The project “Männerphantasien” (Male Fantasies) deals with the question of Series (as in the Quick Marylins project). It is based on the illustrations of Klaus Theweleit’s book “Males Fantasies” (Männerphantasien) published in 1978, and again in 2019. The book deals with sexual and violent fantasies of Nazi men (Freikorps) and their images of women. I was struck by the heterogeneity of the pictures (photos, prints, drawings etc.) that didn’t seem to illustrate directly the text. They reminded me of Michel Foucault’s description in his introduction of Les mots et les choses, of a strange Chinese taxonomy from a book by Borges, in which seemingly incompatible elements question our comprehension of classification – thereby illustrating Foucault’s argument of the historical construction of our perception. The appropriation with black gouache of the pictures embeds them formally in a new system of my own, raising questions about what is their common denominator – beyond the question of authorship already posed by appropriation.
The project was exhibited in 2023 in Gallery NYT, Berlin.
A reading performance of excerpts from the Afterword by Klaus Theweleit to Männerphantasien (2019) took place on the 18.06.2023. (see below 🙂
Excerpts from the Afterword to Männerphantasien (2019)
by Klaus Theweleit
About Männerphantasien: (pp.1124-1225)
“I was struck by the strange treatment of the configurations of the feminine that runs through the posthumous writings of the Freikorps men; be it the treatment of their wives, of working-class women (“shotgun women”), of their biological sisters (holy and pure), of prostitutes (swamp creatures, syphilis partisans), of Jewish women (man-devouring, blood-poisoning), etc. etc. Writing along this path proved surprisingly viable. The path was indeed new. It began with gender relations, describing first the thoroughly fearful perception of the bodies of the “other sex” by the “soldierly men” – as I soon preferred to call them, rather than always, narrowly, “fascists”. The work set course for a kind of cultural history of male violence in the last millennia of European history. Starting from the kind of male violence that culminated in the suppression of the German socialist revolutionary attempts by the Freikorps in the early 1920s and in the Nazi terror in the 1930s and 1940s.’
“Männerphantasien makes an attempt to fathom and describe why there are bodies, predominantly male bodies, that cannot live, i.e., that cannot breathe, without getting someone or something out of the way; to make it disappear; to describe what this compulsion to eliminate consists of in certain bodies, how it arises and then dominates these bodies. “
On the images in Männerphantasien :(pp.1218-1219)
“Männerphantasien is the first academic book in Germany (and probably ever) that does not simply use its lush pictorial apparatus to illustrate running sections of text. Rather, its images are mounted in the text: Images of fascism (but not only of fascism), built into the text in such a way that they become “readable” always also as images in which gazes are stored and historical conditions: gazes of painters, of photographers, of poster makers, of propagandists, of cinema makers, of Nazis, of non-Nazis, historical gazes, current gazes; and – especially relevant – gazes of comic artists: a kind of people who often put the sociological-political events of the 20th century more precisely into their pens. They have often captured the socio-political events of the 20th century more accurately in their pens than anyone else. Super-artists!
The pictures in the book thus form a strand of their own. Every picture – this is a general finding – captures something other than what is depicted: the gaze of the painter or photographer. Every practised cinema-goer knows this and determines the “quality” of pictures (their documentary, emotive, fictional, aesthetic quality) according to the way the maker/director has set up the picture, according to picture detail, depth, fall of shadows, colour nuances and its relationship to the picture before and after it. Above all else, then, one sees something in pictures that is not objectively on them: their manner of making and their placement in the production process of their makers. (If you look.)”
“The way men’s fantasies are made thus reflects in its text/image arrangement – this was only unconsciously clear to me at the time – how the things of reality are present in our brain chambers; namely side by side & jumbled up, not neatly ordered according to any “categories”. They are present in all possible medial forms, not separately according to any brain regions that are “responsible” for them. They unfold their effects according to the way we interconnect them, i.e. assemble them. Brain work is permanent film-making. Our body camera is constantly running. What is decisive is how we cut and combine what we have recorded.”
Conclusion/final chapter of the 2019 Men’s Fantasies epilogue:Freikorps literature, antique.Post-war of World War Zero: (p1277-1278)
“In the beginning was violence “headlines Mark Jones; and means the beginning of the Weimar Republic. A somewhat late “beginning”. From the very beginning, in “our culture”-the one called “occidental” only long after its beginnings- is coupled with applied armed violence; so too is literary writing; not to say interlocked. Intertwined. In the beginning is Homer’s Iliad. At this beginning. The object of the conflict between two great heroes is the body of a woman captured in the course of battle from a people subjugated by the Greeks – the body of a “barbarian”, a particularly beautiful one. The victorious lords, Agamemnon and Achilles, argue about which of them has the higher legal claim to be allowed to sleep exclusively on the beautiful body of Briseis. This dispute – which decisively hinders the conquest of Troy – costs the lives of tens of thousands; such is the material of this most important of all ancient dumpling books. Cockfighting between two rival supremacists, violent brutes who prefer to smash the world to pieces and have it smashed to pieces, and themselves to boot, rather than renounce the right to fuck over the body of a conquered woman from a population subjugated by war. Exercising power as a purpose in life; measured out with the male aristocratic limb – (permanently erect?).
It is war and colonial stories – fought out largely over female bodies – that are first written down with the new technology of the phonetic vowel alphabet: heroic male deeds, boasts, braggadocio, self-justifications, denunciations, rivalries, conquests, piratical things – with the (particularly refined) incorporation of gods’ involvement in the ongoing male trades. With always blood sausage at the end on the bending boards of our early culture: free corps literature of our dawn. Only more beautifully sung than the shabby filthy texts of the bawling soldier hordes after W K I. But as post-war texts of World War Zero, the Homeric ones can be called. Is there a word that would be more suitable as a banner over “Homer’s” Iliad than male fantasies? At the beginning of “our” writing. Sexuality? Nebbich.
“Culture is ritualised violence (…) the normalised violence of a lifestyle. Or also: violence as a habit “, the Austrian film and video artist Hito Steyerl; our story: a sequence of male violent behaviour as an everyday occurrence:” Crime is thus normalised as culture.” She formulates this with reference to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin – imagining himself as the (fictitious) figure of the clear-sighted “historical materialist” – had written that our cultural goods are “all and sundry of a descent that he cannot contemplate without horror.(…) It is never a document of culture without at the same time being one of barbarism.” There is an English book from 1935 entitled The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany. No title has been more accurate – before or since – on the relationship between German classicism, ancient “Greekness” and subsequent German imperial politics (from Frederick II to Hitler). More seamlessly than anywhere else in Germany, the “Greek gods” merged into the complex of their own, that is, into the complex of fascist deities, Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus etc. into Wotan, Odin etc.; the Greek “Olympus” into the Bavarian-German Valhalla. The Nibelungenlied: celebrated as the “German Iliad”. Sexuality? Love? It wasn’t that far in the 800s, and it wasn’t that far after WW I and WW II, the mythical Nibelung coded in Germany. And it is not so far today in many parts of the world of the war and post-war orders; the clod orders of male-technological modern genetics in the war for rare earths. “No Eros!
“Finding and maintaining a love life as normal behaviour of civilians living together, regardless of “gender” and world region, is the most burning political task; even before climate protection. A life of coming people worthy of this name depends on something else; on the preambles of the human rights decrees (and the corresponding behaviour) being detached from bubble formulas such as “dignity” and “respect” and the terrible adjective ” inviolable” – where “touching” is permanent and without any consideration Wouldn’t it be nicer to put something that actually exists in its place, namely “the skin”, a real border. A “human right” should be the right to the integrity of the skin against unwanted interventions. Skin, however, touchable, where desired, mutually.
Make Love Not War — was the most serious snark behind all the activities of the ’68 revolution.
K.T April 2019