Klaus Theweleit

Klaus Theweleit (born 7 February 1942) is a German sociologist and writer.

Life

Theweleit was born in Ebenrode, East Prussia (now Nesterov, Russia), the son of a railway company worker and a Jewish mother. He wrote the following about his father: "Above all he was a railroader, wholeheartedly, as he used to say, and then a human being. He was a rather good human being and a good fascist. His beatings which he gave away abundantly and brutally as it was usual in his time and with the best of intentions were the first lessons I received on fascism, a fact I only later fully discovered."

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 and 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 college, at Karlsruhe. In 2021, he received the Theodor W. Adorno Award.

Audio CDs

Das RAF –Gespenst, 2 CDs, Cologne, 2001.

Extasen der Zeitenmischung. Geschichtsdarstellung in der Kunst, 2 CDs, Cologne, 2001.