■ "Male Fantasies" (by Klaus Theweleit, published by Geulhangari)
After its defeat in World War I, Germany faced sweeping disarmament demands from the Allied powers, reducing its military from millions to fewer than 100,000 troops. Yet the German military organized separate paramilitary groups beyond Allied surveillance, known at the time as the "Freikorps." These groups served a dual purpose: resisting foreign pressure from Britain, France and other nations while suppressing domestic left-wing forces. The Freikorps was eventually disbanded for its ruthless violence, but its members were absorbed into Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party).
Extensive analysis has been conducted on the Freikorps, which emerged as the origin of 20th-century far-right movements, fascism and Nazism. The newly published Korean edition of "Male Fantasies" is significant as a pioneering psychological and psychoanalytic study of these men. First published in Germany in 1977, the book has now been introduced in Korea nearly 50 years later. The Korean edition came considerably late compared to the English version in 1989 and the Japanese version in 2005.
The book compiles findings from an extensive investigation by young German scholar Klaus Theweleit (born 1942) into seven soldiers who belonged to the Freikorps. The author says he "traced their language and actions based on autobiographies, personal accounts and novels about them, unearthing the origins of violent masculinity and fascism in their conscious and unconscious minds." This is why the book is considered a classic in cultural criticism, masculinity studies, psychoanalysis and gender studies.
Remarkably, the author's own father was a fascist — a capable fascist and, by personal accounts, a good man. How a good person could become a fascist is the question his son pursued over a lifetime, and the book bears the traces of that search and struggle.
What sets this book apart from earlier research is that it does not treat fascism as a mere political movement. The author began his study on the premise that fascism cannot be explained solely as the result of top-down agitation by figures such as Hitler. Instead, he focused on something that emerged from within each individual, arguing that "the compulsion to achieve self-reproduction and self-preservation through killing is the core of the fascist movement." To uncover the psychological origins of this compulsion, he examined how fascist men perceived women and the relationships they formed with them. The author reveals he began his analysis after finding interest in the "ambivalent emotions" contained in references to women in the soldiers' texts — the way they "vacillated between intense interest and cold indifference, aggression and worship, hatred, fear, alienation and desire." These men sharply divided women into harmless, pure images such as "devoted mothers" and "self-sacrificing nurses" on one hand, and threatening images such as female warriors and prostitutes who endangered masculinity on the other, harboring dichotomous fantasies. The terror they felt toward a femininity that castrated men, and their desperate struggle to prevent the fragmentation and collapse of the self, ultimately led to violent fascism.
Though written half a century ago, the book's insights remain relevant as far-right political forces rise across the globe and extreme violence rooted in misogyny and other hatreds continues to occur. Priced at 68,000 won.