[1] Introduction: Klaus Theweleit’s seminal work Male Fantasies (1978)[2] delves into the imagination that captivated the private paramilitary group which first appeared in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I: the Freikorps.[3] Echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s argument for the coextension of rational and irrational forms, Male Fantasies sets out to describe the dialectical entanglement of social, political and fantasy machines. Subsequently, many members of the Freikorps went on to become key functionaries for Hitler’s SA and the Nazi regime. Notably, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the co-founders of the German Communist Party, were tragically murdered by a Freikorps member in 1919.

Male Fantasies provides the analytical framework for examining toxic masculinity, particularly the type of violence that resulted in the systematic murder of millions of people, transforming the life of citizens into horrific human tragedies. Theweleit assembles excerpts from a vast corpus of Freikorps literature and subjects these materials to unconventional interpretations. He discerns that imagery suggestive of intimacy, hybridity, or the transgression of boundaries – dirt, disorder, fluidity and flux – is consistently associated with dread and profound revulsion in Freikorps writings. This suggests to Theweleit that the fascist male’s obsessive misogyny and hypervigilant machismo are rooted in the traumatic severing of the negative symbiosis between mother and infant son. In his perspective, the “soldier male” (Theweleit’s term for the archetype of fascist manhood) emerges as a consequence of a catastrophic reaction formation.

For the male soldier, battle serves as a mechanism of self-preservation. He sustains his existence by distinguishing himself as a killer, in opposition to any perceived threats. Throughout Freikorps literature, Theweleit encounters imagery of adversaries transformed into what he refers to as the “bloody miasma” – a crimson cloud, a formless mass – as the soldier male inflicts upon his adversary the feminising dissolution that embodies his deepest fear. Subsequently, the crimson miasma transitions into a “white totality”, a void where the previously standing enemy, the “swarthy rabble”, resided. This hygienic zone of purity aligns with the ideal of the “white woman”. By displacing the tainted and teeming rabble, the white totality also displaces womanly filth. In this manner, race and gender are conflated.

Klaus Theweleit with Dorothee Richter at UdK, Berlin

 

Maria Sorensen and Dorothee Richter: You, Klaus Theweleit, propose that it just might be that these men (the Freikorps) were doing “exactly what they wanted to do”, as they come with a deep disturbance of the psyche. Do you think the recent global events lead to the need for this type of psychoanalysis, and if so, how important is it to apply such psychoanalysis in today’s discourse on fascism and violence? Can we say that fascism is coming back? Or has it never really left and simply flourishes when the conditions are ripe?

Klaus Theweleit: Fascism has never really left. But I wouldn’t have expected it to come back in the sort of actual “flourishing” you mention. For some time, maybe in the 1980s, we had hopes like that. Wishful thinking, having stopped (for moments) to take a closer look at political realities worldwide. But when we take that closer look, we realise that sociological developments in the world don’t happen simultaneously; in certain regions of the world, fascistic traits get stronger; in other regions they nearly disappear. But apart from those changing realities, the need for psychoanalysis to understand violence and deal with its different forms is always there. There isn’t any better set of instruments for that.

Maria, Dorothee: The analysis you provided in Male Fantasies is a rare and rigorous hybrid of psychoanalysis and social critiques. In a way, you are implying a transformation from the psychological to the sociopolitical, which is still rather daring in the studies of fascism and violence. Could one say that a specific sociopolitical moment encourages these sorts of psychosis?

Klaus: The main thesis is that there is no main thesis. There are some basic perceptions: it’s the state of human bodies which decides about the political shapes a society has developed and will develop, or not.

Maria, Dorothee: In one of your lectures, you quoted Walter Benjamin and explained that fascism is not an ideology as such but a product of all centuries and cultures. In Male Fantasies, you also argue that fascism is not an ideology. Could you explain in more detail what you mean by that?

Klaus: A dominating force in that is the existence of what I call the “fragmented body” (a term I borrowed from the psychoanalysis of the child, as developed by Margaret Mahler, Melanie Klein and others). Its first result: fascism is primarily not an ideology but is based in the need of certain bodies to construct institutional and political realities according to the needs of their bodies. In certain ways, these are ‘disturbed’ bodies; I call them “not yet fully born”. They try to find their way to feeling alive through acts of violence. Many people think it is not possible to imply a transformation from the psychophysical aspect of human bodies to the sociopolitical sphere. I try to show that it is possible. The first thing I took from their writings – sort of a main thesis – is that their bodies are filled with fears.

Maria, Dorothee: What you wrote about in your book is not just any man’s psyche; you describe a very specific type of man that you call a “man soldier”. What kind of boys/men are these who grow up to be “men soldiers”?

Klaus: This term came to me from the practical reason of not having to talk all the time about ‘fascists’ or the ‘fascist’ body. Because there are many more violent forms of male behaviour in the world that are not bound to the political form of ‘fascist states’ but who, in the foreground, are ‘soldierly’. This is a word you can use, for example, in relation to the psychophysical states of a ten-year-old boy. The disturbance of bodies of people who as adults will act in mostly violent ways in their surroundings begins very early on; it starts in the bodies of babies who are subjected to destructive actions (of possibly very different sorts) by the persons who are bringing them up. In some particular societies, they get their final shape through military drill – a sort of body-building torture. This was the case, for example, in Germany in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Many of them felt that they were being newly born through the horrors of the military drill. Being reborn as ‘real men’.

Maria, Dorothee: Could that also be nurtured by very rigid sexual or other forms of oppression looking for an outlet? But I think it is much more than that in your definition. According to you, women as a group are split into two different groups – the good ones and the bad ones – be it white women or red ones; in these fantasies, all women are punishable one way or the other, either by suffering and drainage of life (for obedient white women), or by being killed and mutilated to a “bloody mess” (for red women). The primary crime or “potential” crime for all women is in fact their sexuality and sexual/physical/individual agency. In light of today’s global events, this analysis proves to be chillingly resounding. Would you talk more about it?

Klaus: Yes. Their behaviour towards ‘women’ as a sociological position was very peculiar. The main structure you mention – splitting this sort of creature into two parts – was something they had learned to do with (more or less) every phenomenon of the outside world: ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In colours: white (hospital nurses, their sisters and – sometimes – mothers); red for the rest: mostly working-class women at this time, who were taking part in the mass demonstrations after World War I for a socialist republic after the defeat of the German monarchy. These women partly walked hand in hand with men, sometimes kissing in the street. Obviously being on equal terms with everybody in those ‘masses’. They (the soldierly men) knew nothing about women – creatures they had very little contact with on their way to being trained to become ‘soldiers’ (after having been separated from their mothers and, sometimes, sisters). Women they had got to know during the war had been nurses in the hospitals for wounded soldiers or prostitutes in places organised by the military. The term ‘socialist’, these soldiers had been told, meant ‘bolshevism’, meant ‘communist whores’, many of them Jewish (= poisoning good German blood by means of their sexuality). It meant the destruction of every order, the destruction of the natural order of men in the ruling positions – soldierly men like them, not ‘dirty workers’ with their ‘red’ whores.

All of this led to the term ‘rote Flut’ – the ‘Red Flood’ under which name all phenomena of the German Revolution were put together. A world of fluidity, threatening every upright man who hadn’t learned to swim in those swamps and mud and slime of human bodies. Male Fantasies started as a work on the language of those killers. They didn’t write: “There were workers on strike, defending the gates of their factories”; instead they wrote: “The mud (or the slime) of the Republic had grown to our very lips. We were threatened with drowning, in danger of being swallowed by the whirling red swamps”, and things like that. Finally I realised they were not just talking nonsense. They talked about themselves: the “mud” came up from their insides and reached the edge of their lips; the words contained their feelings of fear in such situations. The solution: they fired their guns into those congregations.

All those threats were encoded by them (and not only by them) with ‘femininity’. All the stories they were told about cruel “red women” joyfully castrating “good German soldiers” melted into a stream of hatred in their actions against those “unnatural demons”; turning their bodies into a “bloody mess”, when killing many of them in the suppression of the workers’ fights.

As you point out, this is a worldwide phenomenon in such struggles to this day. Another main point: the central fear of the “fragmented body” is the fear of bodily dissolution, of being melted into one of those “swamps” encoded with femininity.

Maria, Dorothee: In a lecture you gave in 2016, you talked about the constructed “male hierarchical symbiosis” (everyone is in their “right place”) as a substitute for proper object-relation, therefore a psychological construct. Again, what would you say could be the potential relation between such a psychological construct and an a posteriori, societal implementation?

Klaus: We have to take a slightly broader view on that, on the ways in which feelings like that get into human bodies. The primary relation of babies after their birth is what analysts call the ‘symbiosis’ with the nurturing body, mostly that of a mother. It takes the child about two years or more to grow out of that symbiosis into a person ‘of its own’ – still dependent, for years, on the nurturing family or a similar formation. If this upbringing happens in a modest way of helping the child grow, it will, one day in his later life, arrive at a state of being able to find its way into ‘object relations’ with other people – in friendships, groups, love affairs, etc. In psychoanalytical terms: the child has developed ‘friendly introjects’; that means bodily representations of friendly persons from the outside. And realises one day that she or he exists in her or his own right, apart from the others: a joyful experience. People who, when growing up, find themselves forced to live in “fragmented bodies”, didn’t get enough of that necessary help. When treated badly – in whatever way – friendly introjects that made them feel good in their bodies didn’t grow in them (what Melanie called “the good, nurturing mother’s breast”). Instead of that, they are filled with unsure feelings which often turn into fears. That makes it difficult for them to part in a more or less ‘normal’ way from their symbiotic relations; the child turns these relations into negative ones. Children like that get into a principal insecurity about who other people really are, and in a principal insecurity about realities as a whole. They tend to get into states of feeling persecuted (by the introject of the “wicked breast”, as Melanie Klein calls it). Those feelings can be successfully ‘treated’ by the military drill where something like a ‘body armour’ is placed on the soldier, and a special social body order in which every part – every person – knows his exact place in a formation, in groups, in society. There, the “societal implementation” referred to in your question happens. People like that learn to transform every potentially ‘symbiotic’ relation (of insecurity) into a hierarchical one (of security). That’s their process of fencing in their fears. Which means they become – in political terms – bodily anti-democratic persons. Accepting only realities of a strong hierarchical order, obeying leaders, loving dictatorships, and all that. That’s one of the main reasons for the ‘flourishing’ of fascist formations worldwide.

In Germany with the (propagandistic) specialty that from World War I there are reports inside the military, warning soldiers to take care when dealing with Jewish prostitutes. They were said to infect German soldiers on purpose, to weaken the German army through the deaths of syphilitic soldiers. There is no end to the summoning of female wickedness – always planning bodily dissolutions.

Maria, Dorothee: Can you please talk about the main thesis of your 2015 book Das Lachen der Täter (The Laughter of the Perpetrators)[4] and the conclusions you have reached after comparing these various atrocities?

Klaus: There are some scenes of killing/laughing soldiers in Male Fantasies; later, I found so many more that it made sense to put them together to form the core of Das Lachen der Täter. It describes one of the central feelings of relief for the killing agents. In the scripts of the German soldiers, it appears mostly in the form of the “empty place”, or “empty space”. For example, soldiers have been commanded to dissolve a group of workers on strike: they go there, check out how to control the situation, come near, and in the end fire their guns into the group. A miracle – within seconds, the place is empty, except for some corpses lying there. That’s the moment they burst into raucous laughter. Also in similar situations in ‘the field’, at the front during the war. This laughter is absolutely irresistible. One of the moments the killer gets into a feeling of being ‘whole’, no longer threatened by fragmentation. Then I found exactly this sort of laughter in different killings all over the world – South America, Indonesia, in the Congo, Japanese killings, Abu Ghraib, everywhere. It’s sort of an orgasm to those killers.

But the killing alone is not sufficient, To get into a feeling of a sort of “satisfaction”, the victim has to be turned into that special view of a “bloody mess”. Shooting at the heads of persons who are already dead, stabbing into their bellies or cutting off their limbs are the most common ways to put them into these final states.

Maria, Dorothee: In this 2015 book, you applied the theory of the fascist psyche to Islamist terrorists and right-wing extremist mass murderers like Anders Breivik. In what way is it different when a psychotic person like Breivik delves into mass murder, as opposed to when a group like Hamas does it?

Klaus: Breivik – one of my ‘prominent’ examples for the laughing killer. Islamist terrorists we could see on the internet, beheading people, laughing like hell. It really makes no difference to what group or nation the killing men belong. Muslims from the IS state want “all Christians” (= Ungläubige) to be dead. Christians like Breivik want all Muslims to be dead. The same with Hamas. It’s not a national, not an ethnical, not a special religious sign, but a sign of killing men worldwide. Some traits they share are killing with joy and the celebration of elimination. This joy of killing they have in common. Especially when destroying female bodies.

Maria, Dorothee: You also discussed in your work the possibility of creating a strong social support and educational environment that could potentially reduce the burgeoning of fascism and radicalisation in men. An obvious answer would be to have a caring society with infrastructures that would prevent that. Is that a naive dream or a possibility? And how was it possible that Norway – a very different society from Russia or Belarus, a democratic country with strong social support, a welfare society where the weak are protected – produced someone like Breivik?

Klaus: In a way you may be right to say that the Norwegian society produced someone like Breivik. But it produced a guy like that as a sort of counterpart – as a solitary figure, a ‘lone wolf’. Breivik had to act as a loner just because the Norwegian society in its daily life doesn’t produce persons like him. In other societies, a ‘Breivik’ would have found enough companions for killing actions like those he committed.

I’m not afraid of being called ‘naive’ when speaking about the possibilities of a ‘caring society’ in preventing mass murders. You all know the song text: “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one ...” If you had better ways – okay, there’s no limit to those … But – give the world to the realists – and you are in hell immediately. ‘Realists’ are consuming realities, swallowing them. Turn realities into the shape of their insides: bloody pieces of shit. Building societies which are equivalents of their inner states.

Maria, Dorothee: You mentioned before that it is important to engage, that political education is important. You give an example that in Germany, the AfD has a very strong influence in some regions and almost none in others, and the mistake was to stop working with young people in East Germany. It is possible to influence something at a certain stage of human psychological/social development, when these men/boys are still young. Can you give some examples or suggestions as to what these alternatives might be, at least in democratic societies?

Klaus: I’m speaking about the situation after the Wall had come tumbling down in 1989, and shortly after that East Germany, the GDR, ceased to exist and became part of West Germany, the FRG. West German politicians (and many inhabitants too) acted in this moment as if they had ‘won the Cold War’ now (that’s how they felt). And, as if that were not enough, they celebrated it as a belated victory over the Soviet Union, as a rewinning of WW II, idiotically. One of the first things they did was to close nearly all places where the young people in the East had gathered in their free time; they especially closed all the youth centres, because these had been meeting places for the ‘communist youth’ of the East, for the FDJ, Freie Deutsche Jugend. As such, they had to disappear, and many music venues too. Sports centres were also closed. Clubs ceased to exist. But places like these are absolutely necessary in open societies to keep the social contacts of young people going. By closing most of them, there was nearly nothing left of the old meeting places, especially in rural regions. In this gap, the radical right-wing youth movement of neo-Nazis began to grow – those political forces, now organised in right-wing parties like the NPD, later the AfD. The West had missed the opportunity to offer democratic alternatives to what they had destroyed. A social vacuum had grown, and into vacuums like that youth violence will step in, on the edge of criminality.

Maria, Dorothee: What we read in Breivik’s manifesto reflects what you analysed in the letters in Male Fantasies: hatred and fear of women. For him, they are a threat and danger. According to him, when given power, they (women) let foreigners and Muslims into the country and marry them, hence “Islamising” Europe. He blames them for the “great replacement” – by now a mainstream, far-right conspiracy theory proposing that the ‘original’ population of Europe is being replaced with foreigners and migrants, due to liberal elites’ conspiracy. So to him, the biggest ‘threats’ are women, Islam and Marxists. Over sixty teenagers that he killed were from the youth wing of a social democratic, left-leaning party. This rhetoric is quite popular on the Right; it is no longer on the fringe but is used even by mainstream political parties. How concerning do you find it to be?

Klaus: Parts of the answer are in your question. It’s the description of a horrible development. My question is: does it make any impression on people who talk like that if you tell them that they themselves are products of the very mixtures of populations they ‘hate’? Does it make sense to tell them that women are not necessarily a threat to their bodily constitution? I fear it is of no use. They’ve got to have new experiences – the experience of being helped by other people, friends, groups, lovers. But how should one speak to people/men who say – like the American ‘incel’ men do – that we don’t need women any longer, not even for giving birth.

Maria, Dorothee: In an interview with NZZ, you talk about how all religions are also based on this male dominance. “One of the main purposes of the Bible and the Qur’an is to set rules for women: how they should give birth and get married, what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do. Religions are men-made; God’s word is men’s word. This means that the attack is present from the start.”[5] In his manifesto, Breivik also presents rather extreme theories on controlling women, about how they should only be allowed to study up to Bachelor level, should have a minimum of two kids and stay at home, should not join the police, etc. It sounds like a special form of Islamic patriarchy – which he claims to fight in his own battle for a free men’s world. What do you make of this connection? And how can one relate this to the Hamas terror in Israel?

Klaus: Women should not join the police or the army, Breivik writes. Because those are purely male fields which would only be poisoned by the presence of women. Yes, it absolutely sounds like one of the rules of an Islamic patriarchal catalogue. Is that a contradiction? People don’t care about contradictions. Some people – the most intelligent ones – know and say that contradictions only exist inside of logical, philosophical or mathematical systems. In actual reality there are no contradictions; reality is a chaotic multiplicity of things. So, from the perspective of eliminatory thinking – or better, eliminatory feelings, there is basically no difference between an Islamic guy demanding the deaths of all Christians and a Christian guy pleading for the death of all Muslims. No difference to a Hamas killer who wants all Israelis to be dead. Or to Netanyahu, whom I heard say that all Hamas people should be wiped out from the surface of the earth. Or a white racist in the US (or elsewhere) who wishes just the same to all coloured people. People who demand elimination – the most dangerous form of humans existing. We know – from real history – that they are going to act out what they demand, the moment they have the political and/or military power to do this. 

Maria, Dorothee: What do far-right terrorists and Islamic extremists have in common that makes you put them in the same book? What makes them commit these terrible crimes? If we think of beheadings by ISIS, mass rapes by Hamas and, as you pointed out, they laugh when they committed these acts of violence; they seemingly derive pleasure from killing.

Klaus: It’s the things they have in common. In terms of the psychoanalysis of children (Margret Mahler and others), we should speak of ‘dedifferentiation’ and ‘deanimation’ here – two central terms. ‘Dedifferentiation’: “All women are just the same ... All Muslims are just the same ... All blacks are ..., etc.” (“And what are they? Just the same heap of shit. Get them out of the way. It’s our right to act like this.”) That leads to ‘deanimation’: the process of taking life out of all those who are around and who are different from one’s own group; from one’s own body. But to get the psychological processes even more precisely: it’s a trait in sexuality they share. You speak about their “pleasure in killing”. What is this really? What is the pleasure in raping? And killing the women afterwards? It has become common to call it sexualised violence. But where is the sexuality when a leader of a Congo unit orders his child soldiers to cut bodies with their machetes all day long until they get an erection. Then they would have become men. For me, sexuality is primarily a word for a pleasurable bodily intermingling of persons who like each other, not a process of violence. Using the term ‘sexualised violence’ – isn’t that a denunciation of sexuality? What I see are completely de-sexualised acts. We have to realise, I think, that the form of bodily behaviour that we are used to calling sexuality has stopped to exist in bodies like that. It has been transformed into forms of torture, destruction and elimination – which are enjoyed by the bodies of the perpetrators. It’s their form of feeling bodily sensations. There is no sexuality at all left in their bodies. It becomes visible when the penis turns into a murderous instrument that gets an erection over the person the killer is chopping up. A body of sexuality couldn’t do that. It’s lust of killing. And they know this from each other.

Maria, Dorothee: Did modern-day extremist terrors, such as those committed by Hamas, reach a new level of cruelty when they utilised social media and the terror also became a public performance (as parts of it were broadcast in real time on social media, were posted and replicated)?

Klaus: Yes, as far as I can see, this is the only real difference to other killing acts we know. When asked during the last two years to write something about Putin’s cruelties, his dehumanising terror, I refused to do so with the argument that all those things happening in war actions, in other terrorist actions, are completely well known to all the people who wanted to know about them. Putin didn’t add anything ‘new’. I got furious when I heard people say that these were unprecedented cruelties in Europe after WW II. Memory? Obviously that doesn’t exist, even in the brains of actual ruling politicians. Where have they stored away the events that occurred when Yugoslavia fell apart?

But the broadcasting of killings in real time on social media is a change in that field. Some commentators stressed that the killings the Hamas people executed were obviously performed and recorded for the purpose of their exhibition on social media; not only for their ‘documentation’, but also planned to produce a general shock, a feeling of horror and a feeling of being personally threatened. And a feeling of overwhelming power in all those who share the target of that actions. Maybe to billions of people. The electronic networks have become a powerful instrument, not only of ‘communication’ among people who didn’t know from each other before the Nineties, but also an extremely forceful and effective power in the hands of ‘right-wing’ powers all over the world in their fight against democracies, their fight for authoritarian societies, for states ruled by dictators. Hardly to be controlled. Another ‘common thing’ they share: it was Mary Douglas who realised that people like that used to feel that their own body’s borders were equivalent to the borders of their country. A big, ‘invulnerable’ body built out of millions of followers. The electronic media are strengthening these sorts of feelings: “The silent majority is no longer silent” – this we could read on many banners carried by the Donald Trump community. It’s a huge electronic effect.

Maria, Dorothee: Can you think of an explanation why young people (and Judith Butler), who believe they are left wing, justify these atrocities as acts of resistance? And how can they believe that Hamas did not calculate from the beginning the disastrous outcome for their own people? And how do young people deny that in Gaza, Hamas and other Islamic forces have installed a rigid regime against women, queer people and any political opponent?

Klaus: This seems to be a typical result of social conflicts that turn into military conflicts. Both ‘sides’ of those actions tend to become criminal, or at least idiotic. Wars are the crime par excellence, allowing all kinds of behaviour and thinking that are banned in ‘normal’ social life. I cannot see at all that Hamas cares for the Palestinian people. Or that Netanyahu, a war criminal, cares for the people of Israel. Leaders in war situations never care for anyone but themselves, or what they call their countries’ “cause”. An intelligent person like Judith Butler should know that. I think she knows. But wars make idiots out of all of us.

Maria, Dorothee: As modern psychology and psychoanalysis tend to focus on the unpacking of ‘childhood traumas’ and to attribute many adult behaviours – including extreme, criminal behaviours – to these traumas, to blame their wrongdoings on their parents, especially their mother. The Breivik case, as you wrote about, used one such rationale. And you also said that for example for Putin, the KGB was more influential than any upbringing, if I understood you correctly?

Klaus: They use whatever they can get, whether somebody believes it or not. The wrongdoings of parents, the mother, etc. Everybody knows, things like that can play a major, even decisive role in any personal case in court. In the case of heavily and methodically acting perpetrators of mass killings, I would hesitate. Even for Breivik, a single person, it was extremely important to become accepted as a person speaking in the name of a big, overarching historical congregation – the so-called Knights Templar of Malta. Putin does everything in the name of Old Russia, which he believes has been betrayed by ‘the West’. And was he raised by ‘parents’? I don’t think so. He is a man of the KGB, a secret service man from head to toe, including his (non-existent) soul. Hitler spoke in the name of ‘history’ itself. ‘Hope of salvation’? (I hear them laughing). (“Everybody knows,” as Leonard Cohen used to sing): Not the good ones, the peaceful ones, are winning. “That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”

Maria, Dorothee: To come back to new right wings, and to young people denying the obvious facts, you wrote that once a person is isolated from society and is left alone with only violence as an option, the battle is lost. He/she would be radicalised by various groups/ideologies. Perhaps this is what happened to someone like Breivik. By that point he was already beyond the help any psychotherapy or psychoanalyses can provide. In your opinion, how can radicalisation be combatted when it has already taken place? With what means or narratives?

Klaus: “Radicalisation – when it has already taken place”? When there is the decisive will to kill? I think there is no way then. There is no point of return for those who have crossed all possible borders. Whether they are in prison or not. How do you argue with people who are proud to be killers; who declare that they don’t give a shit about anything you could say; who would never lie down on the couch of analysts; who feel that they themselves are the healers of the world. That seems to be just a waste of time.

Maria, Dorothee: In one of the discussions, you say that it is possible to prevent radicalisation through love, friendship, relationships – that these have the power to change things. Not through learning history but through art. Art can reach emotions. Can you provide some examples of how this could be achieved? What would you say to those sceptics who think this tenor is naïve and idealistic?

Klaus: When we take a look at the “fragmented body” again – that is a state of being which possibly can be changed. All personal, bodily changes don’t happen, as far as my experience tells me, without the help of others, of at least one other person. Personal transformation is a process of your relations. Young neo-Nazis who left their groups – which has happened – did it in all the cases I heard about with the help of a friend or a lover; mostly girls who managed to get their motorcycle-wooden-club-bearing, alcoholised, pretty guys out of their ‘clubs’ or ‘gangs’, away from their leaders, who often have a total impact on them. Things like that are worth being done in every single case. Every friendly, lasting relation can save a person from the fascist frame of fake news and violent lying and acting. The first step is stopping the process of finding the reasons for every disturbing feeling in your own body in the outside world: “It’s not me. It’s them.” Somebody has to help you to realise that some of the threats you feel stem from your own inner life, are part of your own body. To accept that is hard work. To stop shouting: “It’s the migrants. The foreigners! The Jews!” And so on. 

One precondition is that new relations have to have the power to dissolve the physical boundaries of the bodies of the involved persons. It happens best between two persons in love. But to come to that state, you have to trust another person totally, which is not easy to achieve.

There are two other main fields with the power to dissolve bodily boundaries. One is a close encounter with recreational drugs – where you also need help; the other is the way that you mentioned: through art, playing music, listening to music, painting, filming, or for some people it may be through sports. There are lots of fields of artistic and life-production. But it’s not always easy to find a group or a person whose vibrations linger on the same wavelength, or take whatever metaphor you want. What do your “sceptics” do about realities like that? Look at them and talk about them sceptically? Good for them. But I admit, I’m not any more ‘idealistic’ than they are. Not idealistic
at all.

Klaus Theweleit studied German Studies and English Studies in Kiel and Freiburg. From 1969–1972, he worked as a freelancer for a public radio station (Südwestfunk). He wrote his dissertation Freikorpsliteratur und der Körper des soldatischen Mannes about Freikorps narratives, a sub-literature produced by paramilitaries organized in Freikorps, who, during the early Weimar republic, had fought external or internal enemies. In academia only few historians had read and analysed this literature before Theweleit. His book Männerphantasien (1977); translated as Male Fantasies (1987), a study of the “proto-fascist consciousness” in general and the bodily experience of these former soldiers in particular. Throughout the book Theweleit uses ideas, terminology and empirical experience from works of Margaret Mahler, Wilhelm Reich, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Melanie Klein, and Michel Foucault among others to develop his theory of the "fascist male imprinting and socialization". In the introduction, Theweleit points out that discussions with Margaret Berger and his wife Monika Theweleit-Kubale (both of whom have professional clinical experience) had an important influence on the book as well as the feedback from Erhard Lucas, a leading German left-wing historian of the Weimar Unrest. Theweleit lives in Freiburg, he teaches in Germany, the United States, Switzerland, and Austria. He was a lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg and lecturer at the film academy in Berlin. From 1998 until retirement he was a professor for “art and theory” at the Staatliche Akademie für Bildende Künste, the art academy, at Karlsruhe. 

Maria Sorensen is a Zurich-based art curator, writer and researcher. Drawing upon her background in film and visual arts, her curatorial practice deals with important societal issues through the use of strong, expressive artistic language. Her recent projects include UnSaid, an exhibition on state and self-censorship; a theatre festival of Russian language anti-war drama held at the Kulturhaus Helferei; and serving on the jury of the Iranian Film Festival Zurich. Sorensen’s writing on art and culture has been published by Kunstmuseum Bern, London-based Index on Censorship, Berlin-based On Curating and Zurich-based research initiative MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture. 

Dorothee Richter, PhD, is Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she directs the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. She previously served as head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS/MAS) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was artistic director at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, as well as an archive on feminist practices entitled Materialien/Materials. Together with Ronald Kolb, Richter directed a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now, Fluxus Explored with a Camera. Her most recent project was Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone, a collaborative exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2024. This project was co-curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb) and ARKO (curator Haena Noh, producer Haebin Lee). Richter is Executive Editor
and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin.