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Abstract
In this dissertation I analyze different aesthetic and psychological formations of masochism in West German film and literature from the 1960s to the 1990s. I outline the aesthetic and psychoanalytic development of the concepts of masochism prior to the twentieth century, beginning with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870). I then highlight key discursive developments in the twentieth century, such as Sigmund Freud's definitions of masochism and feminist debates about masochism from the 1970s to the 1980s, in order to set the stage for the readings of individual texts. In chapter one, on Monika Treut and Elfie Mikesch's film Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), I analyze how the film rewrites the sex/gender system that underlies Sacher-Masoch's novel and that structures narratives of masochism. In chapter two, I focus on the representation of masochism in Elfriede Jelinek's novel The Piano Teacher (1983), which portrays masochism as part of bourgeois femininity. In chapter three, I analyze how the racialized fetish of the main character Ali in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974) allows for a masochistic fantasy of liberalism offered to a West German audience at that time. In the last chapter, on Ingeborg Bachmann's Das Buch Franza (1965-73), I argue that the fragment's main character, Franza, attempts to mourn the dead of the Holocaust, but that her attempts slip into melancholia and finally result in a masochistic staging of attempted sacrifice. The conclusion summarizes masochism's different aesthetic formations and political functions in West German texts of the 1960s through the 1990s.
