Andrew Wackerfuss.
Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement.
New York: Harrington Park Press, 2015. 352 pp.
$35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-939594-05-1; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-939594-04-4.
Reviewed by Alex Burkhardt (University of St Andrews)
Published on H-German (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Nathan N. Orgill
Published on H-German (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Nathan N. Orgill
Soup Kitchens and Street Fighting: The Brownshirts in Hamburg
There is a long tradition of scholarly inquiry into the Nazi Sturmabteilung
(SA), the brown-shirted paramilitary wing of the National Socialist
movement that was in no small part responsible for the mayhem that
descended upon the streets of Weimar Germany in its last fraught years.
Pioneering work in the 1980s by historians, such as Conan Fischer (Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic, and Ideological Analysis, 1929-35 [1983], Richard Bessel (Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934 [1984]), and Peter Longerich (Die Braunen Bataillone: Geschichte Der SA [1989]), furnished
a strong empirical base on the social background, ideological leanings,
and propagandistic provenance of the Stormtroopers. More recent studies
by the likes of Sven Reichardt (Faschistische Kampfbünde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA [2002]), Daniel Siemens (Horst Wessel: Tod und Verklärung Eines Nationalsozialisten [2009]), and Dirk Schumann (Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War [2009])
have brought the tools of cultural history to bear on Nazi
paramilitarism, offering further insights into the value systems and
“organisational cultures” that underpinned it. In Stormtrooper Families,
Andrew Wackerfuss, a historian with the United States Air Force, makes a
further contribution to this already extensive body of literature with a
local study of the Hamburg branch of the SA.
Stormtrooper Families is structured into
nine chapters that proceed chronologically, and it might be possible to
discreetly divide the book into three sections, which deal in turn with
the background, course, and aftermath of the crucial period from 1929
to 1933, when the Hamburg SA was in its heyday. The first three
chapters explore the organization’s prewar origins and its difficult
fledgling years in the 1920s. Wackerfuss first provides a brief history
of Hamburg, focusing particularly on the years before the First World
War, which, he argues, were critical to the later psychological and
political development of the SA. In chapters 2 and 3, he shows that the
city’s first Brownshirts were mainly ex-soldiers disenchanted with the
Weimar Republic, but also that, before 1929, the Hamburg SA remained a
vocal but numerically quite negligible factor in local politics.
In the elections of September 1930, however, the Nazi
share of the vote skyrocketed, and Adolf Hitler’s party became a major
player in national politics, signaling the beginning of the end of
Germany’s interwar experiment with democracy. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus
on these last volatile years of the Weimar Republic, when the SA was at
its zenith and was key to the Nazi campaign to seize power. The Hamburg
SA expanded propitiously during this period, waging constant and bloody
war on the streets against its political opponents, mainly
the Communists. This enormous propensity for political violence is the
focal point in chapters 4 and 6, which concentrate not only on the
chronic, low-level conflict that was a constant feature of the SA’s (and
Hamburg’s) makeup but also on two set pieces, the Battle of
Sternschanze and the Altona Bloody Sunday, when the SA, along with the
police and Communists, managed to bring virtual civil war conditions to
parts of the city. Chapter 5, meanwhile, focuses more on what Wackerfuss
calls “the caring side” of the SA (p. xv)—the vast social support
network of soup kitchens, health-insurance schemes, and barrack-style
“SA Homes” that the paramilitary organization established in the
city and used to both attract and integrate members.
The final three chapters focus on the decline of the
Stormtroopers after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. Though the
Hamburg SA was initially in a triumphant mood and unleashed a wave of
violence against its enemies in the months after the Nazi “seizure of
power,” it soon became a problem in itself for the wider Nazi movement,
which was now looking to consolidate power and had less need of an
unruly paramilitary organization. The liquidation of a large part of the
SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives and its gradual fading
into insignificance thereafter are the focal points of chapter 8 and the
epilogue.
This book, then, is ultimately a local study of a
single organization. But it is not a typical social history, being
relatively free of tables or statistics that show, for example, the
occupational background of members of the Hamburg SA. Instead, this is a
broader “cultural history” of the Brownshirts in the city, focusing
more on the content of the SA’s newspaper, the relationships between its
key figures and its recruits, the social networks it established in and
around Hamburg, the nature and provenance of its violence, and,
crucially, the role played—and tensions inaugurated—by homosexuality
within its ranks.
Wackerfuss brings a very perceptive eye to his
subject. His analysis is augmented by insights from social psychology
and cultural theory, and some of his conclusions are highly thought
provoking. In the first chapter, for example, he lays bare the central
significance that an imaginary idea of prewar Hamburg—a gleaming “city
on the hill” (p. 16)—had for the young Stormtroopers and, even more
important, the role of their fathers in conveying this image.
Stormtroopers, Wackerfuss suggests, wanted to honor their fathers and
assume their rightful place in this tradition of success, but the loss
of the war and the German Revolution of November 1918 prevented this.
Thus, the central motivation of their lives (and the factor that drew
them to the SA) was a desire to restore Hamburg to its (perceived)
prewar state, which of course meant destroying the hated Weimar
Republic. However, as Wackerfuss compellingly shows, the Stormtroopers,
unlike their fathers, were prepared to accomplish this with
violence; that is, they sought to uphold the bourgeois order through
practices that were (ostensibly) contradictory to that very order.
Joining the SA, then, was an act of both conformity and rebellion.
This was not the only contradiction at the heart of
the Hamburg SA, however. As Wackerfuss repeatedly shows, many of its
members joined the organization because they viewed it as a force for
order and “moral authority” that would support the traditional family
(p. 60). However, it also drew them into an exclusively male universe in
which homosexual relationships could and did flourish. The SA’s enemies
on the left, despite their ostensibly “progressive” politics, showed no
compunction about using this in an attempt to discredit the Nazi
paramilitaries. But Wackerfuss also argues that this dynamic of
ambiguous sexuality—in an environment of increasingly uncertain gender
relations—was one of the key factors that drove the SA to violence. The
desire to prove their putative “masculinity” through involvement in a
violent male fighting league was, he suggests, one of the main reasons
people became involved in it at all.
Along with these unstable dynamics around sexuality
and identity, SA violence was also driven by a remarkably paranoid
narrative that ran throughout its press. In a detailed analysis of the
Brownshirt newspaper, Wackerfuss shows that Stormtroopers consistently
presented themselves as victims of enemy violence and as constantly on
the defensive, which meant that subsequent SA aggression was understood
by its practitioners as retaliatory and retributive. Similar narratives,
he argues, are observable in the local Communist press. This mutual
paranoia and sense of victimhood produced a spiraling dynamic of almost
sectarian violence that was perceived as “defensive” by both sides,
though it was frequently anything but.
But the marked instability evinced by the Hamburg SA
in the domains of both sexual identity and violence were to prove its
undoing after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, as the very
practices and internal tensions that had made it such an effective unit
for winning power were precisely those that made it an embarrassing
liability in a National Socialist state. The result was the Night of the
Long Knives. In Hamburg itself, where the SA purge claimed eleven
lives, this unmistakeably indicated the decline of the Nazi paramilitary
group, demonstrated by, for example, the local Nazi Party’s
decision to stop compiling reports on the causes of Stormtrooper
suicides. The SA had fulfilled its purpose and the party was, to some
degree, past caring about it.
Despite the insightfulness of some of Wackerfuss’s
analysis, there are a few issues with the overall focus of this volume.
In the introduction, he promises “the truth about the connection between
sexuality and Nazism,” a claim the book does not deliver on (p. x).
Indeed, its weakest sections are those that stray from its central
subject: the Hamburg Sturmabteilung. For example, chapter 7
contains a section about the Reichstag Fire and how Communists portrayed
this as the result of a homosexual “conspiracy” within the Nazi
movement, while the final chapter concludes with some reflections on the
pernicious stereotype of “the gay Nazi” and how certain contemporary
figures have used this in the service of a homophobic agenda. These
aspects of the book are not uninteresting, but they dilute its focus and
detract from what is, ultimately, its main task—to present a
comprehensive sociocultural history of the Hamburg SA. Indeed,
homosexuality plays an important role in Wackerfuss’s analysis of the Sturmabteilung
in Hamburg, but it is arguably not the central factor treated here. The
occasional divergences into the wider links between Nazism and
homosexuality thus add little to the account, and the book might have
been stronger had it understood itself in more limited terms as a
sociocultural history of the Hamburg SA (and the place of homosexuality
within it).
If, however, we do indeed view the book in these less
ambitious but still worthy terms, then it can comfortably be judged a
great success. Wackerfuss scores a lot of points in two basic aspects of
the historian’s craft: style and archival work. He has done the latter
extensively, and he conveys his findings with considerable and unusual
flair. Above all, as already mentioned, he imparts some striking
insights into the group and individual psychology of SA men that are not
to be found in more drily empirical studies. Academic readers will find
his contribution to our knowledge of the SA, and especially his
perceptive analysis of the psychology of some of its members, immensely
useful, while more casual readers will surely find his account, quite
simply, very enjoyable to read.
