Theweleit was born in Ebenrode, East Prussia (now Nesterov, Russia), the son of a railway company worker and a Jewish mother.

His beatings which he gave away abundantly and brutally as it was usual in his time and with the best of intentions were the first lessons I received on fascism, a fact I only later fully discovered.

His book Männerphantasien (1977); translated as Male Fantasies (1987), a study of the "proto-fascist consciousness" in general and the bodily experience of these former soldiers in particular.

[2] Throughout the book Theweleit uses ideas, terminology and empirical experience from works of Margaret Mahler, Wilhelm Reich, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Melanie Klein, and Michel Foucault among others to develop his theory of the "fascist male imprinting and socialization".

In the introduction, Theweleit points out that discussions with Margaret Berger and his wife Monika Theweleit-Kubale (both of whom have professional clinical experience) had an important influence on the book as well as the feedback from Erhard Lucas, a leading German left-wing historian of the Weimar Unrest.