ULRICH BACH Stanford University Sacher-Masoch’s Utopian Peripheries Das Wesen Österreichs 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 Em- pire, 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 German- language Pan-Slavism, when he writes: Wir werden das Oesterreicherthum vertreten als eine politische Nationalität, in der sich die natürlichen Nationalitäten, jede im vollen Genuße ihrer Rechte und Freiheiten, vereinen lassen. (Sacher-Masoch: Materialien 337) Despite the controversial political implications of his “Germanic” Pan-Slav- ism, his exciting, page-turning novellas, set at the colonial borders of the Hapsburg Empire, have usually been read in the context of sexual transgres- sions 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: The German Quarterly 80.2 (Spring 2007) 201