S.|attia£ie **¥$& §a Theory and History of Literature Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, 1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem Volume 20. Jean-Franfois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise Volume 15. Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings. 1927-1939 Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought Volume 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Volume 9. Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 2nd ed., rev. Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in A merica Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics *anta§ies. *&& *§ f volume 1: women floods bodies history klaus theweleit translated by Stephen conway in collaboration with erica carter and chris turner foreword by barbara ehrenreich university of minnesota press minneapolis Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Originally published as Mannerphantasien, Volume 1. Frauen, Fluten, Korper, Geschichte by Klaus Theweleit, copyright © 1977 by Verlag Roter Stern. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States on acid-free paper Fifth printing 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theweleit, Klaus. Male fantasies. (Theory and history of literature; v. 22) Translation of : Mannerphantasien. Bibliography: p. Includes index. Contents: v. 1. Women, floods, bodies, history. 1. Germany. Heer. Freikorps. 2. Soldiers—Germany—Sexual behavior. 3. Fascism and sex. 4. Fascism and women. 5. Psychoanalysis and culture—Germany. 6. Fantasy. I. Title. II. Series. UA717.T47 1985 355.3'5 86-25052 ISBN 0-8166-1448-2 (v. 1) ISBN 0-8166-1449-0 (pbk.: v. 1) Text designed by Gale Houdek. Cover designed by Craig Carnahan. Cover illustration: "Santo Domingo" by Mary Griep, courtesy of the MC Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota Contents Foreword Barbara Ehrenreich ix Preface xix Chapter 1: Men and Women 3 Seven Marriages 3 The Historical Context and the Nature of the Material 18 Biographical Tradition 26 Partings 27 Brides 30 De-Realization 35 Hands Off! 37 Visions 42 Erasing the Stain 45 Forms of Defense 50 A Soldier's Love 52 Excursus on "Homosexuality" and Where We Go From Here 54 A Soldier's Love (continued) 57 Woman as Aggressor 63 viDD CONTENTS Rifle-Women (Flintenweiber): The Castrating Woman 70 The Red Nurse 79 On Sythen's Ground—Where Myths Abound 84 The White Nurse—Countess of Sythen Castle 90 Mothers 100 Sisters 108 Marriage—Sisters of Comrades 124 The Lady with the Light 125 An Aside on Proletarian Reality, Proletarian Woman and Man of the Left: The Reality Content of the Projections 138 Attacks on Women 171 Sexual Murder: Killing for Pleasure 183 Preliminary Findings 204 Chapter 2: Floods, Bodies, History 229 Aggregate States of the Bodily Interior 229 The Red Flood 229 Street of Blood 235 Boiling 237 Exploding Earth/Lava 238 Warding Off the Red Floods 244 Streams 249 All That Flows 249 Very Early History: The Woman from the Water 288 Woman: Territory of Desire 294 Origins of the Anti-Female Armor 300 Early Bourgeois History: The Expansion and Contraction of Bodies and the World 300 CONTENTS D vii Expansion and Contraction, A.D. 1500: The Ocean Wide and the "God Within" 305 Monogamization 310 Centralization and the "White Lady": The Geometricizing of Bodies 315 Solo with Accompaniment: Falcon and Medusa, or "Let There Be Ego" 318 Some of the Principal Features of Reterritorialization through Women and Images of Women 322 The "One-and-Only" and Doubts about the Nature of Reality: Armor on Two Fronts 325 Sexualization of the Bourgeois Woman in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 332 The Reduction of Woman to the Vagina and Her Enlargement into the Sea of Seas 346 German Classicism: The Woman-Machine and the "New Morality" as a Further Erosion of the Shores of Woman-Nature 350 Into the Nineteenth Century: Crystalline Wave/Concealed Woman—from Water to Blood 359 Closing Remarks 362 Some Characteristics of an Artificial Relation: The Maintenance of Lack in Relations between the Sexes 363 Preliminary Remarks 363 The Body of Woman as Object of the "New Morality" 364 One Form of Female Sacrifice 368 The Incest Commandment 373 The Ocean in Woman—Escape from the Double Bind—Incest Prohibition/ Incest Commandment 380 viii D CONTENTS Floods of Love in Workers' Poetry (Supplement) 382 Contamination of the Body's Peripheral Areas 385 Dirt 385 The Mire 387 The Morass 389 Slime 393 Pulp 394 "Behind" 395 Shit 396 "Through the Body . ." 398 Rain 399 Defense against Slime, the Morass, Pulp 402 Summary: Republic, Revolution, War 405 The Body as Dirt 408 Dam and Flood: The Ritual of Parading in Mass 427 Notes 439 Bibliography 489 Index 505 Foreword Barbara Ehrenreich The fantasies with which this book is concerned belong to a particular group of men: members of the Freikorps, the volunteer armies that fought, and to a large extent, triumphed over, the revolutionary German working class in the years immediately after World War I. The Freikorps were organized by officers returning from the war, in which many of their leaders had com- manded "shock troops," trained to penetrate the lines of trench warfare with sudden, daring assaults. Most of the men who organized the Freikorps and were recruited to them belonged to a class that has no precise analogue in American history: a kind of rural "petty bourgeoisie" with semifeudal traditions. Hired by the socialist Chancellor Ebert to bring order to revolu- tionary Germany in 1918 (he did not trust the regular army, with its working class rank and file), the Freikorps became roaming, largely autonomous armies each commanded by its own charismatic leader. Between 1918 and 1923, they fought Polish communists and nationalists, the Russian Red Army and Latvian and Estonian nationalists in the Baltic region, and the German working class throughout Germany. The Freikorpsmen fought, first of all, because they were paid to, and, by the standards of postwar Germany, were paid generously. They fought also for revenge, believing that the German army had been betrayed in World War I—"stabbed in the back," as it was so often said—by the com- munists, with their internationalist ideology, as well as by the vacillating socialists and other, insufficiently resolute, civilian forces. But they fought, most of all, because that was what they did. Robert Waite, in his classical history of the Freikorps, quotes a member of the famous Ehrhardt Brigade, a man who had started his military career in World War I at the age of sixteen: x D FOREWORD People told us that the War was over. That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War. Its flame burns strongly in us. It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with the enticing urge to destroy. We obeyed . and marched onto the battlefields of the postwar world just as we had gone into battle on the Western Front: singing, reckless and filled with the joy of adven- ture as we marched to the attack; silent, deadly, remorseless in battle.1 For the American reader, the most important thing about the Frie- korpsmen is that they managed to survive the relatively warless years be- tween 1923 and 1933, becoming the core of Hitler's SA and, in several cases, going on to become key functionaries in the Third Reich. The author of the above quote, for example, became the supreme SA-leader for Western Ger- many; another Freikorps leader, Rudolf Hoss, later commanded the death camp at Auschwitz. There is still some debate over how critical the Freikorps were to the rise of Nazism, but a recent and impressively exhaustive study by Richard Hamilton suggests we ought to focus less on the mass social- psychological appeal of fascism, and give more credit to the organizational strength and armed might of the Freikorps.2 Certainly the Nazis themselves were proud to claim the ruthless Freikorpsmen as their comrades and progenitors. So these are the men we are dealing with—men who were first soldiers in the regular army, then irregulars serving the cause of domestic repression, and finally Nazis. They are men for whom the period between 1914 and 1945 was continuous, almost uninterrupted war, in no small part because they made it so. I should add that there may have been as many as 400,000 of them, or according to another estimate, no more than 50,000. Hold on to this information—it may provide you with an illusion of security in what follows.