It has become commonplace after Foucault to consider the marginal, the outsider, and the “abnormal” as cultural constructions of modernity to define ex negativo what is central, mainstream, and “normal.” In the footsteps of the great French historian and also of scholars like Richard Evans, this concept has been thought to hold true particularly when it comes to one of the most central categories of modern (urban) selfhood and subjectivity: sexuality (and, with it, gender), which has become a controversial new field of public interest and academic research since the turn of the century, erupting like a discursive volcano.

In his widely discussed book Violent Sensations, the University of Michigan–based historian Scott Spector tries to challenge this widely held functionalist view, the so-called marginalization thesis (3). In contrast, his central research question is: “What affirmative or even utopian potential could be entailed in the creation of liminal figures and the [concomitant] production of fantasies of radical violence pertaining to them?” (2). The latter could be the point in question indeed, and the author adds: “It will take a book to persuade a reader of the degree to which the marginalization thesis is an insufficient explanation of the cultural meaning of these fantasies” (3).

To illustrate and prove his “counterintuitive” (2) claim, Spector comes up with several detailed case studies. The first one is on a specific Simmelian genre of urban writing that explored the dark sides of the metropoles and their criminality (17–72) in the footsteps of Eugène Sue's Mystères de Paris (which remains unmentioned by Spector!), such as Hans Ostwald's Dunkle Winkel in Berlin (1904). This is followed by an investigation into the construction of “(Homo)Sexual Subjects” in the 1860s (73–115), including a detailed analysis of the Zastrow trial in 1867. The next chapter is dedicated to “Experts, Scandals, Subjects” (116–65), looking into the rise of sexology as an academic discipline (Richard von Krafft-Ebing et al.) and into Karl Kraus's Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität (1908). Another special focus of Spector's monograph is on the “Sensual Woman and the Lust Murder” (166–201)—a topic that was otherwise rather covered for the era of the Weimar Republic—and on the “Modern Ritual Murder Accusations and Defenses” (202–41), that is, the blood libel theme in contemporary antisemitism. There might be quite a few thematic gaps left between these sample studies, but still, Spector covers a large variety of materials from archives and libraries all over central Europe to expose “the parallel interactions of professional knowledge, self-identity, and violent cultural fantasy” (250).

The comparative perspective between Vienna and Berlin proves to be prolific, although it should have been pointed out more that the Wilhelmine and Francisco-Josephine cultures are similar and somehow compatible but not quite the same (a trap into which the late Peter Gay stepped); the question remains whether the much more apparent multiethnicity of the latter, for example, makes a difference when it comes to deviance. Also, when dealing with figures such as the “mad criminal, homosexual, prostitute, lust murderer, fanatic Jew” (251), the notion of liminality is used by Spector repeatedly; here a more clearly defined theoretical concept of this form of “borderline-ness” (Grenzwertigkeit) would have helped to tighten the heuristic focus and with it the results.

In his last chapter entitled “Utopia,” the author uses the examples of sadomasochism, homosexuality, and gender confusion in Robert Musil's Törless novel (with an eye on Otto Weininger). It is stated again that all those images of “degeneration” are not used to reaffirm normalcy. Rather, sexuality in particular “seems to have offered readers a primordial self that was paradoxically a release from selfhood (from individuality, from volition and accountability, from ‘identity’)” (251) and thus has a utopian potential.

However, the fact that all positions of marginality analyzed here evoke violent fantasies in the texts covered could have also led the author to think that they are just means of a symbolic catharsis, meant to let the (externalized) Other in, indulge in forbidden pleasures—and violence against it, and then purge it (here, reading a bit of René Girard and more Freudian theories would have been inspirational). So Spector's study does not falsify the “marginalization thesis” but complements it. Yet utterly interesting is his final observation that the “impulse toward apocalyptic violence running throughout these fantasies suggests a central European imaginary that was more closely linked to the right-wing male fantasies of the German interwar period [as analyzed in Klaus Theweleit's Männerphantasien] than to a historiographical image of an aesthetic garden of ornament” (252). The merits of such insights can be gladly generalized: even if Spector's central claim does not convince all readers, his rich study holds many valuable findings that make it an important step beyond in the history of modern sexuality and deviance in Central Europe around 1900.