactly”
(384).
According to this mission statement, the editors hope that Austria's forced
isolation will spark a movement toward a new all-inclusive Austrian patriotism. The
metaphors evoking this home community emulate exclusion: an inward looking volk and
heimat give birth to this leaflet (blatt), and it is also the volk, which has to keep it fresh
and green. Far from being all-inclusive, Sacher-Mosoch seems here to compete with the
metaphors of German nationalism in the wake of the Reichsgründung.
The Gartenlaube für Österreich was to provide a forum presenting the entire
literary spectrum of this multi-ethnic Habsburg state: “Since our journal is genuinely
Austrian, it will present a cosmopolitan outlook that speaks not just to Austria, or to all
of Germany, but indeed it will have a thoroughly innovative and characteristic message
for Europe” (369). This somewhat diffuse statement informs not only Sacher-Masoch’s
economical savoir-faire, but reveals Sacher-Masoch’s existential liminality: on the one
hand he sees himself as an authentic Austrian, on the other hand as a citizen of the
world, who paradoxically seeks to originate a German-language Pan-Slavism. He viewed
the German language as a common denominator, an imperial language in which people
of different nationalities could communicate.
Sacher-Masoch depicts Austria as a nation that is more than the sum of the
ethnic groups within the monarchy, which he describes “[as] a political nationality, in
which the natural nationalities could be united, each with the full recognition of its rights
and freedoms” (Sacher-Masoch in Bruck 389).
He amalgamates two entities: the
consensus driven, calculated, civilized Austrian nation with the genuinely atavistic Slavic
community. Sacher-Masoch imagines unifying multiple Eastern European ethnicities
into one Habsburg nation while retaining their rights and freedoms. His utopian agenda
would provide Austria with what Hardt and Negri call "the social multiplicity to manage
9
to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different." Thus he
resolves the contradiction between inclusion and exclusion, creating an exclusive
imperial identity that still includes its colonial components.
To be sure, his political adoption of the German language as a universal cultural
medium found little acceptance among his Habsburg contemporaries. On the one hand,
Sacher-Masoch was branded by the conservative Viennese press corps as a Slavic
parasite and German renegade, who sinned against the German language, 3 while on the
other hand the Slavic intellectuals in the provinces, hoping for territorial selfdetermination, rejected his usage of the German language as subjugation to the
hegemonic aspirations of the Germans. Sacher-Masoch answers the chauvinistic libels
of the liberal press of Vienna with stylish irony: “They [the press] are so laughable to see
in the one Austria program a danger for Austria, for Austria is not Austria, they say; the
Czechs, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Rumanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Italians
aren’t Austria; we are Austria, actually not even the Germans, but Vienna, and within
Vienna above all the publishers of the outmoded press” (390).
The Viennese critic Ferdinand Kürnberger, however, perceived in Sacher-Masoch
and his productive sensuality the chance for a new start for contemporary German
literature, and greeted his prose as a “first, fleeting ray of dawn” (Sacher-Masoch Don
Juan 192).
Kürnberger enthusiastically promotes Sacher-Masoch's nonconformist
writings in the introduction to his novel “Don Juan von Kolomea.” Although the critic
shies away from “improperly conceding to a half-alien foreigner our valuable
traditionally renowned literary culture,” he orientalizes Sacher-Masoch through repeated
"What elevates Österreichische Gartenlaube out of the sphere of harmless boredom into a
higher and politically more dangerous sphere, is the Slavic parasite and renegade attitude in
Austria, which is supported by the name of the main contributor [Sacher-Masoch] on the title
page.“ Hieronymus Lorm, Der deutsche-österreichische Schriftsteller: Parasiten und Renegaten
in Österreich,“ Die Presse 304 (1866).
3
10
references to his Slavic naturalness (Natürlichkeit) and his exotic sensuality, which wafts
like “fresh adolescent sensitivity over virgin fields of the fantastical” (192).
If Western orientalist discourse, as Edward Said claims, produces not only exotic
despotism, cruelty and sensuality but also irrational, childlike difference, then
Kürnberger successfully molds Sacher-Masoch into an “oriental” writer for the Germanspeaking public.
The contemporary Austrian writer Karl Emil Franzos tellingly
published his collected stories about Eastern European Jews under the title “From HalfAsia” (1883). But while Kürnberger’s criticism infantilized Sacher-Masoch, it also made
him a potential font of new energy for Europe. In a certain respect, Kürnberger merely
broadens Sacher-Masoch's own dichotomy of the tired civilization of Western Europe
with the pristine vitality of the Slavic East. At the end of Sacher's novella “Hajdamak,”
while standing on a peak of the Carpathian mountain range, the first person narrator,
called Sacher (!), spells out the programmatic Eastern renewal of the burned out
European civilization: “Over there is tired Europe, weathered like rock that crumbles
under our feet and falls into the abyss, […] Here in contrast are the young, fresh nations
on the rise, […] looking toward the future without fear and without doubt” (Sacher
Vermächtnis II/1, 301). Kurnberger’s treatment of Sacher-Masoch thus reveals the
central paradox of Western orientalism: the orientalized subject becomes both the
childlike other and the source of renewal, even the heir to empire.
In this vein, Kürnberger foresees an “authentic future Canaan” (Sacher Don Juan
190) latent in these Eastern lands, related by custom and conduct, but which are neither
geographically nor politically part of the German federation, in which a “sense of shared
humanity” can be drawn “from the shared Pan-Slavic common identity” (191). In light of
this interpretation it’s not surprising that the Viennese critic wanted to win SacherMasoch for his decidedly German-Austrian project:
11
How would it be if, instead of the Great Russian Turgeniev, we had a Ukrainian
[Kleinrussen], someone from East Galicia, that is to say an Austrian, that is to say
a German? What if in Austria, which has so far so inadequately fulfilled its
mission of Germanization; what if, in these times when the nationalities in
Austria are in open rebellion against Germaness, a Slavic-born author from the
banks of the Prut sent an excellent German novella to the banks of the Main and
the Nekar? ... That fact could mean that German literature had conquered totally
new Eastern longitudes and had annexed totally new and fresh primitive peoples
[naturvölker], which had not yet written German but which, in the course of
time, have begun to do so more and more. We would see a great, fertilizing
stream of sensualism set in motion toward the old Germany, overly manured
with books. We would see German poets emerging from the prairies of the
Weichsel and the mountain forests of the Dneister, new earthy men, who make
books out of nature, not out of other books. Their "sources" are not empty
libraries but real sources in meadows and forests (191f.).
With this vision of cultural annexation Kürnberger rightly refers to Sacher-Masoch
since both suppose an improvement of the Austrian state concept in the east.
Sacher-Masoch, Kürnberger and, with differences, Theodor Hertzka and Lazar von
Hellenbach write in the tradition of a cyclically recurring idea of a vitalization of
Austria, or Germany, through foreign cultures from the east. One generation later, at
the time of the Viennese and Berlin Modernism, one finds in Hugo von
Hofmannsthal’s essay “Die österreichische Idee” (1917), as well as in Max Weber and
Thomas Mann intimations of a divine redemption from the east. As Russell Berman
explains: “the notion that an amelioration might come from the East anticipates the
arguments both in Max Weber’s Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des
12
Kapitalismus (1904) and in Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig (1913), where
Aschenbach dreams of a new God arriving from Asia” (224).
According to
Kauffmann, the “Austrian Idea” was frequently recycled as an alternative to a
“Prussian confederation” (Kleindeutschen lösung) or to “Great-German annexations”
(Grossdeutschen anschlüssen) (186). Hoffmannthal's essay, for instance, posits the
idea of Austrian leadership in Central Europe as a counterbalance to the political
reality of the German dominated alliance during the First World War. In light of this,
the “Idea of Austria” and its inherent nationalistic, geopolitical and racist
implications, becomes more and more central.
Referring to Sacher-Masoch’s Jüdisches Leben (1892), the author and literary
critic W. G. Sebald sees in Kürnberger's introduction not merely a cultural but also a
dangerous geopolitical program: “[a]n unholy avenue of thought, and yet in it is most
clearly expressed what is just then taking place. For, even in the ghetto story written
in the German language, there is a component of the ideal process of Germanization,
which had so little political realization in East Europe in the course of the bourgeois
century, disappointing the growing number of geopoliticians, that the vision was put
into practice by force some generations later” (58). In other words, Kürnberger’s
vision alarms Sebald by showing how Sacher-Masoch’s German-language novellas
could be read as part of an aggressive Germanization process. Berman, however,
pushes Sebald's critique of the German desire to dominate and expand into Eastern
Europe a little further. He sees in Kürnberger's argument a degradation of Western
civilization resulting in a (rhetorical) elevation of marginal cultures, when he writes:
"it is this primitivist inversion that characterizes the predominate trope of German
colonial discourse: an inversion of power in the cultural sphere not unlike the
symbolic staging of submission in Sacher-Masoch's fiction" (Berman, Enlightenment
13
224f.).
In the context of German-Austrian imperialism, Berman's reference to
Sacher-Masoch is significant: if sadism follows the logic of institutional dominance
and the oppressor's pleasure in the victim's feeble resistance, then in contractual
masochism, it would be the victim, the one who authorizes his own humiliation, who
is paradoxically in charge of the scenario.
Accordingly, in Sacher-Masoch's
representation of gender relationships, his apparently weak male characters are in
control of the situation in most of his stories. More importantly, by referring to
Sacher-Masoch, Berman inverts the stable power dichotomy between colonizers and
colonized. For Berman, the colony is precisely the site of destabilization, where
cultural hierarchies and values of high integrity lose their credibility. Thus, it is at
the periphery of the Empire, in a para-colonial space, where a mixed race emerges,
that change is fermented, the distillate of which alters the intellectual metropolitan
culture.
Whereas Sebald sounds a cautionary note about the unadulterated Germanic
politics of cultural hegemony found in Kürnberger's introduction, Berman sees in the
same text a positive function for Germanic colonialism as a mechanism for mixing
and rejuvenation.
Consequently, I would like to pursue the question if and to what
extent a colonial utopian program can be read from the depicted gender conflicts in
some of Sacher-Masoch's para-colonial novellas. Since Sacher-Masoch’s erotic tales,
presenting dominating, fur-coated women and submissive, servile men, show only
one side of his manifold creativity, it is time to look at his self-pronounced magnum
opus Vermächtnis Kains.
It is not without foundation that Sacher-Masoch regarded his great,
uncompleted novella cycle, Vermächtnis Kains, as his principal work; it comprises
six thematic books concerning love, possession, the state, war, work and death. In a
letter to his publisher, Cotta, Sacher-Masoch describes the structure as follows: “Each
14
of these [above mentioned themes] will be addressed in a particular part within six
novellas, of which five illuminate the issue itself in its manifold nuances, the sixth
always contains the response, the solution and reconciliation” (Sacher-Masoch Don
Juan 179). Although the cycle is intended to represent the totality of the human
condition, the author was able to actualize entirely only the first two themes (love
and possession) and a couple of dispersed novels such as “Iluj” and “Judenraffael,”
belonging to other themes (state and death). The first cycle comprises aesthetically
sophisticated novels like “Venus im Pelz,” in which a man seemingly lets himself be
tormented by a woman; “Don Juan von Kolomea,” in which a man gets revenge on a
woman by leading an amoral lifestyle; and “Kapitulant,” in which a woman betrays
the love of a man through egoism and pursuit of pleasure.
Notwithstanding its
aesthetic brilliance, the cycle contains: “an unbridgeable discrepancy between the
demand for poetic totality and the individual stories, which aim for its exemplary
representation. Even their form, the novella, as a flash illumination of a singular and
strange occurrence, is unsuited for the construction of such a cosmology.
Sacher-Masoch
brings
about
exhausts
itself,
therefore,
in
a
What
striking
phenomenologically oriented juxtaposition of exemplary cases” (Koschorke 54).
Precisely because I agree in this respect with Koschorke, the following textual
analysis is not concerned with the author's failed intention to represent a poetic
totality, but instead undertakes a critical reading of Sacher-Masoch’s colonial and
utopian impetus.
The prologue to the entire cycle, “Der Wanderer,” portrays a “troubling figure,
who belongs to a company of monks, who dismisses marriage as a mortal sin, and to
whom only a free life together between the sexes is permitted” (8n). The wanderer
per Sacher-Masoch is “to [depict] an authentic national figure of the great Slavic
15
world to the east” (9n). The wanderer flees the demands of world to seek actively for
a putative release from the existing social order. With his flight from the world the
wanderer embodies the type of the anarchistic ascetic, who certainly in addition to
his religious, ascetic pathos, proclaims social-Darwinian perspectives by portraying
humans as “the most reasoned, bloodthirsty, and cruel of all beasts” (11). But at the
same time Sacher-Masoch’s wanderer is a personally troubled figure in his search for
identity, divorced from nation or family or any roots in a particular territory. His
self-inflicted departure from a sedentarily predictable life in search of the German
Pan-Slavic national identity is threatened by multiple losses in the form of cultural
and territorial ties. In this sense, the nihilist Slavic wanderer functions as an alter
ego of the author, and through him Sacher-Masoch voices his own pessimistic view of
humanity:
The nations, the states are big humans, and identical to the smaller humans in
their lust for booty and blood. Indeed, he who wants to do no harm cannot exist.
Nature has directed that we should live from the death of others, but as soon as
we accept the right to exploit lesser organisms only as a necessity arising in the
instinct for self-preservation, then we can go beyond to the justification for
humans to harness animals to the plow or to slaughter them, to the justification
for the strong to exploit the weak, for the gifted to exploit the less gifted, for the
stronger white race to exploit the coloreds, for the more capable, more educated,
or for those peoples lucky to be more developed to exploit the less developed (14).
The wanderer recounts nothing less than a natural history of colonialism. He
thus provides a justification for what Kipling later called the “white man’s burden.”4
4
See Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man's Burden,” McClure's Magazine 2 (1899).
16
However, the wanderer wants to transcend this natural order and withdraw from human
society.5 Sacher-Masoch hereby shows the world and its human inhabitants as they are
and later in the resolution as they should be. This dialectic move is mirrored by the
structure of the novellas: five materialistically grounded novellas, reflecting the realities
of human conduct, are followed by one idealistic conciliatory story which represents the
alternative. An early conceptualization of this structure is set out in a letter to his
brother Karl:
One of the main ideas of the [novella] cycle is that humankind will only then be
happy when the moral social laws are also given validity at the level of the state,
and the so-called ‘great princes,’ great generals and great diplomats wind up on
the gallows or in prison just as today murderers, robbers, forgers, and swindlers
do.
For the state: the misery and business of the absolute monarchy; the mendacity
of constitutionalism; rescue through democracy, United States of Europe;
common legislation.
War: fear of war, recruiting, the misery of standing armies, fire, plundering, rape,
starvation, theft from the dead. The general obligation for military service allows
a general disarmament.
Work: it is a voluntary tribute to existence, overcoming for the time these dangers
and giving people joy in the process. The wealthy will reduce their demand to
have to work as little as possible. Society in turn will have to strive to stamp out
idleness, those who live at the expense of others, by seeking a just distribution of
work to all social elements to reduce the overall workload (178).
For a longer discussion of Sacher-Masoch’s "Wanderer," see Peter Sprengel, „Darwin oder
Schopenhauer? Fortschrittspessimismus und Pessimismuskritik in der österreichischen
Literatur“ Klaus Amann et al. Literarisches Leben 60-94.
5
17
This description of his aesthetic masterpiece reads like a political pamphlet
written by a revolutionary social reformer. All aspects of public life, according to
Sacher-Masoch, need a general reconstitution of the exploitative, social-Darwinist
structure if the European populace is to be allowed the pursuit of happiness. Unlike
Kürnberger’s Germanizing fantasies, he speaks clearly against every form of power
politics.
In contrast, he sees the answer in a Pan-European democracy with
unlimited equality for all citizens. The autocratic rule of the nobility is as strongly
rejected as is war, which falls as a burden first of all on the deprived populace. At a
time when discourses of nationality prevailed, Sacher-Masoch and his fellow
utopianists instead looked forward, anticipating trans-border alliances like the
European Union, which would not occur for another century.
*
In “Kapitulant” (1870), one of the six novellas that constitute the cycle “Love” in
Vermächtnis Kains, we learn about the destiny of the introverted peasant Balaban, who
loses his fiancée Katharina to their master, but subsequently explains her infidelity to
himself as an inevitability of female nature, thereafter compensating for the loss by
leading a life of quiet renunciation. Here we can see what Michael T. O’Pecko describes
as a typical paradigm for Sacher-Masoch’s tales: “a couple, one of whom is a gifted
woman whose sex prevents her from completely realizing her abilities in a male
dominated society and the other of whom is a weak” (335), underprivileged man whose
passivity has become a barrier to his entry into the practical and sensual sides of life.
The man’s modesty finally succeeds in provoking the woman into giving him a thrashing,
which accompanies a crisis in his life, forcing him to reevaluate his behavior. A parting
18
of the ways usually brings about the resolution in his novellas when the man’s
transformation proves insufficient to raise him to his partner’s level.
The frame story of “Kapitulant” is a wintertime sledge ride by the narrator that
provides an opportunity for him to depict the broad plains of Galicia in splendid glory:
As we flew down the bare mountainside with ringing, bright bells, the plain
spread out before us, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite. The winter coat
of ermine fur lent it the greatest majesty. It was completely covered by it. Only
the bare trunks of the low willows, more distantly a few long-armed meadow
springs, in the distance a few forlorn sooty huts, sketched a black appearance on
the furry white surface of the snow (Sacher-Masoch Don Juan 62).
This eroticized description of nature elevates the snow to a fetish giving the
reader a sense of a wintertime Galicia clothed in ermine. It is such depictions that cause
Kürnberger’s blood to heat up as when he writes of Sacher-Masoch’s prose: “We would
see rise up from the prairies of the Weichsel and the forests of the Dniester new
earthbound German writers, who do not create books out of books, but who create books
from nature” (192). In Kürnberger's reading, the vastness of the East European reaches
brings the people back to their natural condition. Kürnberger attributes the greater
vitality of Slavic peoples in Sacher-Masoch’s prose to unleashed forces of nature -pristine rivers, snowcapped mountains and vast fields -- in Eastern Europe. As narrative
technique the landscape description of the frame story anchors the work to what is to
come and depicts the climate in which the displayed human destiny can first be fulfilled.
Notably, the long and detailed description of the infinitely vast landscape of the eastern
Habsburg Empire at the beginning of “Kapitulant” was omitted from a post-war Austrian
19
edition of Sacher-Masoch’s narratives, Dunkel ist Dein Herz, Europa (1957). With this
fragmented rendering of the novella, Sacher-Masoch’s narrative brilliance had to pay
involuntary tribute to post-war Austria, which no longer had any use for romantic
descriptions of the East.
The pastoral structure ends when the narrator comes across the peasant, and
later capitulant, Balaban, in the company of a peasant guard by the campfire. The term
capitulant refers to someone who has signed up voluntarily for a double or triple term of
service.6 But, at the same time, it suggests a person who has given up on himself, who
has capitulated! Despite this instructive name, the stately appearance of Balaban makes
a great impression on the narrator. In the course of evening the capitulant is encouraged
to tell the story of his former fiancée, Katharina von Baran, the telling of which initiates
the interior story. This starting point puts the civilized non-local narrator in the role of
an anthropologist, thereby allowing sophisticated Viennese readers, secure in the
comfort of their armchairs, to be educated and entertained about the exotic, wild East of
the Habsburg multi-ethnic state.
As it turns out, Balaban’s fiancée was a devilishly beautiful peasant girl, who
wanted to elevate herself. Balaban, a Galician peasant at the time, fell hopelessly in love
with her and for a while he felt happy and uplifted without sensing the transience of the
moment. True to the role of “femme fatale,” she tells our tragic hero directly that the
Polish lord of the estate, to whom they are both subject, has eyes for her, and while she
feels nothing for him, his power and wealth have an irresistible charm for her. When
Balaban, a serf and near tears, stammers to her: “Katharina... think of eternity!” (83).
Katharina answers him dryly: “That’s just what I’m thinking of, ... we’re here for just a
short time, but there forever” (84). Katharina lives like a lady, dresses like a born
6
Capitulant, the term used here, is an archaic German term for reenlistee.
20
princess, goes horseback riding, even smokes cigars “like a great lord” (86) and has the
serfs whipped as suits her wish and mood. Thus, the transformation from a pretty farm
maid to a power-addicted dominatrix is complete. It is not without reason that SacherMasoch positions this depiction of the rapid inversion of sexual power relationships at
the border of the Habsburg Empire.
This anxiety-provoking loss of manhood is
projected to the fringe of the Empire to avoid unsettling the Viennese educated bourgeois
readers. Precisely because this sexual anxiety was so familiar, the familiar had to be
alienated, to be kept remote, to maintain the comfort of distance. It had to be ghettoized,
pushed to the outer reaches of Empire where familiarity melded with strangeness. As
Sacher-Masoch consciously breaks through the automatism of perception, he stylizes the
periphery of the Empire to a place of social progress, but also a repository for deeply held
fears.7
Moreover, Katharina chases Balaban out of the village, and he signs up for the
Austrian k. u. k. (kaiserlich und königliche) army, in order to repair his broken sense of
self and he finds comfort in belonging to the Emperor’s military: “Okay, you serve the
Emperor; you at least know to whom you belong” (89). During his long term of military
service he regains his self-esteem and he formulates telling and important insights about
his military training journey: “I saw my prosperity there, more justice and humanity and
more civilization as among us. I learned to esteem the Germans and the Czechs, who
speak our language” (90). In other words, he comes to identify with the colonial power
of Habsburgs. This association with a nation more powerful than the Polish perpetrators
reflects nicely Sacher-Masoch’s liminal position, identifying at once both with the
colonized Eastern Europeans and with the colonial power of the Habsburg Empire.
Linking the private with the public sphere, Sacher-Masoch has the story of Balaban’s
traumatic separation take place in 1846 during the Polish Landlords’ Revolution and the
7
See Buch, Nähe 11.
21
counterrevolution of the Galician peasantry.
In response to these turbulent times,
Balaban becomes increasing politicized and he projects his anger onto the Polish gentry.
Balaban actively seeks a trustworthy authority figure:
And there I saw also in the provincial city, that there is an order in the world; we
were held in strictness but justly. There was there no unwarranted punishment
and no unearned wage, and the people in the city viewed the soldiers equally with
respect. And if I stood guard before the county officers and listened to the
peasants, as they spoke among one another, and how they found there justice and
assistance against the Polaks, then I looked up at the eagle, which hung over the
gate, and I thought to myself: you are only a small bird and you have small wings,
but they are strong enough, to protect an entire people. When afterwards, as we
marched to the parade, the yellow flag with the black eagle fluttered over our
heads, I only had to look up at it and I was contented (89).
Claudio Magris comments succinctly on this text selection in his well-known
treatise The Habsburg Myth (2000): “Folklore and supranational patriotism: that is the
contribution of these rather modest tales from distant Galicia” (192). Yet this superficial
analysis is too abbreviated in its grasp of Balaban’s “supra-national patriotism.”
Balaban’s patriotism stems from an authoritarian personality, which -- precisely through
its affirmative character -- throws into relief the reverse side of patriotism. This reverse
side, this slavish following of military and national authority, allows him to express in
public his desire to become a “true” Austrian.
In this respect, Balaban’s ideology
represents a desperate attempt to regain in the public sphere the structure and order that
was taken from him in his private life by Katharina’s cruel withdrawal of her love for
him.
22
During his sporadic visits home he has to concede that Katharina, who in the
meantime has married the estate lord, has become his “Gracious Lady” (91), that is, the
former farm girl, the deep love of Balaban’s life, is now by contract his all-mighty
Ladyship. Inasmuch as a relationship with great social consequences has emerged from
the previously peasant lovers, the social contract is immediately sexualized. Naturally
such a breathtaking and awe-inspiring social change of circumstances was conceivable
for the contemporary readers only at the para-colonial boarders of the Habsburg Empire.
Or, as Berman puts it, Galicia functions as “a site of destabilization where cultural
hierarchies and truth values lose their credibility, leading to the possibility of new modes
of cognition” (225).
Still, even though Sacher-Masoch projects the feared social upset
outward to the periphery of the Empire, Viennese society nevertheless loses through the
change its “initial position of superiority and getting inserted into a process of
hybridization” (Berman 226).
At the apex of conflict in Balaban’s story, the Polish estate lords revolt against the
Habsburg administration and try to bring the Galician peasants onto their side. They
summon the peasants and appeal to them to join their lords’ cause, because since “the
revolution broke out, the peasants were free, the [Polish] estate lords have abolished
forced labor, and they [i.e. the peasants] would be allowed to attack [Habsburg] Imperial
treasuries and the Jews” (93). It is scarcely possible to depict more drastically the social
Darwinism of the Habsburg borderlands. In order to rid themselves of the GermanAustrian administration, the estate lords offer their peasants self-determination, call for
the plundering of the state treasuries, and don’t even shrink from declaring the Jews to
be fair game.
Balaban perceives his life as a series of such battles, and he explains his ongoing
devotion to Katharina as determined by nature: “Everything is subordinate to necessity,
every living being feels how tragic existence is and still fights with nature, which for
23
humans the struggle of a man with a woman and their love is also just a battle for
existence” (97). The Darwinian conflict between the sexes proves to be coterminous with
the universal conflict for existence, which is itself masochistically justified, for: “later,
that which has hurt us, comes close to giving us pleasure” (100).
With Balaban's
unredeemed suspension and dire prospect, the novella closes with inevitable appearance
of Katharina in fully fetishized attire: “The sledge stood now there, and out of the bear
furs, which covered it, arose a slender, beautiful lady in an expensive fur. As she pushed
back the veil from her capuchin, she was still more beautiful, but frightfully pale. Her
blue eyes were feverish with anger” (100). Although the peasants wouldn't allow her to
pass the checkpoint, Balaban -- true to his stance of personal renunciation -- allows “his
Ladyship” to continue on her way without contention.
On the one side the dominating Katharina negates any connection to the friend of
her youth. As a representative of condescending colonialism as it manifested itself in the
fringe area of the Habsburg Empire, she radiates a sadistic coldness that doesn’t shrink
from torment or violence. On the other side Balaban disavows the breakdown of his
relationship with his young love and refuses to allow himself to be open to the possibility
of falling in love with another woman. Even though he has recently won his freedom
from the Polish estate lords, he suspends his masochism through the self-deception of a
preordained inescapable love, which he can only bear in patience and silence. Thus
“Kapitulant” portrays Darwinian relationships in the private and public realms of
Galicia. In particular, it can be read as Sacher-Masoch’s portrayal of the gender power
reversal. The projection onto the periphery of the Empire of contemporary misogynist
sentiments concerning relationship conflicts illustrates the use of para-colonial border
land as a less-threatening discursive locus for innovative sociopolitical ideas. Balaban’s
capitulation, his renunciation of love, does not imply passive resignation, but an
24
acceptance of the limits imposed by the para-colonial setting. This setting is an area of
both restrictive boundaries and new possibilities for social progress and revitalization.
Balaban's dire existential struggle reflects the utopian possibilities of the para-colonial
space, even though the fulfillment of these possibilities – the conversion of a female
peasant into an aristocratic lady – eventually turns against him.
*
If “Kapitulant” portrays unresolved masochistic love relationships and power
struggles within the multiethnic population in Galicia, the next novella, "Paradies am
Dniester" provides the readers resolution and reconciliation. “Paradies,” in the novellic
cycle “Eigenthum” (Possession), is one of the two completed final novellas of
Vermächtnis Kains. According to Sacher-Masoch himself these novellas are complete.
Thus, it is not surprising that the tale closes with a paradisiacal depiction of a selfsufficient peasant commune. At the opening of “Paradies am Dniester,” there where “the
wild Dniester sends its green silver-foamed waves from the Galizian plains into the
forested Buckovina” (Sacher-Masoch Vermächtnis II/2 461), the first person narrator
meets a selfless soul named Zenon Miroslavski, who “wanders among the people like a
prophet” (462). His life story becomes part of the novella. On his first trip away from
the parental palace, the young nobleman Zenon encounters vagabond peasants. Their
wretched existence affects him so much that he seeks counsel in the palace library.
There “he read [s] of Buddha, the Indian prince, who half a century before Christ, shaken
by a glimpse of human misery, just as he [Zenon] was, left his palace and wandered into
the wilderness to seek the solution to the agonizing mystery” (470). Zenon’s reading is
another instance of one of Sacher-Masoch’s utopian ideas, the revitalization of the
Habsburg realm through the religious mythology of the Far East.
25
Zenon leaves the care of his parents behind, and -- without any means of support
or subsistence -- sets forth to discover at first hand the impoverished life of the
peasantry. Incognito, he struggles against peasant superstition and the exploitation of
the peasantry by shady Jewish businessmen and Polish landed aristocrats. Over time he
evolves into a Galician Robin Hood, who protects helpless young mothers from the
oppressions of procreation and who frees young women from coerced sexual
dependencies. During a period of solitary meditative contemplation in the nearby woods
– clearly a reference to Gautama’s contemplation under the bo tree – Zenon develops a
concept for a social utopia of work, unity and equality. This insight comes to him during
an extended, contemplative observation of an anthill. Drawn by his positive radiance an
exceedingly beautiful countess falls in love with Zenon and allows a seer to foretell her
future in a completely unenlightened manner. He prophesies at this séance that her
“happiness is with the man, whom you love, and with whom you will flee” (514). And,
when asked about his peasant origin, the clairvoyant responds meaningfully: “He is not
what he seems to be… and he does not yet have what will one day be his” (515).
Meanwhile, the political situation reaches a critical stage, and with Zenon’s
support the peasants refuse to perform their feudal servile duties and “began to ring the
tocsin in all other villages and soon thousands of [them], armed with scythes and flails,
moved on the palace” (522). With playful certitude our protagonist, Zenon, the pastoral
Messiah, settles even this far reaching dispute as he has all previous conflicts: “Zenon
took the laments of the peasants to their beautiful mistress and asked for a compromise
favorable to both parties, which was immediately accepted by her.
With this the
peasants let the count and Maria Kasimira [countess] live and withdrew, singing the
song of the humane noble battles. Outside they lift Zenon onto a horse and lead him
triumphantly into the village, Tscherwonogrod” (523). This revolt, instigated and settled
26
by a disguised nobleman, would merely strengthen prevailing authority, but it remains
unclear if the narrator is conscious of the irony of such a “peasant revolution.” With the
social problems on the wild Dniester thus resolved, the narrative turns to bringing
together the two lovers, who supposedly belong to different social classes. Although
Zenon, with his strength and effectiveness, is in no way similar to Sacher-Masoch’s other
heroes, he brings the usual masochistic disposition, characteristic for Sacher-Masoch’s
protagonists, to the fore in a romantic key scene of the text. When Maria Kasimira asks:
“Wouldn’t you willingly be my slave?” -- Zenon knelt down before her. “I am
that,” he cried “and pleaded with the language of the Poet:
Never free my chains! The most painful would be the punishment, for
you are for my God and world and freedom. Place your beautiful naked foot on
the neck of the slave, Mistress, Mistress!”… “Oh! Place your foot upon my neck,” 8
Zenon pleaded.
“No, No,” she countered full of majesty. “I swear to you it makes me
happy, “he cried and threw himself face down on the ground at her feet. She
blushed, breathed deeply, and finally placed her petit foot gently on his neck.
“Are you really happy now?” she asked.
“I am, how beautiful it is to see thus
before oneself a man is who strong, courageous, noble.” --- she paused ashamed.
“What? Sweet Mistress?” “That I love you” (528f).
Sacher-Masoch depicts life as a double dream in which the protagonists can speak the
truth freed not only from confining class, but also from traditional gender roles. Only
with his enacted subjugation is Zenon’s fantasy freed, giving Maria sufficient courage to
overcome her shame and to confess her warm feelings for the putative peasant. To finish
Following Sacher-Masoch’s own footnote the excerpt is from Chateaubriand’s poem “The Slave”
in the German translation by Louise von Ploennies.
8
27
the story within the story, Maria Kasimira flees with her revolutionary peasant, who,
affirmed by her proof of love, tells her that he is of noble birth. If the novella and it here,
one could criticize Sacher-Masoch for glossing over the hard Galician social reality
through a romantic love story. However, as a narrative device, this Galician tale serves
him as a medium for him to set forth his social utopia. After Zenon and Maria are
married and have moved to a grand estate, the narrator visits the couple. There, a
conversation develops among Zenon, Maria Kasimira and other protagonists from the
tale, in the course of which Sacher-Masoch’s pan-Slavic utopia is set forth in detail.
In the theatrically depicted conversation between a conservative German
engineer, Felbe, a French doctor, Lenotre, and a Russian nihilistic aristocrat, Popiel, the
competing contemporary social theories are juxtaposed against each other:
Felbe rose a little from his chair. “Allow me, Countess. It seems to me that to the
extent that culture has brought an increase of population density and luxury, the
outcome is that humankind more and more makes life difficult for one another.
The closer we come to the natural state, the less are our needs, and the less there
is actual poverty, and the more one finds people helping others instead of causing
them trouble.”
Lenotre flared up. „Don’t praise to me the state of nature. This golden age
meant only that all were equally rough and equally poor.
Humankind has
progressed, not always with equal speed, but we have come a respectable way
from crudeness, arbitrariness, slavery, immorality, toward education, toward
justice, to freedom and morality.”
“Why are you getting yourself all worked up,” teased Popiel, “to what
does it lead to discern whether humankind is progressing or regressing? [...] I
would model everything after the Russian peasant communities.
28
The Slavic
common spirit comes close to the ideals of the French communists. Do you know
that Proudhon is my friend?
Yes.
The only salvation is a commonality of
possessions under the direction of the state.
Personal possessions must be
abolished, together, of course, with inheritance, marriage, family. Even money
must be abolished. … The instincts of the Russian race,” Popiel shouted, “are
worth more than all of your European civilization. Anyway, we already have too
much past, history, art. Everything must be abolished so that a new, youthful,
fresh world can come into existence” (540f.).
While the Frenchman has completely given his soul up to the unceasing progress of
European civilization, the German sees cultural development as provoking conflict and
dreams of a community of the natural state. The Russian, in contrast, would like to keep
the community of Russian peasant society withoutgiving up the progress of civilization.
In other words, the Russian Popiel floats a third Slavic way toward the ideal compromise
between the alternatives of humanness and sensual satisfaction. With its emphasis on
the destruction of the past, i.e. history and art, in favor of a new youthful world, this
utopian conception is irreverently reminiscent of reactionary modernism, and shares
with it the same contradiction; Popiel "simultaneously advocates a return to pre-modern
organic corporatism and the unheard-of mobilization of all social forces in the service of
rapid modernization” (Zizek 89). This perhaps represents a temporal version of the
geographical paradox of the para-colonial boundaries in “Kapitulant.”
In fact, Count Zenon Mirolavski, the host of the conversation, establishes a workbased community for his Slavic peasants, in which inheritable property is abolished. His
social philosophy enhances Popiel’s communist position:
The question of possessions will only be solved in connection with the question of
labor and appears to me in its innermost essence to be a question of wages.
29
Possessions will be held in common; wages though must be individual since they
must conform to the effort expended… [Possessions] will have to be returned to
the community after the death of the owner, from which large return flows of
funds can be funded major institutions and enterprises to benefit all mankind,
similar to the Suez Canal or the transformation of the Sahara into an interior sea.
Inheritance has never fulfilled its mission, it has not fulfilled it in the higher
sense, because it seeks to assure the future of a few children at the expense of the
majority (544). … Thus, in its effort to preserve the species in the small, it has
brought the preservation of the species at large into danger. It has also failed its
mission as an attribute of parental love, because mere possessions are an
insufficient assurance for the future of the children. Children will then be better
cared for in common since the community, the state, will prepare them for work
and provide for their care until they have completed their education (546).
Zenon’s statement reflects the heated contemporary discussion about the question of
possession and inheritance. It was not without reason that Sacher-Masoch titled the
entire second part of his Cain’s Cycle Das Eigenthum (Possession), just as other Austrian
utopianists participated in the discourse on possession and inheritance. Independently
of their political orientation, they hoped to resolve social injustice by answering the
question of possession. In his book Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840), Popiel’s alleged
friend, the French anarchist Pierre Proudhon condemns the kind of property gain in
which one man exploits the labor of another, although he does not attack the generally
recognized ownership laws. Conversely, the communist Popiel vehemently proclaims in
the conversation above a radical abolition of all rights of possession.
But Zenon’s
principal criticism of such a radical position is that the categorical abolition of property
would destroy personal freedom by taking away from the individual control over his
means of production.
To resolve the complex issue, Zenon proposes a communal
30
compromise: yes, for individual wages and property; no, for individual inheritance laws.
Additionally, he combines his theory of communal inheritance rights with contemporary
social-Darwinist discussions:
The new morality can only be based on natural laws. Nature, however, only has a
single objective: the continuation and maintenance of the species. It is toward
this goal that the drives of self-preservation, the sex-drive, the drive of parental
love are directed. In the natural state each one expressed himself in the struggle
against the same drives of others. In striving to perpetuate himself and his
species, possessions and inheritance took form; the protection of ownerships
ensured the existence of his descendants. With time, the human being evolved,
evolved above all his brain, and with this a higher understanding of this drive, the
true nature of which is more and more to be understood. From self-love and love
for one’s own children arises human-love, the concern for the maintenance of the
species emerged from the close-knit circle of the family and seeks to embrace the
entire world. One seeks to right this injustice (544).
According to Zenon, the injustice of possessions developed through the process of
civilization, yet this injustice can be made right again through an enlightened stage, if
the state takes over the rearing of “its children” through the completion of their
education. Thus the state creates a unified identity by infantilizing its subjects, thereby
reducing their ability to operate as self-determining entities.
The motor for this Habsburg colonial utopia is expressed in the following
citation:
German-ness
is
self-centeredness,
inequality,
aristocracy;
Slavism
is
commonality, equality, democracy. And for these reasons I only expect a happy
31
outcome for all of the great questions which concern humankind from the Slavic
race. Yes, from the Slavs I expect the regeneration of the world (543).
While a key ideologic tenet of the “Habsburg myth” portrays Austria as a harmonious
place, too peaceable and un-ambitious to participate in vicious European colonialism,
Zenon’s expectations transcend even this wishful thinking.
In contrast to Sacher-
Masoch’s usual portrayal of fierce ethnic conflicts as a natural determinism within the
para-colonial space of Eastern Europe, the conflict in Paradies am Dniester is
prerequisite to his discussion of a utopian pan-Slavic community in Eastern Europe. Yet
from its formal structure, the imaginary discussion is merely an epilogue, an
afterthought to an insoluble political situation.
With Paradies am Dniester, Sacher-
Masoch puts forward a paradoxical colonial utopia, suspended in fantasy by
displacement onto inverted gender relations and the insurmountable spatial limitations
of Europe. Although Zenon’s utopia addresses the practical political problems of his
time, and Sacher-Masoch locates his narratives in Eastern Europe, he clearly is
motivated by a utopian conception of a European-wide new order. He disassociates
himself from a limited and limiting reality, to act out in an imagined space that which is
not possible in the realm of reality, so that the fictional conversation can stand in for the
real. Or, as Deleuze writes: “He does not believe in negating or destroying the world nor
in idealizing it: what he does is to disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an
ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy” (32f.).
This suspension in fantasy also
explains his depiction of a rapid inversion of sexual power relationships, set at the border
of the Habsburg Empire, with its anxiety-provoking loss of manhood.
In fact, these sexual anxieties were so painfully familiar to Sacher-Masoch’s
Viennese readership that they could only comfortably be presented as fantasies from the
periphery of the Empire. He stylizes the periphery of the Empire as a place of social
32
construction and reinvigoration. His contemporary utopian writers in Austria negated
the present political reality by transferring their utopian models to Africa (Hertzka) or to
the South-Sea (von Hellenbach). But by denying the spatial realities and political
limitations of Europe, Sacher-Masoch creates utopian conversations that, through their
suspension in fantasy, can take place within the Habsburg Empire itself. Through his
use of temporal and geographical borderlands, he is able to bring to light conflicts that
were repressed or displaced onto exotic locations. He offers not a way to remove all
colonial, sexual, and psychological anxieties from the Habsburg sense of self, but a way
to project them onto the periphery so that they are no longer dangerous.
33
Works Cited:
Berman, Russell. Enlightenment and Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture
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