It is not surprising that Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies) has recently been recirculating—especially after a new German edition was published in 2019—given both the innovative methodology it introduced at the time and its continued relevance today. First issued between 1977 and 1978, Male Fantasies not only provides one of the first multilayered approaches for structurally analyzing male violence and its deeply misogynistic roots, but it also remains sadly relevant today for understanding the ongoing proliferation of femicides as well as the ways in which masculine bodies are performed and staged by contemporary far-right movements. In a moment when feminists from various fields—including Diana E.H. Russell (Russell 1975), Susan Brownmiller (Brownmiller 1975), and Lea Melandri (Melandri 1977; Melandri 1988)—were already denouncing the systemic nature of male violence against women, Theweleit developed a cultural, philosophical, and psychoanalytical investigation of the writings produced by the Freikorps: the armed paramilitary groups active in early Weimar Germany, whose members later became part of the social base of National Socialism. For Theweleit and his generation, this research had significance beyond historical analysis: it involved confronting the violence of a close past, which still weighed on their generation, and demanded excavation in its unconscious dimension. At the same time, because Theweleit did not shy away from reading the Freikorps’ brutal acts within the framework of patriarchy, his methods were valid when Male Fantasies was first published and continue to offer valuable analytical tools today.
Theweleit shows how these paramilitary soldiers experience their bodies as fragile and unstable, shaping fantasies and behaviors around the need to defend against perceived disintegration and fragmentation, which they would project on female bodies. He emphasizes that these fantasies are not merely ideological abstractions but are rooted in embodied experience and psychic formation. The Freikorps’s texts express an obsessive aversion to disorder, fluidity, and what is coded as feminine, accompanied by a hypervigilant machismo that constructs the male self as a hard, armored body defined against what it fears will disintegrate it. The Freikorp soldier is a figure whose identity is constituted through the drive to withstand perceived fragmentation or dissolution, often by means of violence and control—a form of self-definition that privileges rigid boundaries around self, gender, and nation. With Theweleit, we could say that fascism is not only a set of ideas to which certain people adhere, but also a state of the body: fascist subjectivity emerges from somatic states shaped by fear of fragmentation and boundary loss. This “fragmented body”, perceived as internally unstable and vulnerable to dissolution, responds to anxiety with fantasies of violence, purity, and containment. If, as Theweleit suggests, fascist subjectivity is rooted in anxieties about bodily fragmentation and the need to secure rigid boundaries, these dynamics can also emerge in less spectacular, more intimate domains.
Contemporary practices surrounding food, health, and bodily discipline become especially revealing in this regard. Eating, after all, is one of the most literal negotiations of inside and outside, purity and contamination, strength and weakness. It is at this level—where the management of the body appears as self-care, optimization, or healing—that contemporary configurations of far-right ideology can circulate in subtler, pervasive forms. The recent documentary Soldiers of Light (2025) by artist Johannes Büttner and filmmaker Julian Vogel offers a compelling case through which to observe these transformations as well as the non-self-evident connection between eating disorders and far-right ideologies. Soldiers of Light unveils this relationship within the contemporary entanglement of conspiracy theories, far-right ideology, self-optimization, toxic masculinity, alternative medical practices and new age spirituality. Historically fascist ideologies often insisted on fantasies surrounding food, the body, and its discipline—areas where personal and collective desires become instruments through which far-right ideas are encoded and reproduced. In Italian fascism (see Garvin 2022; Helstosky 2004; Laforgia 2025) and German National Socialism (see Gerhard 2015) food was strategically mobilized as a tool to regulate citizens’ daily lives, shape eating habits and national identity, and reinforce gendered expectations within the household. The fascist dictatorships of the twentieth century—e.g., Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Salazar in Portugal (see Saraiva 2016)—actively promoted the expansion of agriculture and animal breeding, as well as their technological advancements, in order to increase the control both over food production and the lives of the citizens. Food thus became a tangible expression of power and assumed a biopolitical function. Fabio Parasecoli in his recent book Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (Parasecoli 2014) refers to the famous campaign to increase wheat production where Mussolini staged his participation in the harvest for a propaganda documentary, appearing shirtless in the fields.
Already in 1924, the fascist government produced numerous documentaries focusing on the life and labor of rural workers, portraying them as the backbone of the nation. Italian fascism leveraged the symbolic power of food in various propagandistic forms (the so called battaglia del grano, the Battle for Grain): bread, for instance, became central to fascist propaganda, with citizens encouraged to limit their consumption as part of broader messaging about discipline, sacrifice, and national identity. The consumption of wholemeal bread was especially (Parasecoli 2014, 69) promoted, not only by Mussolini but also in Nazi Germany as part of official food and health policy: from 1939, a Reichsvollkornbrotausschuss (Reich Wholemeal Bread Committee) established quality standards and propaganda campaigns to increase wholemeal bread consumption as a symbol of health and national strength, disseminated through posters, educational materials, and branding that linked whole grain bread to “people’s health”. As Soldiers of Light shows, these dynamics have taken on more duplicitous and hybrid forms today, entangling neoliberal market logics, social media influencers, and wellness ideologies that intersect with right-wing movements.
Beyond—or perhaps more precisely, within—its material and vital functions, food possesses an undeniable symbolic and political dimension; the weaponization of starvation in contemporary contexts such as Gaza and Sudan is an emblematic example of how food continues to operate as a mechanism of power. Neither fully subject nor fully object, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s formulation from Powers of Horror (1980), food is instead abject: a liminal substance that enters and transforms the body, dissolving the boundaries between inside and outside. This liminality also accounts for its foundational role in identity, where food practices are deployed to reinforce social and territorial boundaries. Food is at once “natural”—a key term in ideological constructions—and culturally mediated, shaped by social structures, religious rituals, and of course politically determined within the global food market.
Soldiers of Light presents a case that stirred considerable public debate in Germany: the Königreich Deutschland (KRD, Kingdom of Germany), a para-state movement entangled with conspiracy theories, far-right ideology, alternative health practices, and New Age spirituality. The group was officially banned in May 2025, accused of attempting to establish a “counter-state” within Germany by undermining the constitutional order, creating pseudo-state institutions—including a bank, an insurance system, fictitious identity documents, and a currency—and disseminating antisemitic conspiracy narratives to legitimize its claims to authority. The movement’s origins trace back to 2009, when Peter Fitzek, a former cook and karate instructor, unsuccessfully ran for local office in Wittenberg. After blaming the democratic system for his defeat, he publicly founded the Kingdom of Germany in 2012 and declared himself King or Supreme Sovereign. From that point, the group positioned itself as a parallel state, rejecting the legitimacy of German government institutions, taxes, and bureaucracy. Fitzek and his followers acquired properties—factories, hotels, and rural estates—to develop self-sufficient communities and offer alternative courses in health, education, and economic management, operating outside state regulation. Fitzek was convicted in 2017 for illegal financial operations, yet the Kingdom continued its activities until the 2025 ban.
Soldiers of Light did not become obsolete when the Königreich Deutschland at the centre of the film was banned—an event that more or less coincided with the film’s release. This is the case for at least two reasons. First, as we read in the opening scene of the film, it is estimated that there are around 23,000 so-called Reichsbürger and Sovereign Citizens in Germany who do not recognize the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as a sovereign state, viewing it instead as occupied territory since 1945, and who continue to insist on narratives of “withdrawing from the state”, “self-healing”, “purified communities”, and “alternative spirituality”. But the more significant reason concerns the characters and themes the directors chose to foreground, as they illuminate phenomena that extend well beyond the specificity of this case. It is not the story of Peter Fitzek, “the King”, that Vogel and Büttner chose to focus on to depict the structure and dynamics of the kingdom—I believe because Peter’s figure is the most immediately recognizable in terms of historical connection. Especially in Germany, a country that famously has a historical tradition of entanglement of para-state far-right and libertarian-right ideologies with New Age spirituality, the myth of purity, and self-sufficient organic food production. While Peter remains an important figure, he is not as central as the documentary’s main protagonists: Mr Raw (David Ekwe Ebobisse) and Timo—the two soldiers of light as David says to his Instagram followers in one of the scenes. These two characters, as we might interpret through Aby Warburg’s lens, undergo an energetic inversion relative to historical precedents: they repurpose and transform the expressive weight of familiar symbols and practices, revealing how elements such as food, the body, wellness, and the chameleonic notion of healing can convey ideologies and narratives reminiscent of the past while being reconfigured by the economy, politics, and aesthetics of contemporary media. The directors position Mr Raw—the Kingdom’s influencer, who runs a line of vegan food products and supplements—at the center of the film, as he is the linchpin of the group’s material, ideological, and pseudo-spiritual economy, with his authority rooted both in communication and in the embodied performance demanded by social media platforms. His vegan food business operates through an online shop and through a café-bistro in Frankfurt called the Rohkosteria, whose workers are themselves members of the Kingdom and therefore do not receive a regular wage but instead “benefits” tied to their status within “the community”. As a compensation for his work for David (which is in fact a form of enslavement through manipulation), Timo is offered accommodation in a communal house where the “community” lives, but, more crucially, he is granted free access to the so-called superfoods (as smoothies of varying consistency) and treatments that are presented as therapies capable of curing his psychosis (officially diagnosed as schizophrenia). Timo also suffers from a severe eating disorder—somewhere between orthorexia and anorexia—which appears to have developed during his earlier period as a bodybuilder.
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Still from Soldiers of Light, Johannes Büttner, Julian Vogel, Wood water Films and patatino, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
Rather than ridiculing or flattening the “irrational” elements of these two stories, the directors approach them seriously—without thereby victimizing or glorifying David and Timo—by choosing to explore from the very first scenes two main themes that guide the documentary throughout: labor and body wellness in the form of the workout. The opening scene shows David and his collaborators performing cleaning labor, where they will shortly begin their daily exercise routine. Interestingly, the scene conveys more apathy than “fit masculinity,” especially because the viewer’s attention is drawn to Timo’s emaciated body and vacant gaze. The unpaid labor required to sustain David’s business within the Kingdom (operating outside formal taxation) is observed alongside—or rather, in relation to—the metabolic labor (the term is drawn from the field of animal studies. I thank Mikhail Lylov for suggesting it. See: Beldo 2017; Boyd 2001) of the body. Within the wellness ideology promoted by David’s company, both offline and online, this bodily labor involves eating exclusively clean, organic food, practicing regular fasting, maintaining a strict exercise regimen, and undergoing para-scientific forms of healing—knowledge of which is kept secret by David. But also, as an influencer, David’s labor not only break the borders between private and public space of work (something surely not new in neocapitalism) but it is completely embodied. And, considering the big trend of fitness and food influencers, it is worth to ask if this obsession with food are not new forms of eating disorders as an outcome of the metabolism created by the influencers body which is constantly at work in and on itself. Due to the chameleonic nature of eating disorders, food and fitness influencers (sadly, often women) are frequently seen as having hidden food obsession masked beneath the façade of a healthy lifestyle. Here, however, I suggest something more different: the labor of the influencer itself may generate a metabolic disorder.
In their essay, Influencer Die Ideologie der Werbekörper (2021), Ole Nymoen and Wolfgang M. Schmitt analyze the figure of the influencer as an emblem of contemporary digital capitalism, in which identity and aesthetics becomes a market force. The authors show how influencers represent a new form of advertising integrated into everyday life: their bodies, their narratives, and even their emotions are converted into vectors of commercial value. Content production thus becomes secondary to the ability to generate desire, imitation, and consumption; the influencer is less a creator and more a “living advertising medium”. From this perspective, the phenomenon of influencers illuminates two central processes of the digital age: on the one hand, the aestheticization of labour and politics, and on the other, the marketization of aesthetics. Following Benjamin’s famous insight that politics, once aestheticized, presents itself as spectacle and lifestyle, influencers embody a form of continuous self-representation that transforms choices, values, and attitudes into image-experience. Nymoen and Schmitt show how what appears spontaneous, authentic, or “personal” is in fact constructed in service of the monetization of attention. The images produced by influencers are already predisposed to sponsorship, turning the aesthetic into an embodied advertising vehicle. In this way, influencers become the intersection point of these two movements: they produce a politics reduced to the aesthetics of identity, and an aesthetics reduced to a commercial infrastructure, where value no longer derives from content but from its marketability.
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Still from Soldiers of Light, Johannes Büttner, Julian Vogel, Wood water Films and patatino, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
In unveiling this contemporary phenomenon emerging also in the case of the Kingdom of Germany, the two filmmakers also bring to light also into the connection between this wellness business and contemporary right-wing movements. As a recent investigation by Al Jazeera showed segments of far-right wing activists have successfully infiltrated and co-opted the mainstream (Hay 2025; Kassam 2025) wellness movement, turning trends in organic food, holistic health, and “natural lifestyle” into vehicles for their ideology. What appears as harmless self-care or spiritual healing mask conspiratorial, xenophobic and supremacist beliefs. The investigation shows that this appropriation of wellness helps these groups evade scrutiny, presenting themselves as benign lifestyle even as they disseminate extremist content. Through this aesthetic, such groups construct an aura of innocence, authenticity, and apolitical detachment that enables the normalization of explicitly racist content. The semantics of wellness and nature thus become an affective platform capable of de-politicizing ideology, translating it into a familiar, domestic, “natural” imaginary. Linguistic anthropologist Catherine Tebaldi whose research focuses on digital traditionalism and coined the term “Granola Nazis” (Tebaldi 2023), has shown how healing rhetorics can attract subjects who are disillusioned or vulnerable in the face of contemporary crises—ecological, sanitary, economic—by offering an alternative horizon of meaning that promises protection, rootedness, order, and purity.
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Still from Soldiers of Light, Johannes Büttner, Julian Vogel, Wood water Films and patatino, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
Mr Raw and Timo are two profoundly different figures, yet both construct their reality through a specific relationship with food, physical exercise routine, and healing. In Mr Raw’s case, it is hard to tell where his business—both economic and manipulative—ends and his personal conviction begins. He appears to be a convinced supporter not only of the Kingdom—as a separate reality that protects him from the falsehoods and perversions of the outside world—but also of a wide constellation of conspiracy theories, ranging from flat-earth beliefs to the idea that the world is controlled by secret satanic sects, similar to some QAnon convictions held by Trump supporters who believe he alone can defeat them. Throughout the film he repeatedly asserts that he is the creator of his own reality, a narrative reinforced by the self-styled spiritual guide Sananda, whom Mr Raw interviews and promotes on his channels. Their conversations revolve around the imperative of self-optimization and the need to differentiate oneself from the majority of humans. The mantra that prevails in Mr Raw’s discourse is the insistence on working on oneself regardless of the world around—since the world, he claims, is impossible to change. This logic of radical interiorization, of salvation through self-purification through fasting that he does on a regular basis, aligns with a broader neoliberal-spiritual grammar that individualizes both suffering and responsibility. It also resonates with the Kingdom’s ethos, where personal transformation is posited as the only meaningful horizon, and where geopolitical, social, or historical structures are dismissed as irrelevant illusions. Soldiers of Light preserves this ambiguity of the neo-fascist wellness businnes, only gradually revealing political orientations within the Kingdom; it is only around the midpoint that one of its most committed AfD supporters. Josh, a muscular garage owner, initially presents himself as politically centrist—an interesting detail regarding AfD supporters’ self-perception, who often do not see continuity with the Nazi past—before quickly deploying a repertoire of familiar statements: racist remarks, Holocaust denial, anti-immigration positions, toxic masculinity, and denigration of antifascist and leftist movements. David/Mr Raw, by contrast, never openly declares any affiliation with the AfD, consistent with the soft-politics logic of the online wellness business. However, a brief online search quickly reveals his smiling face in an of the YouTube program Welt der Gesundheit, hosted by Jana Witschetzky, a city councilor for the AfD in Meissen. Between January 2022 and November 2023, the channel produced over 60 episodes of Bewusst Kochen!. The program regularly covers topics related to esotericism, healing promises, and, notably, anti-vaccine and para-scientific content, with David appearing as an expert on various subjects.
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Still from Soldiers of Light, Johannes Büttner, Julian Vogel, Wood water Films and patatino, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
Timo, on the other hand, is the primary victim of the Kingdom, at least as far as the film reveals: he passed away six months after filming ended due to severe malnutrition. By that time, he had left Mr Raw’s community but had internalized some of their core convictions, particularly regarding food, prayers, and supposed alternative remedies for his mental health. His personal trajectory took a significant turn during the COVID-19 pandemic, as his mother explains to the filmmakers. Already struggling with psychotic episodes and intensely focused on bodybuilding and protein intake, Timo only encountered someone aligned with the Kingdom’s ideology during an anti-vaccine protest in the lockdown period. In this sense, Timo represents those who approach these ideologies with the hope of healing and who, paradoxically, may initially experience some sense of benefit from the calm provided by communal labor and a structured routine—similar, for instance, to therapeutic residential communities for drugs-dependent individuals, art therapy programs, or certain behavioral therapies. Yet the framework and the individuals in whose hands Timo finds himself operate in bad faith. Timo’s story, while deeply personal and specific, also points to a broader issue: the ways in which the term healing circulates today in a pervasive manner. As Dana L. Cloud suggested already in 1997 in Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of Therapy, framing societal and political problems in terms of personal healing can encourage inward focus on coping and self-improvement rather than engagement with structural or collective challenges. In Timo’s case, the promise of healing and well-being masks manipulative forces, illustrating the broader risks of therapeutic rhetoric when deployed in ideological contexts. His experience serves as a stark reminder of how appeals to personal wellness can conceal coercion and exploitation, even under the guise of care. If Theweleit’s analysis centers on the brutal violence of the Freikorps, in Soldiers of Light violence does not appear in spectacular or militant forms but emerges instead as care, discipline, and purification. In Timo’s case, what is presented as healing—strict dietary control, fasting, metabolic regulation, and unpaid labor within the community—functions as a regime of control that progressively isolates and weakens him. The promise of therapy conceals a coercive structure: Timo’s labor sustains Mr Raw’s business, and his body becomes a site of experimentation for a para-scientific ideology; a form of psychological and economic violence that ultimately contributes to his death through severe malnutrition.
Bibliographical references
- Beldo 2017
L. Beldo, Metabolic Labor: Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality, “Environmental Humanities” 9,1 (2017), 108-128. - Boyd 2001
W. Boyd, Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production, “Technology and Culture” 42, 4 (October 2001), 631-664. - Brownmiller 1975
S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York 1975. - Cloud 1997
D.L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics. Rhetoric of Therapy, Thousand Oaks 1997. - Garvin 2022
D. Garvin, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, Toronto 2022. - Gerhard 2015
G. Gerhard, Nazi Hunger Politics: A History of Food in the Third Reich, Lanham (MD) 2015. - Hay 2025
M. Hay, How White Nationalists Infiltrated the Wellness Movement, “Al Jazeera” (2 February 2025). - Helstosky 2004
C. Helstosky, Fascist food politics: Mussolini’s policy of alimentary sovereignty, “Journal of Modern Italian Studies” 9,1 (2004), 1-26. - Kassam 2025
A. Kassam, ‘It’s frightening’: How far right is infiltrating everyday culture, “The Guardian” (27 December 2025). - Kristeva [1980] 1982
J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection [Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, Paris 1980], trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York 1982. - Laforgia 2025
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F. Parasecoli, Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy, London 2014. - Russell 1975
D.E.H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective, New York 1984. - Saraiva 2016
T. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism, Cambridge (MA) 2016. - Tebaldi 2023
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A related version of this article, bearing the same title, appears in Johannes Büttner, Hrsg. von L.L. Krämer, Köln 2026.
Abstract
Nicastro’s contribution explores how contemporary wellness culture—focused on food, fitness, and self-optimization—intersects with far-right ideologies. Drawing on Klaus Theweleit, it argues that bodily practices become sites where anxieties about purity, control, and identity are embodied. Through the case of the movie Soldiers of Lights (2025), it shows how influencer culture and alternative health movements can subtly normalize extremist worldviews within everyday regimes of self-care.
keywords | Soldiers of Light; Granola Nazis; Klaus Theweleit; Klaus Theweleit; Male Fantasies.
questo numero di Engramma è a invito: la revisione dei saggi è stata affidata al comitato editoriale e all'international advisory board della rivista
Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: C. Nicastro, Soldiers of Lights. Food, Self-optimization, and the Contemporary Far Right, “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 233 (aprile 2026).