Male Fantasies

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.Theweleit's 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.