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   simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 18-Aug-2023 22:59:57 JST simsa03

   • band
   In 1977 the German author Klaus Theweleit wrote a two-volumes account of #fascism which he called "Männerphantasien" / "Male Fantasies". Concentrating on the Freikorps soldiers of World War I, who roamed the streets of Weimar Republic and became a bedrock and driving force of the SA of the Nazi reign, he dives into their "fantasies", the absence of their own spouses and children, their pursuit of perennial war, of their "production of death" as a specific way of living. Other than various theories of fascism (Marxist, psychonalytic, etc.), Theweleit insists that the Freikorps men didn't pursue their actions because of delusions or of yearning for substitute enactment, but because they decided to live that way, because they wanted to do what they did. In that, Theweleit insists that "fascism" is not some aberration but ingrained in every "normal man", detectable in his way his prefers to treat women, minorities, communism, the working class...
   
   The first volume of Theweleit's book was translated into English by Stephen Conway and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1987. It can be found here: https://monoskop.org/images/5/54/Theweleit_Klaus_Male_Fantasies_Vol_1_Women_Floods_Bodies_History.pdf
   
   Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a foreword to this translation which I recommend to read. Some connections of themes, thoughts, and justifications sound dated today – in particular the argumentative jump from "male suppression of women" to "human exploitation of nature" (which was a common topos in the late 1970s to 1990s) – but in her preparation of the reader of what is to come in the book, she does a very good job.
   
   The first idea that came to my mind reading her was to compare the depiction of the Freikorps men with the mercenaries of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s «Wagner (PMC)» as well as with the human rights violation by many in the Russian army vis-à-vis Ukrainian civilians. I'm earger to dive into Theweleit because his insistence of fascism and cruelty as deliberate choice is something that sounds very realistic. It may even provide further explanations why in totalitarian regimes the identification of regime and population is so strong till the end.
   
   #sources
   
   cc @band
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     band@octodon.social's status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 03:26:17 JST band

     in reply to

     @simsa03 thanks for this post. your thinking here is associated with my own reading of Martha Nussbaum (Upheavals of Thought: the intelligence of emotions). tldr: our emotions are part of our intelligence and how we behave is related to some of the primitive emotions we experienced as infants and how we were then cared for.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 21:34:54 JST tinydoctor

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     @simsa03 Hey, I have that book. Unless my daughter Ariel stole it, again.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 21:39:26 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 Now I have to dive into the basement library to see if I still have it. I think I bought it in my favorite bookstore in Oklahoma City (it and its proprietor, who chain smoked Pall Malls, long gone) about 1980ish...

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 22:13:39 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     @tinydoctor
     Then her sense of good taste should comfort you :-)
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 22:50:42 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     Ahh! "Basement library" should be a fixed category in all our musings on "enlivened cultural pathology". What images it triggers... :-) (And even to think about "enlivened cultural pathology" as a form of entertainment... thank you for getting my marbles kicked into motion.)
     
     Many years back, at the university library of my town, I tried to borrow a book from the late 19th century or so, and my order came back unsuccessfully with the abbreviation "k.v." (which, as you'll notice, is the also the abbreviation of my name), standing for "war loss" ("Kriegsverlust"). At the end of the second world war, the librarians of that time swapped out some inventory in fear of looting should the U.S. Army enter the city. Well, as far as I know, the US-icans never did – they entered but didn't loot – but rather a few books disappeared on that way. (I guess the anxiety was motivated by history when in 1622, after the loss in the Thirty Years' War, the university library was ransacked by the Catholic Alliance and transported to the Vatican.) In the following decades, a lot of "evacuated" books kept being stored in such external stockrooms otside the city. I'm still kind of proud to have managed to produce such a notice. It's a rare feast.
     
     (As far as I can remember, I was looking for some obscure investigation into a very specific (or: obscure) aspect of either the Christian cult of relics as a whole or some reliquaries in particular...) (The university library of my town has its specific collection focus on art history, other university libraries pursue different foci.)
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:08:03 JST simsa03

     • tinydoctor
     • band
     • sz_duras
     @sz_duras @tinydoctor @band
     Aren't all books invisible? But more importantly, don't they seem invisible in degrees, some more, some less? Yes, the various shimmers (not lustres) of concreteness, subcategory of transparency...
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 00:06:32 JST simsa03

     • sz_duras
     That was rather a play on your suggestion, looking where it leads me to. More literally, you may take orality into account, the story lines memorised and retold over centuries without ever being written down. Or, even closer, "Fahrenheit 451" (Bradbury), in which books are learnt by heart in case their material carriers perish in the fires...
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     band@octodon.social's status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 03:16:16 JST band

     • tinydoctor
     • sz_duras

     @sz_duras @simsa03 @tinydoctor "try this idea out ..." - 💥 that itself is a good idea (to try out).

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 07:11:49 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03 found it.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 07:12:58 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     @simsa03

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 07:24:56 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     yep, that's the edition. wonder whether ever volume 2 has been published.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 07:38:53 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     .. and it was this quote you're showing that made me think of the parallels between the Freikorps soldiers and the Wagner mercenaries on the one hand and the Freikorps and the mutilating Russian soldiers in Bucha on the other. They enjoyed their "work";they don't need to be forced to such atrocities as the custom of dedovshchina ('grandfathering') in the Russian armed forces shows: they like doing it to themselves. This embrace of sadism, of the combination of magalomania and victimhood, doesn't seem to be covered by the usual analyses of fascism. My gut feeling is that Theweleit is very important today.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 07:44:41 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     @tinydoctor
     Found the second volume on abebooks. You'll need both, I guess.
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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 09:33:40 JST tinydoctor

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     @simsa03 The quote is the first thing I remembered when you mentioned Theweleit. I had forgotten it was in the introduction by Erhenreich. I last read the book 20 odd years ago. My daughter Ariel kyped it when she was 14. She's 34 now. I stole it back some years later. Because of you, I'm reading it again. Thanks...I think.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 09:35:26 JST tinydoctor

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     @simsa03 And I will be getting Volume 2.

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 09:37:19 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     Don't know if I'll have enough time for it... Keep me posted on gems you're stumbling upon.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 09:38:26 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     @tinydoctor
     And lovely to know your family is one of thieves stealing ("borrowing") stuff back and forth.
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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 20-Aug-2023 09:39:46 JST simsa03

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     • tinydoctor
     https://www.abebooks.de/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31540607954&searchurl=an%3Dtheweleit%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dmale&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1
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