Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: the natural history of a social problem
- 2 Young laborers in the population, labor force, and industrial law: structural preconditions of the youth salvation campaign
- 3 Youth savers and youth salvation: the image of young workers and institutional reform
- 4 Vocation and civics: the continuation school in practice
- 5 Beleaguered churches: Protestant and Catholic youth work
- 6 The Socialist youth movement
- 7 Youth cultivation: the centralization and militarization of youth salvation
- 8 Preparing for motherhood: the inclusion of young working women in youth cultivation
- 9 Youth cultivation and young workers in war
- Epilogue and conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Socialist youth movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: the natural history of a social problem
- 2 Young laborers in the population, labor force, and industrial law: structural preconditions of the youth salvation campaign
- 3 Youth savers and youth salvation: the image of young workers and institutional reform
- 4 Vocation and civics: the continuation school in practice
- 5 Beleaguered churches: Protestant and Catholic youth work
- 6 The Socialist youth movement
- 7 Youth cultivation: the centralization and militarization of youth salvation
- 8 Preparing for motherhood: the inclusion of young working women in youth cultivation
- 9 Youth cultivation and young workers in war
- Epilogue and conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The origins and development of systematic German youth policy were direct results of the fears and anxieties shared by government officials, teachers, clergy, and other social reformers about the growing strength and widening influence of the Social Democratic party. At one level, youth savers regarded socialism as a clear and serious menace to the unity of the nation and to the stability of the social and political order. At another level, they viewed socialism as a manifest symptom of a host of debilitating and pernicious diseases associated with an advancing modern economy and polity: materialism, hedonism, urbanization, mass popular culture, democracy, and secularization. Thus, as we have seen, major youth savers charged the Socialists with fostering pleasure seeking, demanding arrogance, and irreligiosity among the young. In whatever avatar the Socialists appeared, whether as actual social revolutionaries or as symbols of disorder, youth savers found them deplorable. The Socialists challenged both their authority and their most cherished beliefs and values, whether their intense loyalty to the Imperial State, their idealism, their religiosity, their notions of social and political harmony or their commitments to personal responsibility, individualism, and social inequality. Hence anti-Socialism became the keystone, holding together the disparate building blocks that constituted the youth salvation campaign.
Almost all youth programs contained a strong dose of anti-Socialism prescribed to weaken the viselike grip in which the Socialists ostensibly held young workers. Civic education in the continuation schools was to teach young workers that their future welfare depended on Germany's strength, which in turn hinged on class cooperation rather than conflict.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Who Has the Youth, Has the Future'The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany, pp. 118 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991