In addition to modern spatial forms of presenting 'wild' animals and men in zoos, films or museums of natural history, the display of 'savage people' ("Völkerschau") depicts a prominent model of colonial, exoticist cultural contact. At the beginning of the 20th century, such contact was closely related to the development of urban consumer structures. The circensian presentation of ethnic troupes as a consumer item within "safe spaces of alterity" (E. Ames) is linked to the popular ethnological ambition (typical of the educated classes) to represent an 'authentic image' of the savage culture. The complex entanglement of such fictional authenticity with both the logic of imperial power and cultural-historical stereotypes of 'the savage' can be seen in two works of modern Viennese literature. Altenberg's impressionist response to the Ashantee shows of 1896/97 takes a critical ethnographical look at the racist attitudes of the Viennese public towards the 'noble savages', in contrast to the exoticist perception of young Ashantee women as objects of sexual desire; both perspectives rely on the principle idea that empathy ('Einfühlung') would abolish the cultural differences between Europeans and Africans. Müller's major work of expressionism, "Tropen" (1915), denies this myth of empathy by demonstrating the social disfunctionality of western exoticism and its spaces of desire within a tropical scenery of failing cultural contact. The middle part of the novel which is designed as a reversed "Völkerschau" leads the attention back to the deficient state of western cultures and sketches out a utopian vision, a global fusion of the human races, which must be related to the confrontation with national varieties of 'exotic' strangeness in Austria-Hungary. While the symptoms of the "Ashantee fever" and "tropical frenzy" indicate the limits of civilized patterns of identity, the textual longings and utopian visions denounce the fact that any notion of an 'authentic' cultural contact between 'civilized' and 'savage' men is indeed a highly artificial construction.