Sacher-Masoch and the Jewish Bildungsroman

This essay reads Sacher-Masoch’s narrative Venusim Pelz as an oppositional parody of the German Bildungsroman in which male, female, Slavic, Black, and “Greek” (i.e., “German”) coordinates collapse into each other under the sign of “Jewish” representational and gender fluidity—that is, a fluidity that was widely coded in Masoch’s day as Jewish. The resulting figure, a Greek-Jewish composite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dominant and subaltern ethnicities, physically materializes a new Bild (image) and Bildung (formation, education) in which opposites occupy the same bodily space. The novella, written just before the consolidation of Austria’s rival, the Prussian-dominated German Reich, destabilizes topoi of identity formation that were increasingly associated with the colonizing power of a Prussian-German monoculture. By mixing and mimicking the overdetermined signifying fields of “Jewishness” and Bildung, Venus fractures strategies of Germanic self-fashioning and the anti-Semitic discourses frequently deployed in that self-fashioning, yet simultaneously articulates Masoch’s own “borderland” colonial ambivalence.