The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Orgasmatrons and Orgasm Guns -- (Chapter VIII, Part 36)

Whereas old Sigmund tried to support the status quo—not least because the bourgeoisie kept him in cigars—Reich was an avowed Marxist who aimed to free the libidos of the lumpenproles.

Unfortunately, like his fellow Galician, Sacher-Masoch, he also wasn't right in the head.

Early on, the psychiatrist claimed to have discovered a new form of energy.

'Orgone' derived its name—and power—from the orgasm.

What's more, Reich claimed that this magical sex energy could be captured and concentrated to produce earth-moving miracles.

After fleeing to the US in 1939, he set up a research lab called Orgonon in the boondocks of Maine and started advertising 'orgone accumulators.'

The idea was that patients would sit in these special boxes—they look like posh, blonde-wood porta-potties—and wait for orgasmic energy from the atmosphere to build up in their, um, organs.

Unbelievably, Reichian therapy and many of its offshoots are still going strong today.

To my immense disappointment, though, no one's allowed to sit in the specially imported orgasmatron here in Vienna's Jewish Museum.

In fact, it's strictly verboten to take pictures of it, or the equally bizarre invention that Reich cooked up in his later years (God forbid the technology should fall into the wrong hands).

Convinced of the power of sex energy, the increasingly paranoid scientist built orgone 'guns'—basically, big hollow tubes lashed together—that he claimed could repel enemy UFOs.

Nailed it!

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The S&M Youth -- (Chapter VIII, Part 17)

For the record, Grazy says he mainly likes girls, but he's also been with men, and he doesn't always camp it up, especially not as his day-job alter-ego: Michael the Computer Guy.

He and his girlfriend have a tempestuous romance, he says.

Apropos of which, the Sturm to his Drag interrupts us to have a smoke, and Grazy gallantly follows her outside. 'I don't like her to stand outside alone,' he says.

Though it's hard to see how his presence would help her. What's she gonna say: 'Don't bother me, or my cross-dressing boyfriend will beat you up with his handbag'?

On my right is Angelika, a university student euphemized as a BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) in online parlance.

'This is my first time here,' she says. 'I usually go to another group—the SM Youth.'

I splutter into my beer. 'The what?' 

'The SM Youth: for people aged sixteen to twenty-six.'

Ah, sweet sixteen and never been whipped. 

Well, this is awkward:
a teen fashion label has the same name

'Gosh,' I wonder. 'If you start with S&M at sixteen, where do you go from there?'

'I dunno. I guess they'll find out as they get older.'

For the most part, she tells me, the monthly SM Youth meetings deal with issues like exams… moving house… how to make a bondage chair that converts into a coffee table… and how to build a torture cage from wood to keep the cost down—y'know, questions we all grapple with at one point or another. 

Angelika's writing her thesis on intergender studies at the University of Graz, where both Sacher-Masoch and Krafft-Ebing taught.

'Did you have to read Psychopathia Sexualis for your paper?'

'No—the university didn't have it in the library. At least, I don't think they did. I think I looked it up. I can't remember. I know one thing, though: if I wrote something on SM, it would definitely get published. SM's huge now. When I was growing up, you hardly saw it. But shows like CSI, Law and Order and NCIS often have SM characters—usually the baddies—but you never saw that on Colombo.'

'Or Hawaii Five-O,' I add. 'Spank 'em, Danno!'

She smiles politely; clearly, I'm too old for the SM Youth.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists -- (Chapter VIII, Part 16)

Prior to coming here, I struck up an email correspondence with a transvestite who used to run Graz's (now defunct) club devoted to S&M—or simply 'SM,' in German.

He/she then forwarded my email address to an online forum, and since then, I've received helpful tips about Graz's miniscule SM scene.

In fact, the aficionados have decided to hold one of their special meetings, a Stammtisch, at a local restaurant in honor of my arrival.

So it would be rude not to go, right?

Weirdly, the setting for the BDSM do is a traditional wood-beamed Austrian restaurant, the kind of place that sticks antique farm implements on the walls for decoration and makes its waitresses dress up like wenches for ambience.

The arrival of 'Grazy' and his girlfriend—both in high heels and black fetishwear—elicits a few bemused chuckles from the pensioners dining nearby, but there's no real shock or disgust.

After all, today's bluehairs are yesterday's longhairs: these sexagenarians came of age in the Sixties.

And whether they're able to accept it or not (forever young!), most of Grazy's entourage isn't much younger.

Having met the Terribly Nice Sadists of France, I feel bad being mean to Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists; then again, they probably prefer it that way.

THE USUAL SEXBAIT

The twenty or so people who show up are typical of the regulars you see on swingers' sites: mainly well-preserved women who serve as sexbait for their balding partners, plus a couple of young guys tagging along in the off-chance an orgy breaks out.

At the top of the long wooden table sits Grazy, all dolled up in a bobbed wig, a black corset and a miniskirt with matching choker and armband.

Judging from his button nose and neatly symmetrical features, he's probably as cute as a guy as he is as a girl—and boy does he know it.

His poor girlfriend, on the other hand, has a face that's curdled round her nose. She's probably a big softie deep down, but her default expression is defensive: she doesn't so much stare daggers at you as an entire fortress, complete with vats of boiling oil.

You have to feel sorry for her: it's bad enough having a better-looking partner, but having a boyfriend who's hotter than you dressed as a woman would drive any girl crazy.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Masochists' Paradox -- (Chapter VIII, Part 15)

One manifestation of this trickle-down theory of deviance is the plethora of women now willing to abuse men for money.

Whereas many of Krafft-Ebing's masochists lamented the dearth of real-life Wandas, there's now no shortage of women advertising as dominatrixes.

To my mind, it's no real mystery why a working girl would opt for this particular career path: 'You wanna pay me to humiliate you—and I don't even have to shag your sorry butt? Heck, yeah, I'll do it, suck—I mean, "slave"!'

What mystifies me is that they're able to charge anything at all; given the number of women with 'male issues,' you'd think prices for a good spanking would have hit rock bottom, so to speak.

But the reason they don't is the masochists' paradox.

Just as the supposedly 'weaker sex' often rations intercourse in vanilla couplings, in S&M 'play,' the submissives hold the whip hand.

'The masochists are the real masters because they decide what's going to happen,' Oosterhuis explained, echoing Krafft-Ebing's correspondents.

'And that's also their difficulty because they have to instruct the mistress. And as soon as she does not behave as they want her to, they are disappointed. So masochism is a frustration for these men because they cannot realize their fantasies.'

Taken to its logical extreme, this all gets very angsty, with masochists ending up like their namesake, forever searching for ever-harsher mistresses and 'stimulants.'

Personally, I've never seen the appeal of being abused by a surly woman, much less paying for the privilege; not only does it seem deeply silly, I could get abused in any bar or club for free.

And after Paris, I've seen more than my share of sadomasochism (my eyes! my eyes!).

The point of this Teutonic jaunt is to explore the cerebral aspect of sex, without getting sucked into the seedy side.

Well, not literally, anyway.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- It All Comes Together in the Sacher-Masoch Suite -- (Chapter VIII, Part 13)

So far, that seems premature.

Sacher-Masoch's house in Graz is now a place where people go to treat their ills; apparently, the pharmacy even has a plaque commemorating the author of Venus in Furs, but I'm too distracted by the billboard across the way advertising Der Venus Club, a girlie bar that takes its symbol from another Renaissance masterpiece—Botticelli's Birth of Venus (gold and silver plated)—and charges €75 for half an hour with a 'Top Girl' in themed rooms spanning Hollywood, Africa, Harlem… and, um, Britain. 

If only I'd known…

Instead, I've booked the 'Wanda Sacher-Masoch Suite' at a hotel in the center.

Leopold and Aurora used to dine at the Erzherzog Johann after the opera, so as part of the 2003 festival, the hotel's owners concocted a cake fit for masochists—the Sacher-Masoch Torte, natürlich (with layers of fruit and marzipan)—and dedicated a suite to the unhappy couple.

Its designer is the same Austrian woman who bullied the Pole for performance art, and the centerpiece is a large portrait of her posing as Wanda in the middle of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, right in front of Titian's Venus in Furs as well as his Ecce Homo/Christ Before Pilate.

Irene Andessner as Wanda

Now, this is all very exciting for me because the photo ties together Titian, his pornographer mate Aretino (as Pilate)...

...and the same saucy model from the Venus of Urbino...

...posing as Venus in Furs (aka The Woman in the Fur Coat)...

—plus an Austrian artist playing Sacher-Masoch's muse.

Irene Andessner's Wanda wears thigh-high boots, a corona and a satin-lined cloak with a massive train: the fake fur in the portrait is actually the bedspread of the four-poster in the Sacher-Masoch Suite.

Though the room's color scheme is predictable—black and white with red velvet features—it's the details that take the room gloriously over the top: the (somewhat disturbing) cameo of the artist as Wanda inside the bed's canopy—gloating over you while you sleep (or not)…

...the quote from Venus in Furs on the glass panels in the bathroom… the life-sized projection of Venus on the shower wall when the lights are dimmed… and the pièce de résistance: a Gideon's Bible next to the telephone.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'The Century of Sacher-Masoch' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 12)

You may have blinked and missed it, but Graz was Europe's Capital of Culture in 2003, the same year its most famous son did his bit for world culture in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Nowadays, though, Schwarzenegger is a former Governator non grata, after Graz's assembly denounced him for sending a convicted killer to his death in California.

(The city hasn't always been so conscientious, however, having produced more than its fair share of Nazis—including Arnie's own police chief father.)

The star of Kindergarten Cop promptly returned a 'ring of honor' to Graz and demanded that it remove his name from the local sports stadium.

MASOMANIA

As for its other infamous son of a local police chief, Graz has also had a tortuous relationship.

The story goes that Sacher-Masoch's widow tried to have his ashes interred in Graz, but the city fathers refused to let his cinders besmirch their soil.

In the sexed-up twenty-first century, however, the dead writer has become an underground celebrity, with at least one French philosophe bemoaning the fact that masochism 'has suffered from unfair neglect' versus sadism, and Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals bickering over which country is the true home of the perversion: Sacher-Masoch's hometown was actually the city of Lviv in Ukraine, which now boasts a Masochist Café and a life-size bronze statue of him, while some Russians argue that he got his taste for a good whipping from their native sect of khlysty, or flagellants.

According to this fascinating Russian blog post on monuments people rub and kiss, the statue "hides a few 'surprises': in chest was mounted magnifying glass through which erotic pictures can be seen, and by putting a hand into the left pocket you can touch its 'man-dignity' for good luck." 

To justify Graz's EU sop in 2003, a local art gallery hosted a full-blown Sacher-Masoch Festival, including a film festival, a conference featuring a domina friend of the Fanny I met in Paris, lectures with titles like 'The Headaches and Rewards of the Dominatrix in the Relationship with a Submissive/Masochist' and a program of 'Masomania' performances, as well as an installation piece featuring a weedy little Pole being bullied by an Austrian (alas, some things never change).

'The 20th century was the century of de Sade,' the festival declared. 'The 21st century will be the century of Sacher-Masoch.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'To Kill What One Loves' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 11)

These farcical situations turned Sacher-Masoch's life into a tragedy.

Wanda left him for another man, and his second wife, Hulda, ended up having him committed.

According to Sacher-Masoch's biography (The First Masochist by James Cleugh, recommended to me by Finn in Lacoste), one day Hulda found the writer in his study with his favorite cat dead on his lap, ranting about how he'd had an urge to kill the Angora kitten while he was stroking it:

'Ah, to kill what one loves, Hulda! What appalling rapture! It is like killing oneself! To crush, tear, suffocate and destroy another's handiwork, to set the seal of death, of annihilation where God Himself has enthroned life!'

Predictably, he then had nightmares about cats getting their own back:

'I am being eaten alive! It's the cats—they're after me!'

And during the day, he resorted to ever more extreme remedies, including whips of hooks and nails, boiling poultices, red-hot needles, razors, and plenty of salt to rub into his wounds.

Officially, the renowned writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, died of heart failure in 1895, aged 59.

In reality, according to his biographer, he lived for another decade in a German insane asylum—ironically, in the hometown of Krafft-Ebing, the man who ensured his name would never be forgotten.

Leopold and Hulda

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- From High Drama to Low Farce -- (Chapter VIII, Part 10)

Although the conventional view nowadays is that Krafft-Ebing ruined the writer's reputation, in truth, if anyone ruined Sacher-Masoch's career, it was the Chevalier himself.

Forever striving for high drama, his sexcapades usually collapsed into low farce.

While Wanda was still recovering from the birth of their third child, for instance, her husband excitedly showed her a personal ad from a Viennese newspaper:

'Handsome, rich, energetic young man would like to meet pretty, elegant young woman; admirer of the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch preferred.'

The writer himself quickly drafted a reply for his wife, enclosing a photo of Wanda.

The man returned the favor, including a picture of himself in Eastern garb.

'A Turk, Wanda!' Leopold exclaimed. 'Now at last we've got hold of someone who understands how to make love!'

Sacher-Masoch then hastily dispatched his ailing wife to a health spa to have sex with the stranger.

However, Wanda returned the very next afternoon, informing her far from gallant Chevalier that the 'Turk' was actually 'a very nice boy' from Vienna—real name: Nikolas Teitelbaum—whose mother was a friend of the family.

'We talked half the night, but nothing happened,' Wanda told him. 'I felt ill, anyhow.'

LUDWIG THE MAD

In another intrigue, a mystery correspondent tried to sound out whether The Love of Plato might reflect Sacher-Masoch's true tendencies.

Wanda quickly worked out that the fan was a man, not least because of his nom de plume: Anatol.

But Sacher-Masoch fantasized that he was a frustrated 'she-devil,' a manly woman who would beat him like an evil Queen Mother of Constantinople.

The famous author then embarked on a bizarre charade that at one point involved him sitting blindfolded alone in a hotel room at midnight (to meet a man he couldn't see) and at another him and his wife trying to arrange a ménage-a-trois, sitting in the dining room of a hotel in Graz so that Wanda could be seduced by Anatol.

When she was finally summoned upstairs, instead of the deep-voiced man Sacher-Masoch had met, she found a crippled pipsqueak with red hair.

After a tiresome cat-and-mouse game (even Sacher-Masoch got bored), the couple found out years later that they'd been outwitted by two royal friends: Holland's invalid Alexander of Orange and Bavaria's 'Mad' King Ludwig II, who wound up drowning himself and his doctor in a lake (Krafft-Ebing had warned his colleague to keep an eye on Ludwig).

Mad? Me?

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- How Masochism Got Its Name -- (Chapter VIII, Part 9)

In reality, the end of Sacher-Masoch's affair with Fanny was far less melodramatic: 'Gregor' and his Mistress simply split up when their six-month contract expired, apparently because they got bored.

After a couple more flings—one of which produced a daughter—Sacher-Masoch returned to Graz.

Then one day a letter landed on his desk signed 'Wanda von Dunajew.'

Ever a sucker for female fans, Sacher-Masoch took the bait: not only did he sign an S&M contract with this real-life 'Wanda,' he also proposed to her.

THOROUGHLY WHIPPED

After their marriage, she confessed to him that she wasn't actually a lady at all: her real name was Aurora Rümelin, the daughter of a deadbeat train-stationmaster and a woman who ran a tobacco shop.

What's more, Aurora hadn't even written the letters she'd sent to Sacher-Masoch; they'd been penned by a Jewish friend who knew he liked fan mail.

By then, though, Sacher-Masoch was so thoroughly whipped he didn't care.

He and his wife settled down in a millhouse outside Graz, where she gave birth to a second son (the first had died shortly after birth) and he focused on writing—while demanding that 'Wanda' whip and cuckold him.

Despite these extracurricular passions, Sacher-Masoch somehow found the time to churn out more than eighty books during his career, including a novella called The Love of Plato featuring homosexuality.

His works were translated throughout Europe, and in 1883, the French celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as a writer by inducting him into the Legion of Honor, with salutations from Zola, Dumas, Ibsen and Hugo.

By the time Krafft-Ebing coined 'masochism,' though, Sacher-Masoch's best years were behind him.

In naming the kink after a contemporary, Krafft-Ebing argued that even straight sex involved a degree of sadomasochism, with men inflicting pain on the women they deflowered.

What seemed to be new about Sacher-Masoch and his followers was that they reversed the 'natural' sex roles.

Krafft-Ebing rejected a rival term, algolagnia—or a love of pain—because his correspondents told him they didn't necessarily want to be hurt (or have sex, for that matter); they relished the feeling of being dominated and humiliated, usually with heavy lashings of fantasy and role-playing.

Sacher-Masoch complained that the psychiatrist had tarnished his mother's good name.

However, calling the kink 'Sacherism' might have hurt Austria's already delicate imperial pride: another family called Sacher ran the landmark Hotel Sacher in Vienna, home of the famous Sacher Torte.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pleasure-Seeking Pagans -- (Chapter VIII, Part 8)

Venus in Furs is a remarkably modern tale about a Galician nobleman who falls in love with a rich, young Russian and turns her into a sadist.

Severin and Wanda von Dunajew initially bond over their belief that the Christian world is corrupt; it's more honest to live as pleasure-seeking pagans.

Unlike many modern hedonists, though, they're realistic about 'the world of the ancients:'

'Pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand. People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish ponds, and gladiators who do battle while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.' 

As in his real-life fling with Fanny, Sacher-Masoch's alter ego in Venus in Furs adopts the common servant's name of Gregor and follows his Mistress to Italy, where she seduces a Greek.

Besides their contract, Wanda goes the extra mile by having Severin write a suicide note in case she opts to kill him.

Sure enough, the crueler she treats him, the more he worships her, especially when she's wearing fur.

'Furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures,' Severin explains. 'Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth… This is why cats exercise such a magic influence...'

'A woman wearing furs, then, is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?' 

'Certainly.'

You'll have guessed that the ending isn't warm and fuzzy: Severin is 'cured' by being whipped within an inch of his life; he then turns into a sadist himself.

Years later, the Galician tells a friend what he's learned: in love, a man 'has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Original Mistress-Slave Relationship -- (Chapter VIII, Part 7)

Being slapped around entertained him for a bit, but Sacher-Masoch eventually tired of the doctor's wife, deeming her too common to be a despotic sultana or tsarina.

So he started trying to offload her onto some other sod, thinking the jealousy might spice up their adultery.

Sacher-Masoch had shown Anna a draft of what would be his most famous work—Venus in Furs—but she never really got what he wanted.

What she did get, though, was syphilis from a 'Polish Count' who'd been encouraged by Sacher-Masoch to seduce her.

Even worse, the 'Count' turned out to be an impostor, and when Anna tearfully confessed her infidelity—and contagious disease—to Sacher-Masoch, he pretended to be offended… and neatly cut her dead in the process.

THE FANNY OF HIS DREAMS

Leopold then flirted with a manly Baroness from Munich who turned out to be a lesbian before he finally found the Fanny of his dreams.

Or, to be precise, Fanny found him.

In 1869, Sacher-Masoch received a fan letter from a would-be authoress who signed herself as 'Baroness Bogdanoff' but in reality was just plain ol' Fanny Pistor.

Nevertheless, they soon embarked on the original Mistress-Slave relationship, complete with a six-month written contract giving her the right to punish 'Gregor' at will.

In return, she promised to wear furs as often as possible: 'especially when she is in a cruel mood.'

Sacher-Masoch and Fanny: Mistress and Slave

Mistress and Slave immediately left boring old Graz to live out their fantasies in Venice, where Sacher-Masoch encouraged Fanny to have an affair with an Italian actor he insisted on calling 'the Greek' (because it sounded more exotic).

That year, the writer also published Venus in Furs, basing the title on his nickname for a painting by Titian (which is actually called Venus with a Mirror).

As with the Venus of Urbino, Sacher-Masoch's fixation features a hefty goddess in the buff, but Titian painted her dripping in jewels and fur.

The saucy detail is in the trim: her fur cloak cunningly overlays her mons veneris.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The First Masochist -- (Chapter VIII, Part 6)

The 'first masochist' had come into the world around the same time that sadism made its way into the dictionaries.

Like the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was an aristo with theatrical tastes who became a bestselling author and wound up dying in an asylum.

As with sadism's namesake, he was probably a bit odd to begin with.

Born in 1836, he came from Austrian Galicia, a culturally rich but cruelly poor region on the frontiers of Russia and Poland.

When Leopold was barely ten, his father helped crush a master-versus-servant revolt in Galicia that featured all the usual Slavic bloodlust: massacres, rapes, lynchings and people being buried alive.

A contemporary noted that Galician women had two choices: 'Either they fully dominate the husband and make him their slave, which is their most usual behavior, or else they themselves sink to the most pitiable level of abject existence.'

As a boy, Sacher-Masoch idealized his mother as one of Raphael's Madonnas, but the woman he idolized was his father's sister.

Tall and domineering, his aunt had a comically theatrical name: the Countess Zenobia.

Sacher-Masoch would later recall impulsively kissing her foot while helping her put on her shoes.

Like a good aunt, the Countess laughed at her nephew; then, like a bad aunt, she kicked him in the face.

LET THE SLAPPING BEGIN...

Some time later, the little Chevalier was secretly playing in her bedroom—sniffing her furs, natch—when she rushed in with a lover.

While Leopold hid in the wardrobe, her husband happened to interrupt the adulterers, but instead of begging his forgiveness, the Countess leapt up and slapped the Count in the face.

After he and the lover fled the room (via different exits, naturally), the frustrated Countess discovered her nephew's hiding place and gave him a hiding.

Whereas most people might try to forget such a trauma, Sacher-Masoch spent his life trying to recreate it.

Having qualified as a doctor of law at just nineteen, he published his first book two years later as a professor at the University of Graz.

Around the same time, he met the first of his would-be dominatrixes.

Anna was the sexy wife of a doctor (with whom she also had two children), and her young admirer was attractive in a tortured artist-mad hatter kind of way, with tousled hair and intense eyes that diverted attention from his irregular features.

What's more, Sacher-Masoch had a way with words—not to mention a steady income from his family.

The pair flaunted their affair until the writer began to realize that Anna was a gold-digger.

When Leopold finally challenged her about spending his money, she slapped him.

She immediately apologized, but to her surprise, he replied, 'No, Anna. I like it—do it again.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pop Psychopathy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 5)

With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.

Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'

As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'

Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.

At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.

'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.

Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'

ENTER THE MASOCHISTS

Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.

Rousseau had written about the joys of a good flogging in his Confessions, and many old codgers knew the trick as a way to get blood flowing to their todgers.

But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.

A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).

A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.

And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.

What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.

In fact, his dad was the police chief of Graz.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- And Venus Laughed: How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy -- (Chap. VIII, Pt. 1)

Chapter Eight 

AND VENUS LAUGHED 

How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy 

in Fin-de-Siècle Graz and Vienna 

'Things have become livelier. The sexual business attracts people who are all stunned and then go away won over after having exclaimed, "No one has ever asked me about that before!"'

--Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, 1893 

While the French elevated decadence to an art form, their Teutonic counterparts turned it into a science.

A German pioneer in 'sexology' championed the Marquis de Sade's work, and a certain Austrian shrink popularized the term 'sadism' and its pain-loving partner in 1890—naming 'masochism' after a fellow academic (much to his colleague's chagrin).

Even now, the West is struggling with the fallout from fin-de-siècle Austria and its role in inspiring not one but two 'Sexual Revolutions.'

Like Istanbul and Venice before it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a nexus of East and West, controlled by a sclerotic ruler and legions of bureaucrats.

Economically powerful but politically impotent, the moneyed classes focused on pleasuring themselves during the 'Gay Apocalypse,' an era combining Klimt's erotica and the timeless waltzes of Strauss, initially described as 'African and hot-blooded, crazy with life.'

And when the whirl of life ended, the elite insisted on leaving eine schöne Leich: a 'beautiful corpse.'

A modern take on the theme
by Martin Schmid

At the top of society, the young heir to the Empire killed himself and a mistress (conspiracy theorists maintained they were murdered), and the death of the Crown Prince—and the succession of a cripple to the German throne—seemed to prove that Western civilization was breeding itself into extinction.

Nietzsche had declared God dead, and in the midst of this nihilistic, eroticized milieu—where the demimonde was 'everywhere but unseen like the sewers'—a fame-seeking Viennese neurologist with a messiah complex began obsessing about the sex lives of children.