This is an important collection of essays, many of them very original and outstanding, that will further the field of history of sexuality in general and will contribute to the German historiography in particular. . Lutz Sauerteig, University of Durham

This volume provides a thought provoking and thorough engagement with various aspects of Foucault's writing, at once paying homage to core themes in the history of German sexuality and charting a course for future research...The organization, structure, and coherence of each section is very strong...Most intriguing is its blend of approaches and blurring of time, distance (the Atlantic divide in scholarship, that is), and disciplinarity. . Jennifer Evans, Carleton University

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.

Scott Spector is Professor in the Department of History and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Helmut Puff is Professor in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

"This is an important collection of essays, many of them very original and outstanding, that will further the field of history of sexuality in general and will contribute to the German historiography in particular." Lutz Sauerteig, University of Durham

"This volume provides a thought provoking and thorough engagement with various aspects of Foucault's writing, at once paying homage to core themes in the history of German sexuality and charting a course for future research...The organization, structure, and coherence of each section is very strong...Most intriguing is its blend of approaches and blurring of time, distance (the Atlantic divide in scholarship, that is), and disciplinarity." Jennifer Evans, Carleton University

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.

Scott Spector is Professor in the Department of History and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Helmut Puff is Professor in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers 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--as well as male and female homosexuality. In Violent Sensations, 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. The book analyzes these sexual and criminal subjects on three levels: first, the expertise of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and scholars; second, the sensationalism of newspaper scandal and pulp fiction; and, third, the subjective ways that the figures themselves came to understand who they were. Throughout, Spector answers important questions about how fantasies of extreme depravity and bestiality figure into the central European self-image of cities as centers of progressive civilization, as well as the ways in which the sciences of social control emerged alongside the burgeoning emancipation of women and homosexuals.

Nowhere else have Jews contributed so massively and consequentially to the general culture than in Germany. From Mendelssohn to Marx, from Freud to Einstein, Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in scope and profound in their impact. But how are these intellectual innovations contributions to European Jewish culture? How are they to be defined as Jewish? Scott Spector argues for a return to the actual subjects of German-Jewish history as a way to understand them and their worlds. By engaging deeply with the individual as well as with the literary or philosophical character of the text, Spector offers a fresh view of the presumed contradictions, uncertainties, and paradoxes that underlie the project of Jewish participation in culture. Spector forges a new definition of what modernist creativity means in our understanding of German-Jewish culture.

Nowhere else have Jews contributed so massively and consequentially to the general culture than in Germany. From Mendelssohn to Marx, from Freud to Einstein, Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in scope and profound in their impact. But how are these intellectual innovations contributions to European Jewish culture? How are they to be defined as Jewish? Scott Spector argues for a return to the actual subjects of German-Jewish history as a way to understand them and their worlds. By engaging deeply with the individual as well as with the literary or philosophical character of the text, Spector offers a fresh view of the presumed contradictions, uncertainties, and paradoxes that underlie the project of Jewish participation in culture. Spector forges a new definition of what modernist creativity means in our understanding of German-Jewish culture.

"This admirably lucid, impressively well researched, and theoretically sophisticated book provides both a cultural history of Prague, focusing on its German-Jewish writers, and a broader context for reading Franz Kafka. It brings out the complex ways in which a 'minor' literature has a powerful if problematic political import."--Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

""Prague Territories" is a marvelous study of the 'Prague circle' writers of the generation of the 1890s, most notably Kafka, but also Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Franz Werfel, among others. The book uses the figure of the circle as an organizing metaphor, both for the intersecting patterns of artistic collaboration and more abstractly in the hermeneutic sense. It is beautifully written and sensitively balances the at once overwhelming and yet fraternal presence of Kafka."--Carla Hesse, University of California, Berkeley

"A remarkably fresh, engaging study that breaks new ground."--Mark Anderson, Columbia University

"Organized with elegance, both conceptual and stylistic, the book combines historical and literary analysis at the cutting edges of both disciplines."--Michael P. Steinberg, Cornell University