Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

541 Pages·1987·15.257 MB·English

by  Klaus Theweleit

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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
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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: