Stormtrooper Families

Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement

Andrew Wackerfuss

• Publisher: Harrington Park Press, LLC
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781939594068
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

Based on extensive archival work, Stormtrooper Families combines stormtrooper personnel records, Nazi Party autobiographies, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, court records, and police-surveillance records to paint a picture of the stormtrooper movement as an organic product of its local community, its web of interpersonal relationships, and its intensely emotional internal struggles. Extensive analysis of Nazi-era media across the political spectrum shows how the public debate over homosexuality proved just as important to political outcomes as did the actual presence of homosexuals in fascist and antifascist politics.

As children in the late-imperial period, the stormtroopers witnessed the first German debates over homosexuality and political life. As young adults, they verbally and physically battled over these definitions, bringing conflicts over homosexuality and masculinity into the center of Weimar Germany's most important political debates. Stormtrooper Families chronicles the stormtroopers' personal, political, and sexual struggles to explain not only how individual gay men existed within the Nazi movement but also how the public meaning of homosexuality affected fascist and antifascist politics—a public controversy still alive today.

FATHERS AND FOREFATHERS

1

On a crisp late-summer morning in 1898, ten-year-old Franz Tügel accompanied his father on a Sunday walk through the city of Hamburg. It was one of the first times that Franz’s father, a man with the kingly name of August Christian Wilhelm Ludwig Tügel, had allowed the boy to accompany him to church, and on his weekly rounds after the service. Before then Franz’s father had deemed the boy too young to grasp the intellectual and spiritual implications of a church service, or to appreciate the combination of pleasure and purpose that a successful merchant’s walk through his city could serve.¹ Now, however, Franz’s father had finally seen fit to include his oldest son in his Sunday rituals. In time the second son would join them, but for now just the two of them shared this special ritual.

Father and son began their journey in their home neighborhood of Hamm, one of several small towns that lay within Hamburg’s eastern border along the broad Elbe River.² Hamm, Horn, and the other city districts to the east and north of Hamburg’s urban core were part of the great metropolis, but they still had a small-town feel that lent them a slower, calmer atmosphere. In his memoirs, a much older Franz Tügel looked back on Hamm as a “garden district” and a “vision of small-town life within a big city.”³ Hamm featured broad, tree-lined streets, through which trains of horse carts regularly carried goods and people from the countryside to the city center. Many of the local passenger carts featured a surprising and delightful innovation: electric meters that automatically monitored a rider’s fare and charged an appropriate and precise amount.⁴ Bridges large and small spanned the many canals that branched off the Elbe, allowing all of Hamburg’s neighborhoods access to this essential river.

From the upper stories of Hamm’s modest and widely spaced four-story apartment blocks, a childlike Franz could sit in a window and gaze westward toward the high towers of Hamburg’s five main churches, whose steeples called out to adventurous boys and weary sailors alike. The tallest was an impressive gothic cathedral named for the patron saint of sailors, St. Nicholas. Until 1876 it was the tallest building in the world. In the 1890s, Hamburg’s quiet eastern and northern towns were the perfect place for rising bourgeois merchants like August Christian to raise their families. August Christian’s own father had come to Hamburg from provincial Mecklenburg—driven, as were so many others in that era, to leave the countryside to seek their fortune in the big city.⁵

On their Sunday walks, Franz and his father traced a path down the main avenues toward the city center. August Christian looked on indulgently as his son peered into the windows of shops stuffed with toys, bakeries that emitted delicious smells, and, later in the season, Christmas markets that combined both delights.⁶ Father and son soon passed through the old Berliner Tor, once a gate in the city walls that had monitored Hamburg’s commerce with Brandenburg and Lower Saxony to the east. The similar Lübecker Tor had connected Hamburg with the other great Hanseatic trading cities to the north. The walls, however, were no more: Hamburg’s city fathers had ordered them demolished in 1820 as a way of proclaiming that the city, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s haughty occupation and compulsory fortification, would continue to assert its traditional neutrality in armed conflicts.⁷ On a map, one can still see the ghost of Hamburg’s medieval walls encircling the city. After 1820, however, the encirclement comprised not barriers but bridges, houses, shops, and green spaces—especially on the west side, where a botanical garden encouraged burghers to stroll through their increasingly wealthy and confident city.

Having passed through the gates and gardens of the former walls, Franz and his father entered the increasingly narrow streets and canal passages of Hamburg’s ancient urban core. In the young boy’s imagination, the merchant houses there were themselves a type of fortress that was simultaneously intimidating and alluring. In his first journeys down the Steinstrasse toward his father’s office building, Franz peered apprehensively through cavernous entryways into the merchant buildings’ shadowy inner courtyards. He shied away from the “dark elements” who took refuge in the alleys, or who packed the areas around the canals as they loaded and unloaded goods.⁸ Many of these men lived nearby, in an area called the Gängeviertel, or Alley Quarter. This thieves’ den had grown narrower, dirtier, darker, smellier, more crowded, and more criminal as Hamburg’s population swelled. Most men living there provided useful labor at the nearby docks, harbors, and warehouses, or in the booming construction industry. Working-class women became household servants or worked in textile factories. Eventually the growing number of laborers became a problem for the city fathers. Conditions had been deteriorating rapidly, turning the city’s oldest and most central area into a crime-ridden slum rife with pickpockets, robbers, and general villainy perpetrated by and upon the recently arrived masses from the countryside.

Franz’s father did not allow his son to enter these dangerous districts, wanting to shield the boy from the marginal inhabitants and their questionable lifestyles. Indeed, the pair never went as far as the city’s western border of St. Pauli—a haven for sojourning sailors and hence a refuge for organized crime, rough language in many tongues, and far more adult entertainments than a respectable merchant would allow his young son to encounter. St. Pauli had always been somewhat of a borderland. Its most famous street, the Reeperbahn, acquired its name from the rope-makers who could practice their trade only outside the city limits. Outside the old walls but well within Hamburg’s domain, St. Pauli became home to professionals of all stripes whose trades the city needed but also disdained for their din, their stench, or their disrepute.

With the arrival of steamships in the mid-19th century, the district quickly found an infamous new purpose. Although most cities and towns locked their gates at night, the iron barriers guarding St. Pauli remained closed during the day. At night the gates swung open and welcomed the Reeperbahn’s famous nightlife. Taverns opened their doors. Dance halls and theaters raised their curtains. Sailors staggered drunkenly through alleys, fought locals and each other, passed out in piles, and were robbed of any coins they had not yet spent. On certain streets, lights from back-alley windows burst into red brilliance, illuminating the women who made themselves available to men—for a price. The scene degenerated further at Altona, where the Prussian takeover in 1864 had done little to reduce prostitution, and a street with the taunting name of Große Freiheit—great freedom—was home to a structure that Hamburg’s solid Protestant leaders may have considered a second Babylon—the region’s largest Catholic church. St. Pauli, Altona, and similar districts were at best necessary appendages to the central work life of a port city; at worst they were a constant source of disease, destabilization, and dismay. Respectable boys and girls had to be kept as far away as possible.

As Franz began to accompany his father into the far more tightly controlled world of the bourgeois merchants, his fascination with its solidity, its productivity, and its grand promises grew into adulation. His memoirs recall his growing interest in Hamburg’s industrious bustle, which he later eulogized as a vanished “old-Hamburg world.”⁹ The green-tinged towers of the central churches rose above the clamor, their softly clinging bells uniting all below in marking the hours. Merchant houses clustered in the city center, growing ever taller and more grandiose, and buzzing with trade and commerce that refused to rest, even on Sunday. The masts and white sails of ships in the harbor shone through the morning mist, while the call of steamship whistles floated up from the docks. All these sights and sounds coalesced into a vast and varied commercial network that pulsed through the canals and inner streets of a Welthandelstadt—a world-class international trading city.

At the peak of their Sunday journey, father and son would arrive at August Christian’s offices in the newly built Dovenhof, a massive and impressive building in the middle of Hamburg’s central commercial district. Although young Franz would have always known the Dovenhof as a vital part of Hamburg’s commercial scene, the new building actually represented a recent change in the city’s architecture. Hanseatic merchant houses traditionally featured ground-floor shops and public spaces, warehouse rooms in the rear, and upper-story living spaces. The new style eliminated the residence, shop front, and warehouse elements in order to increase the amount of office space available for rent. These new “office buildings” had caught on like wildfire in London, New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, and their gradual takeover in Hamburg therefore showed how the city imported not only goods from overseas but also methods of doing business and ways of living. This connection to the larger Atlantic world of trade, with its openness to English and American business techniques, had long been one of Hamburg’s strengths. In fact, the purpose of the Tügels’ Sunday stroll was to enable August Christian to keep track of the outside world, which was reflected in the letters and other weekend mail that had piled up on his desk in the Dovenhof.

While Franz’s father read his post at a leisurely Sunday pace, the boy would quietly amuse himself. Perhaps he would have carefully climbed on and off the fascinating paternoster elevator, a type of elevator cab recently imported from England. Franz’s father might not have allowed him to do so unsupervised, however, as these constantly moving elevators had killed several people who mistakenly climbed onto the roof of the cab and were carried upward into the gears. Franz most likely would have sat at a desk next to his father’s and watched the man review his business affairs. Or perhaps he sat at the window and looked out over the lower roofs of the old merchant houses. The office gave Franz a commanding view of the city, befitting the station of a rising merchant’s son who expected to learn at his father’s side and someday earn his own desk at the Dovenhof.

But this was not to be. Six years later, in 1904, while the family was living in Cologne for a time, August Christian Tügel suddenly died. Within a few short months, a man who had been perfectly healthy wasted away from a rapidly growing cancer. Franz was 16, and his world changed forever with his father’s death.

“I cannot describe,” he later wrote, “what went through my soul in that moment. Through my deepest sorrow grew an impassioned love for the heart that had ceased to beat, but whose unending care-taking had helped create for us such an easy and carefree childhood.”

But now, he wrote, the “curtain had fallen; the world of childhood was forever closed to me.”¹⁰ Franz could never forget the sight of his father’s coffin as it sat on the train that took the family back to their Hamburg home, on its way to be buried in the vast Ohlsdorf Cemetery. Ohlsdorf was one of the largest city cemeteries in the world, and it housed generations of Hanseatic patricians from Hamburg’s historic past. August Christian now belonged to that past, yet his death was not just the end of one story. It was also, Franz wrote years later, a harbinger of the future.

“The death of my father,” wrote Franz, “changed my life. Once again, I saw God’s hand above me, as I had not seen since the striking pictures of biblical storybooks that I read during my earliest years in school. It gave me a powerful vision into the future of the land He wanted to show me.”¹¹

Ten years later, on the April day that would have been his father’s birthday, Franz Tügel took the oath that made him a Lutheran minister. He did so in overt consciousness of upholding his father’s worldviews—the “healthy opinions” of August Christian that Franz said had “entered my flesh and blood” at an early age and became “as self-explanatory as daily bread.”¹² These views emphasized piety, tradition, self-restraint, and, above all, a strong connection between church and state as agents of God’s order in the world. For the young “arch-conservative,” as Franz proudly called himself, the “fatherly heritage” of his two fathers—literal and spiritual—demanded political conclusions. “Everything that looked like revolution or revolt,” he wrote, “was high treason in my eyes.”¹³

Franz Tügel seems not to have considered the possibility that his conception of his father’s worldview was, at best, imperfect. Franz had only known his father as a relatively distant patriarch, a man who did not share nuanced or sophisticated aspects of his beliefs with children. Like most children, Franz knew only a highly idealized version of his father, and the man’s early death prevented Franz from undergoing the periodic reevaluation of parental figures that most people experience throughout ...