Sturmabteilung

The Sturmabteilung appears in the novel chiefly as a political identity enacted through marching and song. Rather than presenting the organization’s structure or operations, the text shows how affiliation is named in an intimate confrontation—and how that identity is bound to a character’s denial of violence.

Identity and Portrayal

A woman identifies the young man she addresses as a member of the Sturmabteilung, calling him a Brownshirt and condemning him as violent. Her description links membership to public participation: he marches with the group and sings its songs. The passage offers her accusation, not an organizational account, so the Sturmabteilung is defined here by the conduct she attributes to its adherent and by the political label she uses to confront him.

Membership and Self-Deception

The confrontation turns from public identity to the young man’s private imagination. The woman describes him falling asleep after sexual fantasy and dreaming that he commits terrible acts; in the dream, he is not their victim but their perpetrator. He acknowledges the sequence she lays out: he wakes and finds the imagined violence to be real, yet returns to his former fantasies. The Sturmabteilung affiliation therefore sits within a sharp contrast between outward political performance—marching and singing—and a private refusal to reckon with violence.

Narrative Significance

The group’s limited but pointed appearance makes it a marker of the character’s political alignment, not the subject of a separate institutional history. The woman’s words collapse the distance he might claim between a dream of violence and violence in reality: his Brownshirt identity is part of the accusation that he participates in a world of harm while retreating into private indulgence. The scene gives the Sturmabteilung significance through this personal reckoning, while leaving its formal organization and wider activities undescribed.