When did Christian von Ehrenfels die?
Christian von Ehrenfels
Dickinson noted that for Ehrenfels, the fear of the "Yellow Peril" was always expressed in water imagery; noting how Ehrenfels warned of a "flood" of Chinese coming to the West, that the Chinese were a "torrent of mud" in which Europe was drowning in, that the Japanese were a "polluting liquid", and that Europeans would not respond to this menace until the "waves" of Asians were up to their neck.[34] The German historian Klaus Theweleit wrote that the same threatening water imagery was frequently used in the writings of Freikorps men during the interwar period, but the only threats were the Jews and the Communists (usually the same thing in these writings) rather the Asians which threatened to subsume German men.[34] Theweleit wrote that right-wing German men who had served in the Freikorps during the interwar period were obsessed with proving their masculinity by establishing their "hardness", and that the water imagery reflected their fear of women, the erotic, love, intimacy, and of dependence, all things that threatened to make them less than manly.[34] Theweleit argued in his 1977 book Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies) that the water imagery was associated with sexuality and a loss of self-control.[35] Reviewing Theweleit's book in 1987, the American historian Paul Robinson wrote that "...one can't read it without feeling that Mr. Theweleit is onto something: the piling up of examples eventually begins to take its toll on even the most skeptical."[35] Dickinson argued that men like Ehrenfels felt the same sexual anxieties about their masculinity as did the writers examined by Theweleit, but only he projected these anxieties onto the "Yellow Peril" rather than "Judeo-Bolshevism".[36] To be in love can often mean a certain loss of self-control as those in love often invoke the images of being "swept away" or "swallowed up". Dickinson argued that for Ehrenfels, a self-proclaimed macho "manly man" and Aryan alpha male, the prospect of being in love with someone was terrifying as it meant the possibility of losing control, and he projected those fears-which were always expressed in the water imagery-onto the Asians.[37] Ehrenfels often denied quite vehemently that marriage had anything to do with love, writing about his own marriage that marriage was: "in the final analysis the sexual provision for two persons of the opposite sex through mutual, exclusive and contractual agreement to intercourse. Our morality tries to cover the matter...instead of sexual provision we speak of a unity of souls and the contractual agreement to coitus...is more or less transparently veiled by the term 'community of bed and table'".[38] Dickson wrote that Ehrenfels's efforts to deny that a man could ever love a woman suggested a huge fear of emotional dependence on his part.[39]