SA

The SA is shown through two brief but telling connections: its marching band turns a rainy square into a rehearsal for Adolf Hitler’s birthday, while a cadet’s account of his father’s past reveals how service and political tradition can be passed down as family obligation. Together, these details place the organization in the novel’s public spectacle and private inheritance.

Public Ritual in Berlin

Near the Brandenburg Gate, an SA band in soaked brown uniforms wheels and stamps through puddles in the middle of Pariser-Platz. People gather outside the Academy of Arts, hunched against the rain, watching as drums and trumpets play an old Party marching song. The music reaches Xavier March and his passengers only as a muffled thump through the Volkswagen’s closed windows, while the windshield wipers beat time against it.

The rehearsal is not an isolated performance. With Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the Führertag, six days away, bands throughout the Reich are preparing to parade. March calls the crowd’s response to martial music proof that the German people are “mad.” The scene gives the SA a role in making political loyalty visible as public ceremony: uniforms, marching, music, and spectators turn an ordinary wet day into a rehearsal for a state-wide celebration.

Family Inheritance and Military Service

The SA also enters the story through Jost’s explanation of his own path. He says that he hopes to return to university after serving his three years and wants to become a teacher or writer rather than a soldier. When March asks why someone opposed to military life is in the SS, Jost points to his father: his father was a founding member of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and Jost is his only son, expected to fulfill his father’s dearest wish.

Jost’s account distinguishes the organization’s historical presence from the institution in which he now serves: the father belonged to the SA-linked founding tradition he invokes, while the son is a cadet in the SS. Jost describes enduring that service rather than choosing a military vocation. He has also been told, unofficially, that he will not be sent to the front; instead, he may assist at the officers’ school in Bad Tölz, teaching a course on the supposed degeneracy of American literature. The prospect appeals to his literary interests, even as its ideological framing shows how the regime recruits those interests into its institutions.

Narrative Significance

These moments present the SA less through organizational structure than through its reach into everyday life. In the square, its band supplies the sound and motion of a political spectacle that spectators have gathered to watch. In Jost’s family history, the memory of his father’s membership becomes a personal expectation powerful enough to determine the son’s service. Public performance and inherited duty thus meet in a single portrait of a society where political allegiance is staged in the streets and transmitted within families.