Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies..psychoanalytical origins of Fascism

Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies vol 1: Men and Women

Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History by Klaus Theweleit

The first chapter of Klaus Theweleit’s book Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, is an examination of origins and manifestations of fascism. Theweleit argues that Freud’s concepts of psychoanalysis, such as the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, repression and the unconscious, cannot sufficiently describe the types of fascist men that were members of the Freikorps in Germany in the intra-war era because their hypre-violent mysogyny expressed a more primal alienation. The Freikorp members’ pursuit of the “bloody mass” originated in their prepersonal, symbiotic phase of infancy. Theweleit builds his argument by profiling members of the Freikorps and then putting them on the couch for psychoanalysis that has been informed by post-Freudian theories.

Theweleit does not overtly situate himself within established historiography as he pursues the “fascist phenomena” (227), but instead uses the Freikorps as a case study and applies to them theories developed in the fields of philosophy, psychiatry, and child analysis. His own analysis is not theory-driven, but instead originates from his sources and is his response to documents that consistently featured “strangely ambivalent emotions” when members of the Freikorps mentioned women. Far more bold and ambitious than a historical account of blood-thirsty men of a certain era, Male Fantasies attempts to untangle the fears, desires, and relationships that “might belong at the center of fascism, as a producer of life-destroying reality.”(227) Theweleit uses autobiographies of members of the Freikorps, novels written about their exploits, eyewitness accounts of their activities and the actions of the Freikorps themselves to establish common perceptions, motivations and fears amongst these exemplars of fascism.

Theweleit focuses on their relationships with women and women’s bodies in his analysis, exploring their articulation of their marital relationships, their ideals of motherhood and purity and their descriptions of the bodies of the women they killed. He interprets the meaning of his sources and states that, for these men, “the idea of woman is coupled with violence” (50), “women are robbed of their sexuality and transformed into inanimate objects” (51), and “the men experienced communism as a direct assault on their genitals” (74). Theweleit quotes a Friekorps hero in a novel by Dwinger describing a woman’ death as “it wasn’t really so much a mouth as a bottomless throat, spurting blood like a fountain” (177) and telling his men to attack the rifle-women and “let our revulsion flow into a single river of destruction. A destruction that will be incomplete if it does not also trample their hearts and souls”. (180) The reader imagines the men that would “wade in blood” (205) and recognizes that the intentions and the actions of these men were hauntingly destructive. Theweleit shows his reader the face of the fascist.

Yet there is no comfort in Theweleit’s quantification of the manifestations of fascism because after he illustrates their commonalities he seeks their origin. At this point, Theweleit contrasts a Freudian explanation for the Freikorps with the theories and contributions of Deluze and Guattari, Michael Balint, Wilhelm Reich, and Melanie Klien, among others. Unfortunately, this last portion of the chapter is thick with both Marxist and Freudian jargon that almost obscures Theweleit’s “preliminary findings”. (204) While Freud’s description of the Oedipal triangle and the ensuing repression and anxiety is a simple model not “capable of apprehending the fascist phenomena” (127), the idea that fascism stems from “the fear of/desire for fusion, ideas of dismemberment, the dissolution of ego boundaries, the blurring of object relationships” (206) is daunting both in its complexity and its banality. If the “unconscious is a molecular force” (211) whose “mode of production” (216) could be annihilation as a result of a disturbance in one’s “separation-individuation of symbiosis” (207), then the fascist lives inside us all.

Theweleit profiles these men knowing that he unravels the fascist sensibility without offering a solution to its existence. Once we begin to understand that both the fear of dissolution and the failure to adhere to boundaries are rooted in an infant’s inability to distinguish itself from the living reality that threatens to envelope and extinguish it, we are left to wonder how we can prevent such disorders, and their underlying misogyny, from manifesting into a fascist state.

THE WOMEN THEY FEARED

By PAUL ROBINSON

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MALE FANTASIES Volume One: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. By Klaus Theweleit. Translated by Stephen Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. Illustrated. 517 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cloth, $25. Paper, $14.95.

FIRST published in Germany 10 years ago, Klaus Theweleit's book is ostensibly a study of the imaginative world of the German Freikorps movement. The Freikorps units were paramilitary groups composed of World War I veterans who fought against the newly formed Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1923. They engaged in bloody confrontations with republican loyalists and engineered some of the more notorious assassinations of the period, such as those of the Catholic Center Party leader Mattias Erzberger and Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau. They believed that the German Army had never been truly defeated in the Great War, only ''stabbed in the back'' by leftist-sympathizing civilians.

Although most of these illegal military organizations were disbanded with the stabilization of the Republic in 1923, a large number of their members ultimately found a home in the Nazi regime. A classic example is provided by Rudolf Hoss, who became commandant of Auschwitz. The Freikorps men were profoundly anti-Communist, devoted to the defense of what they viewed as traditional German culture, and seemingly addicted to a life of soldiering.

As a precursor of Nazism, the Freikorps movement has been the subject of a substantial amount of historical research. Klaus Theweleit's distinctive contribution is to examine the fantasies of the Freikorps soldiers, under the assumption that their intellectual and emotional predilections would explain their behavior. He does so primarily through a close reading of the autobiographies and novels of a select group of Freikorps members (or ''soldier males,'' as he likes to call them). In particular he draws our attention to the ideas they entertained about women and sex.

Depending on your taste, ''Male Fantasies'' might be judged exceptionally rich or just plain disorderly. Mr. Theweleit, who is a West German freelance writer, himself calls the book ''meandering,'' and a reviewer is more than usually hard pressed to summarize its argument. It contains a good deal of unanchored psychoanalytic theorizing, numerous asides and long stretches of text that have no obvious bearing on the Freikorps movement. In addition it begs more than its share of empirical and conceptual questions. Nonetheless, one can't read it without feeling that Mr. Theweleit is onto something: the piling up of examples eventually begins to take its toll on even the most skeptical.

His central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women. Indeed, not just afraid, they were deeply hostile to them, and their ultimate goal was to murder them. Women, in their view, came in only two varieties: Red and White. The White woman was the nurse, the mother, the sister. She was distinguished above all else by her sexlessness. The Red woman, on the other hand, was a whore and a Communist. She was a kind of distillation of sexuality, threatening to engulf the male in a whirlpool of bodily and emotional ecstasy. This, of course, was the woman the Freikorps soldier wished to kill, because she endangered his identity, his sense of self as a fixed and bounded being. In this manner Mr. Theweleit links the Freikorps soldiers' fantasies of women to their practical life as illegal anti-Communist guerillas: the Republic had to be destroyed because it empowered the lascivious Red woman, while it failed to protect the White woman's sexual purity.

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Among the most interesting features of Mr. Theweleit's analysis is his examination of two distinctive elements in the fascist imagination: liquidity and dirt. He argues that aquatic and other liquid metaphors were associated in the minds of these soldiers with the loss of a firm sense of identity. Much of their literature speaks of Communism as a flood, a stream, or a kind of boiling or exploding of the earth - images he shows to be associated traditionally with sexuality.

In similar fashion, he argues that the idea of dirt terrified the Freikorps soldiers precisely because it also was linked in their minds to the loss of self and to bodily pleasure. The connection is perhaps clearest when the metaphors of liquidity and filth are combined, as in such notions as mire, morass, slime and excrement. Again, Mr. Theweleit shows how the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Freikorps soldiers was systematically informed by such metaphors, and he makes a plausible case for linking this political sentiment to their fear of sexuality. The member of the Freikorps, he writes, was hostile to ''all of the hybrid substances that were produced by the body and flowed on, in, over, and out of the body: the floods and stickiness of sucking kisses; the swamps of the vagina, with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat . . . the warmth that dissolves physical boundaries.'' As this passage suggests, much of the power of Mr. Theweleit's book depends on his own rhetoric, which is luxuriant and fearless.

The principal weakness of ''Male Fantasies'' is its inability to demonstrate that the attitudes it explores were in any way limited to, or even characteristic of, the men who joined the Freikorps movement. Even if we are persuaded by the emotional connections he charts (and I am myself persuaded only in part), they would appear to be the common psychic property of bourgeois males - and perhaps of nonbourgeois males as well - in Western society since the French Revolution. In other words, there seems to be no reason to limit them to Germans, fascists or members of the Freikorps. Mr. Theweleit attributes the fantasies of his ''soldier males'' to problems they encountered in the first year of life (in particular to an abrupt termination of the mother-child ''symbiosis''), but he presents not a shred of evidence to suggest that their childhood experiences differed from those of anyone else. Since he can't establish their distinctiveness, in the end he asks us to believe that their hatred of women and fear of sexuality were merely an exaggerated version of what all men feel, or have felt for the past two centuries. The claim, I hardly need say, is a grand one, yet I find it difficult to dismiss out of hand. Mr. Theweleit is one of those intellectual mavericks, who, while he does not always respect the conventions of scholarship, may have captured a glimpse of our souls.