ABSTRACT
The excavation of Freikorps literary remains, of novels, letters, and autobiographies, uncovered the terrifying visions of these protofascists, visions of hatred and fear in which women were reduced to a series of blood images: the red tide, the red flow, a sea of blood. Women, perceived as sources of contagion, were equated with dirt, pits of muck, effluvia. The nature of femaleness and womanhood, envisioned in terms of bodily emissions or secretions (blood, mucus, excrement) was experienced as menacing. The Freikorps soldiers hated women, specifically women’s bodies and sexuality. Their hatred surfaced in an endless series of liquid images, in which women were associated with everything that threatened to flood or deluge the boundaries of manhood. It was a dread, ultimately, of dissolution, of being swallowed, annihilated.
