What was the moral horizon of ordinary SA men? What did they think, what did they believe, and what were their ideals? These are hard questions to answer even when they concern people still alive and events still going on. To pose them some eighty years after the fact is to admit that no answer can be definitive. Yet a fresh look at some well-known contemporary sources can at least allow some tentative, suggestive answers. They demonstrate, above all, an emphasis on frenetic activism, combined with a sense of personal suffering and sacrifice. They stress key National Socialist values, such as antisemitism, criticism of the bourgeoisie, and a commitment to an idealized national community, or Volksgemeinschaft. And yet, they also reflect, to a certain extent, pre-Nazi middle-class values. Beyond this, they show men trying desperately to rewrite themselves as ideal SA men and Nazis.

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.

Established in spring 1928, the Sturmabteilung's (SA's) Sturm 33 was known in the Berlin area for its bloody street fighting. Four years after its founding, the well-known journalist Gabriele Tergit observed in the Weltbühne that “People know it—when Sturm 33 is involved, . . . there is terror. But no newspaper says as much any longer, no police pass it on as news—it is civil war as habit.” The Berlin-Charlottenburg district's SA-Sturm represented the Nazi movement's systematic application of violence in an especially acute manner, as both social experiences and the way of living within the unit were closely tied to violent action. In that respect, I will here argue that in Sturm 33, only an internal sociohistorical dynamic of violently plotting camaraderie made it possible to fulfill Nazism's ideological promise of integration, rendering it plausible within the organizational unit's particular cosmos.

In July 1933, an official at Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry gave an influential speech concerning the “cultural-political tasks of the German press.” The speaker, Wilfrid Bade, was himself an author and journalist who had previously attracted little notice outside Nazi circles. He declared that “a new Germany needs new authors”—an unsurprising sentiment, and one pronounced by the cultural representatives of many new regimes. Bade went on, however, to name a surprising group of candidates for this authorial duty: the storm troopers, members of the Nazi's paramilitary group, the Sturmabteilung (SA), whose violent thuggery had raged through German streets and helped to push the decaying Weimar Republic over the edge.

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

Initial public offerings (IPOs) in the dot-com world do not always turn out to be the darlings they are expected to be. Ask Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's IPO in May 2012. But even successful new ventures often defy their founders' expectations. As we hope to suggest in the following report, German History in Documents and Images (GHDI)—a project that has put thousands of primary source texts, drawings, photographs, and maps on the internet, along with hundreds of pages of accompanying commentary—has drawn critical appreciation from specialists and nonspecialists alike, but it has also raised thorny questions about authorship, authority, and audience. Those questions concern the writing of history in general and the newer, more specific discipline of “history on the web.” Like the project itself, this report is the result of a collaboration among the GHDI project staff, which is based at the German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, D.C., and the GHDI volume editors, all of whom teach (or taught) German history at colleges and universities in North America. In the following pages, we will discuss the origins and early goals of the project, describe the challenges associated with the realization of a large, collaborative history project of this nature—whether in book or digital form—and reflect upon what we perceive as the promise and perils of digital history anthologies.

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.