Klaus Theweleit's book center upon the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, seeking out and reconstructing their images of women. Heavily illustrated with cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters of the era.
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Klaus Theweleit, born in East Prussia in 1942, studied German and English. Today he lives as a freelance writer with teaching assignments in Germany, the USA, Switzerland and Austria. Between 1998 and 2008, Theweleit was professor of art and theory at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He became known for his monumental work Männerphantasien (1977/78), a new edition of which was published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin in 2019. Rudolf Augstein called it "perhaps the most exciting German-language publication of this year" in Der Spiegel after its initial publication.
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"As a warning against a culture of violent history sedimented over millennia in male bodies, which is still socially reproduced today, albeit in a weakened form, Theweleit's "Male Fantasies" remains highly topical. And as a reminder that gender relations must be seen as a central key to civilizational progress." - Hannes Soltau, tagesspiegel
