Male Fantasies Vol. 1: Women Floods Bodies History (Theory and History of Literature Vol. 22)

About this book

This first volume of Male Fantasies centers on the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. These men were officers in the Freikorps--private volunteer armies that roamed Germany serving the cause of domestic repression in the aftermath of World War I. Klaus Theweleit draws upon the novels letters and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries as well as cartoons advertisements engravings and posters. He explores these sources not to discover what their creators thought about fighting or the fatherland but to seek out and reconstruct their images of women. He shows that the Freikorps male identity was shaped by the dread and revulsion that characterized their relations with women (real or imagined) and that this dread was in turn linked to the aggressive racism and anticommunism at the heart of most fascist movements. Theweleits second volume Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror carries Male Fantasies from the female image to the self-image of manhood and its ritualized forms of mass behavior culminating in warfare. It also is available from the University of Minnesota Press.