ABSTRACT
Theweleit is concerned not with the literature of the Nazi movement but with that of its much smaller military precursor, the Freikorps movement of the years between 1918 and 1923. The Freikorps were heavily armed bands of right-wing thugs, including many ex-soldiers, who were used by the Social Democratic-dominated governments of the early Weimar Republic to put down revolutionary uprisings such as those of the Spartacists in January 1919, the Communists in Munich later the same year, or the ‘Red Army’ in the Ruhr in the spring of 1920. Recently the Freikorps have had their
defenders: some historians have suggested that they helped stabilize Weimar democracy in its formative phase, or that they were a basically legitimate means by which the German middle classes defended themselves against the Bolshevik threat. No one who reads this book, however, can come away without feeling that these men were pathological murderers who despised the values Weimar represented and hated the ‘bourgeoisie’ as decadent and corrupt.
