Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos, and: Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement by Andrew Wackerfuss (review)

The Nazi Party was, in many respects, the crystallization of a series of paradoxes, one of which is poignantly captured in the two texts under review—namely, that a political movement that purported to shield the traditional, heterosexual nuclear family was energized by men who eschewed such living arrangements. Andrew Wackerfuss’s Stormtrooper Families and Despina Stratigakos’s Hitler at Home clinically probe the homosocial networks of the Sturmabteiling (Storm Detachment, or SA) and the carefully constructed domestic spaces of Hitler’s home life, deconstructing the ostensible boundaries between the public and private in the Nazi universe. At the same time, these books grapple with self-conceptions and outward portrayals of masculinity within the movement, drawing sharp distinctions between “reality” and narrative constructions, the latter of which seem to have wielded far greater societal influence, both within Germany and abroad.

Stormtrooper Families offers a captivating microhistory of the rise and demise of the Nazi SA in the metropolis of Hamburg. Andrew Wackerfuss, a historian working for the United States Air Force, has mined city archives to uncover memoirs, letters, and local newspapers that allow him to weave a storyline that addresses the issues of masculinity, intergenerational conflict, and the interplay between the local and the national within the National Socialist movement. Particularly riveting are the vivid accounts and interpretations of the violence of the Weimar-era Kampfzeit (time of struggle), when the SA developed into “an all-consuming political fraternity” that functioned as a substitute family for multitudes of frustrated young men who constructed themselves simultaneously as marginalized victims and “heroic male warriors” (pp. x, 63).

Hitler at Home offers an intriguing exposé of the Nazi regime’s conscious construction of a public obsession with the private life of the Führer. Author Despina Stratigakos, a faculty member in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, focuses extensively on the painstaking renovations of Adolph Hitler’s three residences—his Munich apartment, the Old Chancellery in Berlin, and the mountain retreat that would be rebranded as the Berghof. Sparing no expense, the Führer and his advisors set out to dramatically transform Hitler’s image into that of a man who led a cultured, peaceful, and even “boring” private life (p. 59). The author astutely situates the skillful transformation, dissemination, and consumption of the new domestic Hitler myth within a broader “growth of celebrity culture in the 1920s and 1930s” made possible by technological advancements in the world of media (p. 207).

Both titles under consideration successfully draw their readers’ attention to the complexities of Nazi views and portrayals of masculinity. Seeing themselves as the “postwar heirs of powerful male bonds formed during wartime,” stormtroopers glorified in their own martial masculinity while vilifying the “feminized and weak” Weimar Republic (p. 50). Although outbursts of “homophobic activism” certainly occurred, Wackerfuss argues that stormtroopers welcomed homosociality and homoeroticism, precisely because they perceived such behavior as constituting the “peak of masculinity” (pp. 97, 93). The Führer himself, much like his stormtroopers, shunned life as the head of a nuclear family in favor of that of the perpetual bachelor. Furthermore, the fact that Adolf Hitler subsisted as a vegetarian and avoided the consumption of alcohol and tobacco products made him an incongruous candidate to lead a hyper-masculine political order. Rumors of a love affair between Hitler and his niece, Geli Raubel, and the young woman’s untimely death inside her uncle’s Munich apartment in 1931 in an ostensible suicide sparked further accusations of sexual deviancy within Nazi leadership, alongside critiques and parodies of SA leader Ernst Röhm’s open homosexuality (p. 21).

It should therefore come as no surprise that the Nazi Party’s concerted campaign to refashion the image of the F...