MALE FANTASIES vol 1 - KLAUS THEWELEIT

I’ve been trying to get my hands on this thing for some time now, maybe a couple of years. For whatever reason, it’s never in any libraries or on any of the sites I steal books from. However, it has a pretty impressive reputation and I always check when I’m living somewhere new. Well, I finally found it through an inter-library loan here in the Midwest and got it from a Christian college in Iowa. For unclear reasons, they made me check out both volumes, each 400 pages, at the same time so I’m in a bit of a rush to finish them both before they’re due but I’ll do my best. Anyway, the reputation is deserved, this thing rocks. The nominal topic of this book is the literature of the Freikorps, their novels and memoirs. The Freikorps were paramilitary, irregular units that existed in Germany between the world wars. They were mostly made up of psychotically right-wing veterans of WWI who crushed the various communist uprisings in Germany and fought with the Red Army across Eastern Europe before Hitler took over and they were folded into the regular German Army. There are a lot of good candidates but “what if the communist revolution had worked in Germany before WWII?” is perhaps the biggest fork in the road of 20th century history, one that (now 100 years on) clearly placed us in the much worse universe. Anyway, this isn’t a history book, in fact, I don’t know a ton about this period (need to read more, as always), it’s more of a psychological study of fascism and how it functions throughout the art of these men. It has a deep resonance now, most especially when Theweleit shows how fascists play up the antagonism between the sexes and play down the class divisions and how hatred and fear of women is the prime driver behind the fascist worldview and violence. Listening to any manosphere podcast today will make this very, very clear. This book also includes one of the better explanations of Deluze and Guattari’s work that I’ve ever seen. Like Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, I kinda wanted less stuff about the actual work he’s critiquing, in this case the Friekorps novels/diaries/art (since I have literally read none of it and it seems pretty bad on it’s own terms), and more of his psycho-political musing. My man is really cooking here. I’m excited for the next volume.