Violent sensations: sex, crime, and utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 - 57734

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.