Dennis van Vreden/annomalefantasies

Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit

Foreword by Barbara Eherenreich

I'm extremely excited by this new book I got from Annet Dekker, and though I've only read the foreword I think I already have some things to write about.

The book is about German soldiers called the Freikorps. This group was created by officers of World War I and many of these officers were initially trained for battle in the trenches. This Freikorps triumphed over the working class army during those years after World War I and would later become the most important key figures in the Third Reich and some became leaders of concentration camps.

The books aim is to go into the psychology of these men, what moves them. Apparently to them the war was never over. "They fought for revenge, believing that the German army had been betrayed in World War I - stabbed in the back, as it was often said - by the communists, with their internationalist ideology, as well as by the vacillating socialists and other, insufficiently resolute, civilian forces". But it becomes clear that that's not their only reason.

• • • what for me also is a good point about this book is that it crushes the defensive lies of the soldiers and officers who said they were obliged to do what they did. By someone higher in rank, and that they were merely obeying, not to get killed themselves.

"When he throws a grenade at a working-class couple who are making love on the grass, he is not taking a symbolic stand against the institution of heterosexuality. When he penetrates a female adversary with a bullet or bayonet, he is not dreaming of rape." They want blood.

• • • I don't know if I necessarily agree with this but it is an interesting point. A 'production of death', the book calls it.

It wants to psychoanalyze the warrior. "Are they evil - which is a way of saying that their motives lie outside normal human drives and desires, that they themselves are inhuman? Or are they only absentminded, lacking the imagination or powers of concentration to broach the unthinkable? Or is it just possible, Theweleit forces us to ask, that they are human beings (i.e. not totally unlike ourselves) doing, more or less consciously, exactly what they want to do?

Then the foreword goes into another interesting side of this analysis. That the Freikorpsmen all hated women. And that there was no mention of women whatsoever in their most intimate diaries.

Let's leave it at there for now.