Marisa Žele (ZRC SAZU)




The Devil Wears Furs: Tracing Faustian Elements in the Contracts of Christoph Haizmann and Sacher-Masoch


In the early 1920s, Freud was contacted by Mr. Payer-Thurn, the then director of the Austrian National Library, who discovered a forgotten manuscript by one Christoph Haizmann. Consequently, he became one of Freud’s cases, which he published in 1923 under the title ‘A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century’. Haizmann’s case is fascinating and rich for further analysis – the manuscript, which includes his paintings, testimonies and notes from other involved parties, also contains two contracts that Haizmann is supposedly to have made with the devil in 1669. This paper will focus on analyzing these contracts, positioning them alongside those made by Sacher-Masoch with Mrs. Fanny Pistor Bagdanow and Wanda von Dunajew.