Theweleit’s project in Male Fantasies is to discover the emotional core of fascism as it was revealed in the novels and memoirs of the Freikorps, mercenary bands that fought Germany’s border disputes and put down worker revolts in the aftermath of World War I. His excavation of Freikorps literary remains (and the writings of some of their protofascist contemporaries) enabled Theweleit to reconstruct the mythical content of the fascist imagination. An integral part of Male Fantasies is Theweleit’s choice of illustrations--cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters--that serve as an ironic commentary on the text and extend its meaning in time and space.In this second volume of the two-volume work Theweleit discovers how the repudiation of one’s own body--and of femininity--became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid--the “Red Flood,” lava, mud--and the “feminine” emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into a “man of steel.” As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.The first volume of Male Fantasies, also available from the University of Minnesota Press, deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior that threatens to engulf the male ego.
