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[From Before the Deluge (Otto Friedrich, Harper & Row: New York, 1972). Friedrich seems to be a jew, certainly exhibits the standard jew biases. Nevertheless, the book’s an interesting compilation of facts and observations about Berlin in the twenties.]

…so it was with the German Youth Movement. It had begun most inconspicuously in 1896, in Steglitz, then a staid middle-class suburb just south of Berlin. There, a twenty-one-year-old youth named Hermann Hoffmann, a student a Berlin University, organized a little group dedicated to self-improvement through the practice of shorthand. When their studies finished, they would go hiking together in the nearby Grunewald Forest. Hoffmann soon faded away , off on a trip to Turkey, but ten of his associates gathered at a Steglitz tavern, drew up a constiution for their hiking society, and named themselves the Wandervögel (roughly, birds of passage). They saluted each other with the word “Heil!”

That was in 1901. Within a dozen years, the movement had spread all over Germany, and the Wandervögel hiked by the tens of thousands to a convocation on the Hohe Meissner, a rain-swept mountain south of Kassel. They lit bonfires, sang songs, recited Goethe, listened to speeches on the German spirit, and generally behaved with the traditional solemnity of youth. The Wandervögel were not originally a political movement — except to the extent that the wandering youths already shared certain political views, ranging from an emotional patritism to an equally emotional mistrust of Jews (and girls). With their banners and songbooks, therefore, they marched off to the slaughter in the trenches of France. “O holy fortune,” one of them wrote of the heroic spirit of 1914, “to be young today!”

Those who survived, and there were not that many, returned to find, as often happens, that the new leaders of the Youth Movement considered them old and irrelevant (there were periodic resolutions to expel everyone over the age of twenty-five, or thirty, resolutions that the aging Wandervögel resisted for dear life). The returning veterans discovered, too, that the Youth Movement had inevitably become a political force, divided by the same political passions that divided the nation as a whole. not entirely, of course. There were some who had just found out about Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophic movement, and others who had gone beyond that to discover, once again, the Wisdom of the East: Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the preachings of Rabindranath Tagore. Then there were the militant idealists, like the Christian Socialists who called themselves “The Brotherhood,” who established a commune to live off the land (and survived emigrations to England, paraguay, and finally back to post-Hitler Germany). But to be nonpolitical, as George Orwell once wrote, is itself a political act.

The first major conflict divided the pro-Communist youths from those who supported the new Weimar government. The battleground was the major left-wing student group, the Free German Youth, which had been founded in 1913 as a haven for tose who had grown too old for the Wandervögel. At a series of conventions, the students wrangled so fiercely with one another that the group divided forever, splintered and by the end of 1923, it was dead. At that, the Youth Movement gradually came under the control of various right-wing groups that called themselves Bünde. These Bünde were far more political than the old Wandervögel, dedicated to the idea of renovating German society rather than simply escaping from it. The hierarchy was more strictly organized, and the restrictions on Jews (and girls) were more sternly enforced. This was, after all, the era of Stefan George.

It has been said that all young Germans of the 1920’s were influenced by Stefan George “whether or not they had ever heard his name or read a single line he had written.” This is, if true, an odd commentary on any nation, for George seems never to have wanted to convert anyone outside his circle of worshipping students (a circle to which, we recall, the young Joseph Goebbels was not admitted). He did, to be sure, use a wsastika as the symbol of his magazine, Blätter für die Kunst (Papers for Art), which repeatedly advocated the mystical concepts of brotherhood in service under the rule of a true leader. But George himself, though rather overtly homosexual, was scarcely a Storm Trooper. He was a votary of Greece, which he had never seen, and of the Mediterranean spirit. He hated the violence of the war, and when the Nazis finally offered him a high office in the cultural hierarchy of the new Third Reich, the aged poet fled to Switzerland, where he died.

As one considers the various patrons of German youth during the 1920’s, one finds figures far stranger than George. For example: John Hargrave, who had been “commissioner for camping and woodcraft” in the Boy Scouts of Britain. He left the Scouts in 1920 to form his own group, “Kibbo Kift, the Woodcraft Kindred,” which sponsored the building of wigwams, the playing of tom-toms, and other manifestations of frontier skills in the wilds of Europe. This may seem rather exotic, but Hargrave’s movement won the support not only of German frontiersmen but of D. H. Lawrence, Anatole France, and Maurice Maeterlinck. How far is it, then, to Martin Voelkel, a pastor in Berlin, and his belief in “the holy, divine Reich of the German vision, which is everywhere and nowhere,” and his genuflections before the “German trinity,” which was apparently to be defined as God, the I, and the weapon/

In a decade of argument, the German Youth Movement never achieved either unity or mass power. There were a dozen major Bünde, and many minor ones, and the total membership of the independent bunds totaled about sixty thousand (much larger numbers of Germans went on hikes with the youth groups of their churches and labor unions and other established organizations). But the elite groups did have their effect. Youth hostels spread across the country, and many of th eolder Wandervügel went on to become teachers, spreading the gospel among their new pupils. And as the 1920’s passed, the Youth Movement, like the country itself, seemed to become more and more nationalistic. One group called the “Artamans,” for example, worked on the farms of eastern Germany to prevent them from being desecrated by migrant workers from Poland; among these Artamans, in a minor official capacity, was Heinrich Himmler. Other factions, like the Order of Young Germans, concentrated on military training, gunplay, and parades. Prussian traditions were too mild, according to one of the militant leaders; every youth group must become a garrison, every youth a soldier, dedicated to the principles of the Japanese samurai, which he described as “demonic, knightly masculinity.”

It is tempting to draw a line connecting the Wandervögel on their mountaintop to the cheering ranks of the uniformed Hitler YTouth, but th econnection is not so simple. The Hitler Youth was relatively weak throughout the 1920’s, as was Hitler himself, and indeed the Führer used the term “Wanderv” as an insult. When he came to power, he disbanded the Bünde and threw a number of their leaders into prison. Are we justified, then, in indicting the prisoners for the misdeeds of their jailer? Perhaps we are, to some extent, for the evidence indicates that it was Hitler, the necromancer of the lower orders, who rejected these hero-worshipping students, and not they who rejected him. And although many prim an dstiff-collared teachers had perverted the whole process of education, the history of the Youth Movement suggests that the young were quite capable, without any teachers, of miseducating each other.

After more than a decade of drill and discipline, then, the young German was ready to confront the uncertain winds of the university. But by now, he was indeed ready. “In a big-city university like Berlin, about two-thirds of the students were already committed to the right,” says Professor Lowenthal. “Only 20 or 25 percent were liberal or Social Democrats. That left us, the radicals, about 5 percent, at the most. And we were not really very radical at all. It would never occur to us to interrupt a lecture, or insult a professor, the way they do nowadays. The only ones who did that were Nazis.”

[…]

“How was it that the Nazis could appeal so strongly to young students, when one usually thinks of young people as idealistic?”

“Because the Nazis were idealistic too,” says Professor Lowenthal, former leader of the Communist youth movement, sipping coffee. “They promised national unity and national resurrection. And there was that basic German romanticism — you know — you know the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? The first is a medieval concept, a society in which everyone competes against the others for his own good. There was a widespread feeling that this was unGerman, that it had been imposed by foreigners. There was some truth to this too. Capitalism did come from outside because Germany was so backward, and democracy was brought in by the armies of Napoleon. The whole German romantic movement was a criticism of that, and this is still true for the young radicals of today.

“So the Nazis promised an alternative to what they called the corrupt plutocratic system. And everybody wanted to believe them.”  [pp. 243-47]