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- Title
The SA in the Radical Imagination of the Long Weimar Republic.
- Authors
Brown, Timothy Scott
- Abstract
Hitler's storm battalions, the SA—their creation, organization, and worldview—have been the object of extensive scholarly study. A key factor in the victory of National Socialism, the SA has been understood above all as an exemplar of the political violence that helped to destabilize Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Attention to the role of the storm troopers in the Nazi seizure of power—a narrative in which the SA is centrally embedded, and in which it has been largely confined in the scholarship—has tended to foreclose other lines of analysis. Indeed, the metanymic linkage of the SA to the “failure of Weimar” has prevented scholars from considering the complex ideological and social field in which the storm troopers operated as the site of contingency that it was for contemporaries. Alongside a marching, singing, monolithic SA, policing the streets against National Socialism's enemies—an SA appropriate to the long-dominant scholarly focus on the reasons for Weimar's failure and Nazism's rise—another SA exists, one that had to be spoken for, indoctrinated, won over, infiltrated, and surveilled; an SA around which moral persuasion and ideological discussion played at least as prominent a role as the political violence that has so dominated the analytic concerns of historians and social scientists; an SA that attracted the attention of self-styled revolutionaries of every stripe in the seething chaos of Weimar politics, revolutionaries who sensed in the not-quite-closed ambit of the SA's political commitments—and in classed and gendered cultural assumptions with which these commitments were bound up—the utopian horizons of the possible, both before and after January 30, 1933.
- Subjects
GERMANY; NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Sturmabteilung; WEIMAR government, 1918-1933; NATIONAL socialism; RADICALISM; ANTI-communist movements; NATIONAL socialism &; communism; KOMMUNISTISCHE Partei Deutschlands (Political party: Germany); TWENTIETH century; PSYCHOLOGY; HISTORY
- Publication
Central European History (Cambridge University Press / UK), 2013, Vol 46, Issue 2, p238
- ISSN
0008-9389
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0008938913000605