As I came across today a set of deeply disturbing photographs of Turkish soldiers having stripped off the clothes of a young Kurdish girl after killing her, posing with her naked body, shared on social media, I remembered Klaus Theweleit's book Männerphantasien (1977), translated in English ten years later as Male Fantasies . In this unique book, Theweleit, provides an insightful analysis of the proto-fascist consciousness of the Freikorps fighters who roamed the Weimar Republic during the interwar period to fight communists and 'other' enemies. Their ambivalent but, at their core, deeply misogynistic attitudes were central in their worldview and eventually formed one of the cornerstones of national socialist ideology as it was eagerly adopted by the Nazi party and, later on, by state discourse and policy. The Turkish state, waging war against its own Kurdish citizens allows and encourages similar fantasies to be enacted at the 'battleground' and but...
from triglav to caucasus
Commentary on the political and cultural developments in Southeastern Europe