ABSTRACT
Klein talks about the boy's 'excessive protestations of masculinity' and the use he makes of his aggression to assert his threatened masculinity and his sense of humiliation as he is faced with his feelings of inferiority towards the mother. Although Theweleit's study has been criticised on many grounds It think that his analysis of the fusion sought in the pre-fascist and fascist groups is very insightful and revealing of the underlying forces and contradictions involved in the fascist state of mind. The fear of feminisation and of not being proved to be a man seems to have been a widespread masculine fear in Wilhelmine Germany, and probably in the whole of nineteenth-century Europe and can be linked to what Alexander Mitscherlich has called the 'fatherless society'. The Jew as the feminised man was a stereotype of nineteenth-century Germany, and more widely, Europe, and was connected with the fact of circumcision which was seen to be feminising the male.
