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Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement. By Andrew Wackerfuss. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2015. Pp. 393. $90.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).
"Because the role of homosexuality in fascism is very ambiguous and complicated and has been subject to all kinds of homophobic projection," observes the influential queer theorist Judith Halberstam in a recent essay, "we often prefer to talk about the persecution of gays by Nazis, leaving aside the question of their collaboration in the regime."1 This is one of the central questions that the historian Andrew Wackerfuss takes on in his book Stormtrooper Families, a fascinating local study of the Nazi SA in the northern city of Hamburg. The book goes a long way in explaining the appeal of the Nazi Party for young Germans during the 1920s and early 1930s. As Wackerfuss puts it, "Nazi sexuality combined with political forms connected to larger structures of family, locality, and society that crossed all sexual and political orientations" (x). In demonstrating these connections, the book will be of interest not only to anyone interested in German sexuality in the early twentieth century but more widely to students and scholars of German society and the Nazi movement.
Who exactly joined the SA? The social composition of the Stormtroopers was a topic that provoked much debate in the 1970s and 1980s. Relying heavily on memoirs and other books eventually published by SA members, Wackerfuss's study leans toward depicting the SA as an embodiment of frustrated middle-class ideals, though he does acknowledge that many more working-class men joined as...