This article is a further attempt to demonstrate the role played by warrior clubs as components of the Germanic social structure and in the formation of tribal units. Since this presentation is based on a hypothesis, it is necessary to explain the methodology and in particular the model employed.

In recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cultural historians, as has the response of the social elite to this form of popular culture. Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the history of what must surely be one of the most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object; stigmatization and repression of pornographic literature helps define and uphold the authority of socially sanctioned sexual norms, while at the same time revealing something about how stable or vulnerable that society imagines its established values to be.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) of Austria claimed a particular development and an identity which differed from the larger party in the Reich. Unlike the latter, the Austrian Nazis traced their roots to the prewar Habsburg Empire. They also identified with regional objectives and local mentors; they accepted Adolf Hitler's 1934 and 1936 proclamations that their activities were a domestic, not an international affair. Austrian National Socialists further believed their movement was a different entity with different problems and different leaders, despite the repeated advice, support, and protection they received from Germany. The local Nazis also expected to control their own country, developing the new principles as they saw best—not as others dictated.

In recent years the biographical literature about Adolf Hitler has continued to grow. Publications centering on the Führer of the Nazi party are now so numerous that not long ago, one reputable British historian felt compelled to apologize for introducing yet “another book about Hitler.” But with all this activity, most scholars agree that few if any of the new studies on Hitler have significantly extended our understanding of the German dictator beyond that provided by Lord Alan Bullock's authoritative biography, first published in 1952 and now a classic. Novel and trendy approaches to the subject, such as those of the “psychohistorians,” have not broken new ground. Gerhard L. Weinberg's balanced judgment of Robert G. L. Waite's psychobiography of Hitler is that “the very great strengths of the book are precisely in the more traditional portions, and the weaknesses in the least traditional.” The more current life histories—such as Joachim Fest's, which was clearly designed to supersede Bullock's work as well as to be a huge commercial success—remain of questionable value either because they restrict themselves to known factual information as their basis of documentation or because they lack truly original insights.