Apollo & Dionysus III: Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies

Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies is a sociological study of proto-fascist literature. Theweleit, who read over two hundred texts written by members of the paramilitary Freikorps (which would eventually become an arm of the Nazi Party), found that many of their narratives had ‘peculiar’ passages in which women were mentioned. He writes that his decision to ‘undertake an analysis of the soldier male’s relationship to women was not made in advance’, but that it ‘grew from reading the source documents’ — which reveal ‘strangely ambivalent emotions’ toward women: ‘They vacillate between intense interest and cool indifference, aggressiveness and veneration, hatred, anxiety, alienation, and desire — ambiguities interesting enough to pursue’.

His conclusions (which I have also written about here) follow that of Wilhelm Reich, who argued that the ‘fascist sensibility springs from a mortal fear of orgasms’ — or, perhaps more specifically, a mortal fear of ‘dissolution’. According to Theweleit, this fear manifests itself in two derivative forms; gynophobia (fear of women) and enochlophobia (fear of the masses) — which are both conceptualized as inundating ‘floods’.

‘The flood’, Theweleit writes, ‘is abstract enough to allow processes of extreme diversity to be subsumed under its image. All they need have in common is some…