Klaus Theweleit

Certainly a slog at parts but you’d be hard pressed to find a better concretisation of deleuzoguattarian analysis anywhere. The Freikorps and the historical determinations behind them are fascinating, with the collusion of the conditions of their inception and ours being really quite unnerving. Theweleit’s solutions concerning body-armour and the nature of desiring-production do strike me as somewhat adolescent at times, a bit too new agey and utopian and ooohh ahh embrace your body and skin and the determinations of your feminine unconscious and ooohh this is a discourse written by a man so don’t listen to me pal! but the analysis is so bloody incisive when he isn’t busy trying to derive some generalised prescriptive/normative conclusions from what he’s writing about that I’d consider this a necessary tool in the fight against the fascist tendency - which keeps on rearing it’s godforsaken head (even in writers like Brecht with their implicit misogyny, placing empirical women below the iconography of a great infinite flood/big wet menstruating fanny etc.) - so yeah go out and snatch this piece up sharpish you goddamn fools.… (more)

[Full disclosure: I only read the first section of this book, as it considers the male fascist regard for women; I only perused the second section]

A psychological study of protofascism that, in my humble estimation, is hit and miss.

The author bases his analysis of the Freikorps (the militaristic form of German fascism under the short-lived and tumultuous Weimar Republic) on a reading of their "literature." I find this sloppy and wish he'd have relied more on historical instance in making his argument instead of subjecting his readers to the lurid details of pre-Nazi pulp fiction. (Is the work of Danielle Steel reflective of the state of American feminism? C'mon.)

However, he does a good job of demonstrating 1) the shortcomings of a Freudian analysis of fascism, and 2) that protofascists (and hence, the lineage of said protofascists) didn't just dislike women -- they hated them because they are (and, I'd wager, remain) terrified of them.

Although there's a Walter Benjamin sighting, for my money Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a more insightful book into the psychology behind fascism (and Reich is one of Theweleit's targets), and Frontsoldaten by Stephen Fritz better demonstrates just how universal "fascist" prejudices were in Germany leading up to and during World War II, even among non-Nazis, and shows how Hitler and his band of brigands merely gave form and expression to nascent intolerance.… (more)