German History Advance Access published October 30, 2013 German History Book Review Bürgerkriegsarmee: Forschungen zur nationalsozialistischen Sturmabteilung (SA). Edited by Yves Müller and Reiner Zilkenat. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2013. 469 pp. €44.95 (hardback). © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University College London on October 31, 2013 Although books about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust easily ill a library, there is a relative lack of recent research on the National Socialist brownshirts, the storm troopers (SA). This is all the more surprising since it was the SA that contributed in a decisively to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 by promoting a new style of ‘street politics’, by committing violent acts against political opponents and by attracting ever more followers to the NSDAP, in particular among male German youth since the mid-1920s. Against this background, the book under review, an extensive collection of essays on the SA mostly written by junior scholars, is a welcome contribution to the ield. So far, the few existing histories of the SA have been written irst and foremost as political histories. These stories tell the rise and fall of a political organization, from the early 1920s to its heyday in 1933/34, when the SA had grown into the ‘brown army of millions’ with nearly 4 million men by incorporating previous rivals such as the veteran organization Stahlhelm (‘steel helmet’), only (allegedly) to become completely marginalized after the ‘night of the long knives’. In the summer of 1934, SS and Reichswehr units executed the SA’s chief of staf Ernst Röhm and with him nearly 200 people, mostly belonging to the SA leadership. These crimes certainly ended all plans among the increasingly dissatisied SA leaders to complete the Nazi seizure of power through a ‘second revolution’, but whether it reduced the SA to a powerless ‘propaganda group’, a toothless veterans’ association for the ‘Old Fighters’—as historians usually claim—is doubtful. In their balanced introduction, the editors successfully challenge this dominant interpretation by pointing to several roles which the SA units fulilled after 1934. The SA not only served as a ‘stand-by terror group’ that was mobilized against Jews on many occasions but also contributed to the paramilitary education of male Germans and even actively participated in the Second World War, both with ighting units such as the ‘Panzergrenadier Division Feldherrnhalle’ and on the home front. The SA provided air-raid wardens and, in the inal stages of the war, organized the last defence lines of the hardly trained and badly equipped Volkssturm units consisting of those previously considered too old or too young to ight. Only in part do the authors of the chapters concur with this important shift in the perception of the SA. Most contributions deal with rather familiar aspects of the history of the stormtroopers up to 1934, and they often concentrate on a region that is relatively well documented, namely the capital Berlin and its hinterland. In spite of this, however, many of the essays provide new insights by paying attention to more recent trends in historiography. The authors are interested not so much in SA leaders and in political history proper as in asking—stimulated not least by Sven Reichardt’s important study Faschistische Kampfbünde (2002)—about body images, the self-perception of the ‘ordinary’ SA man, sexuality and gender. Furthermore, several contributions follow a generational approach that helps to deine the role of the SA within the wider context of youth movements within the Weimar Republic, a youth full of expectations while highly critical of their parents’ generation and of political liberalism. This approach often adds detail to the general picture but—maybe inevitably—also reproduces existing scholarship. Page 2 of 2 Book Review The fascination in this volume, however, lies in the essays that explore hitherto hardly touched topics. Stefan Dölling’s contribution stands out in this respect. He analyses the importance of the SA for right-wing paramilitarism in the Sudetenland prior to the ‘Munich Agreement’. Dölling convincingly demonstrates that the SA cooperated closely with the Sudeten German Freikorps, that it provided logistic support and when needed a ‘safe haven’ on German territory, and that it actively trained and prepared the Freikorps men for civil war. The SA saw this activity as an opportunity to raise their proile within the framework of Nazi organizations in the Third Reich. Their support of the Sudeten Germans also ofered the SA men involved a rare and eagerly awaited chance: inally to ight an enemy after years of training and indoctrination. Alexander Zinn’s and Oliver Reschke’s contributions are likewise important, as both question long-held assumptions. Reschke, who has just completed an extensive regional study on the Berlin NSDAP and SA, re-evaluates the proile of the allegedly ‘proletarian’ SA and suggests that the existing research has partly overlooked the mixed composition of the capital’s SA, thereby unintentionally repeating some of the images the Nazis themselves created. Zinn analyses the emergence of the cliché of the homosexual storm trooper, established in the 1930s by left-wing writers and journalists, and recently rehashed in Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes. Zinn rightly points out that ‘explanations’ that link homoerotic attitudes with political preferences, apart from attesting to prevalent homophobic attitudes, do more to obscure than to explain why the military-style SA proved highly attractive for millions of male Germans in times of crisis. Obviously, a short review cannot do justice to the variety of contributors and topics. Four further essays, however, merit closer attention, as they all link the Nazi past with contemporary Germany. Matthias Heisig’s essay analyses the role of the SA ield police that was heavily involved in the terror against political opponents in Berlin in 1933. His study not only complements Irene von Götz’ contribution, a survey of Berlin’s more than 200 early concentration camps and places of terror, but also accounts for the diiculties of coming to terms with the SA terror on a local level in the Federal Republic. After a group of amateur historians, inluenced by the history of everyday life that was so popular in the 1980s, had discovered the former SA prison in Berlin’s Papestraße, it took more than 20 years until a small public museum was inally opened earlier this year. The volume ends with two articles that analyse tenets of the SA that feature prominently in today’s neo-Nazism. Ulli Jentsch and Frank Metzger emphasize that the SA and its ‘dead heroes’ were again gloriied after the 1970s not least because the storm troopers were (allegedly) not involved in the German war crimes and the Holocaust. Alexander Häusler and Michael Sturm’s co-authored article concentrates more on the problems of today’s neo-Nazis, the so-called ‘autonomous National Socialists’. A small but vital thread among the diverse and highly fractured youth cultures since the 1990s, these right-wing extremists still use elements of the National Socialist past for their own masculine identity, but less explicitly than previous generations. Instead, they blend the alleged idealism of the former SA activists with critical attitudes towards actual processes of globalization and ethnic diversity into a new amalgam that has, so far, only proven attractive for a tiny fraction of German youth. All in all, this volume is an important addition to the history of the SA. Accessibly written, it testiies to the methodological diversity of current research, sums up the main indings and partly even moves beyond them by exploring some parts of the post-1934 history of the SA. Like another recent edited volume, Stefan Hördler’s SA-Gewalt als Herrschaftssicherung: ‘Köpenicker Blutwoche’ und öfentliche Gewalt im Nationalsozialismus (2013), Müller’s and Zilkenat’s book redirects our attention to the SA as one of the pillars of National Socialist rule. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ght081 Daniel Siemens School of Slavonic and East European Studies