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Around the turn of the 20th century, Vienna and Berlin were centres of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and criminal deviants and the tales of violence surrounding them. Sensational media reports fed the prurient public's hunger for stories from the criminal underworld: sadism, sexual murder, serial killings, accusations of Jewish ritual child murder. Scott Spector explores how the protagonists of these stories - people at society's margins - were given new identities defined by the groundbreaking sciences of psychiatry, sexology, and criminology, and how this expert knowledge was then transmitted to an eager public by journalists covering court cases and police investigations.

Contents -- Introduction: On the Border -- 1. Dark City, Bright Future: Utopian and Dystopian Urban Genres around 1900 -- 2. Identical Origins: (Homo)sexual Subjects and Violent Fantasy in the 1860s -- 3. Sensation and Sensibility: Experts, Scandals, Subjects -- 4. Utopian Bodies: The Sensual Woman and the Lust Murderer -- 5. Blood Lies: The Truth about Modern Ritual Murder Accusations and Defenses -- Conclusion: Utopia -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliography -- Index.

Michel Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault's richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality

Research on human sexuality enjoyed a boom around 1900. Beyond the boundaries of science, a widespread social debate arose about the new discoveries and their potential social, moral, and political implications. This anthology examines the interactions between science, society, and art and offers historical-critical readings for a broad range of representations of sexual pathology. Oliver Böni, Univ. Münster; Japhet Johnstone, Univ. Münster / Univ. of Washington, Seattle, USA.