To modern readers, the Freikorpsmen’s fantasy life will be familiar: a country in decline, a nationalistic call to purge it of disorder, a clear separation between men and women, rich and poor, your kind and the other.When the book was published in Germany, it became a cult classic and required reading in leftist circles. “Everyone — at universities, in left-wing undogmatic circles, in communal communities or groups of men — read the book at the time,” said one German writer. In 1987, the book was released in English and instantly, modern-day parallels were drawn. A New York Timesreviewer wrote that Theweleit had “captured a glimpse of our souls.”While other writers sought to understand the rise of Nazism by looking directly at Nazi violence, Theweleit, perhaps sensing that this direct path was too on the nose, used a different access point to the proto-fascist mind: their relationship to women.
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The Freikorps violence was not limited to women, but women are a potent symbol of their most primal fears: the dissolution of the self in another. Sex and the female body are, to them, nothing short of horrifying, so it is better that women be absent, separate, or dead.
When the Freikorpsmen’s wives appear in their writing, they are usually nameless and only mentioned in passing, even when they die. One Freikorspman’s writes only of his wife, “When I came home, I found my wife suffering from a severe nervous disorder. She died soon afterward.” Two pages later, he mentions honeymooning with his second wife. The white nurse is similarly unthreatening. She is sterile, sexless, and statuesque.
The “red women” however, are where the ugliness really lives. They represent everything that the order-obsessed Freikorpsmen fear: unwieldy sexuality, the chaos of revolution, the mingling of people regardless of class, creed, and color. “It’s a well-known fact that women are always at the head of these kinds of riots,” a Freikorps General’s speech read. “And if one of our leaders gives the order to shoot and a few old girls get blown up, the whole world starts screaming about blooodthirsty soldiers shooting down innocent women and children. As if women were always innocent.”
Throughout their writing, the Freikorpsmen are nearly drooling over the opportunities they have to murder these “red women” and stop the “filthy-red wave.” Theweleit quotes a scene from a fascist novel in which a Communist woman is confronted by Freikorpsman: “his sight is pointing straight into her mouth, into the center of that slobbering hole, so wide open with hysteria that he can even see the gums.” Once he shoots her point blank in the face, he is amazed. The shot “threw her onto her back, as if she had been blown over by some gigantic wind. Is that thing at his feet really her?”
The mineral component of bone is comprised mostly of the calcium phosphate mineral hydroxyapatite which is embedded in the organic component type I collagen. When bone is exposed to a mildly acid environment the mineral component leaches out leaving only the pliable organic component. Vinegar is safe to use and does not destroy the protein scaffolding that gives bone it’s characteristic shape. This is a human fibula tied in a knot.
The ‘information is free, distrust authority, truth and justice at any cost, respect my identity and right to communicate’ attitude generally attributed to millennials? Has always been a strong part of scientific culture. Scientists find the truth and argue about it for a living. Scientists share their practices and out-truth each other for a living. Scientists market that truth to other people for a living.
The open source movement was built and pioneered by scientists. The concept of the internet as a freely available and accessible worldwide tool was an extension of scientific culture. Before that, other media and communication efforts went through the same process. There are so many cool underground stories of small groups of scientists using their limited power and a bit of secrecy to create open source cultures and free information under the noses of political and business interests trying to restrict such things for personal gain.
Scientists consider themselves above everything – politicians, business, the law if the law restricts truth, other scientists. A nervous grad student who thinks they’ve found a flaw in the work of a Nobel laureate would be *expected* to challenge that work publically; respect for seniority is for business decisions, not for ideas. Scientists never grew out of their rebellious teenage phase after discovering that the world was unfair. Scientists are punks who channelled their energy into learning as much about the laws of the universe as they can. Scientists are basically the punk community if it were interested in information rather than music, and they do not ever grow out of it, and they do not ever stop. We had staff at our university who were frequently driven to tears because they couldn’t find ways to convince the senior scientists to take their vacation days for over a decade and it was causing serious administrative problems. They had to bribe the scientists to work from home for a month and pretend to be on holiday, and then everyone pretended not to notice when the scientists showed up to work to advise us poor grad students in person anyway. Scientists do what they want, and the first thing they are taught is how to see bullshit – the second thing they are taught is that it’s their fundamental duty to call out bullshit in anyone they see using it, no matter how prestigious or powerful.
They do not rest, they do not stop, they fear no death or ridicule or government sanction.
