INTRODUCTION

The three organisations that form the focus of this book have aspects of their origins in the German Youth Movement, and thus it is an appropriate starting point. The sense in which the term ‘German Youth Movement’ is used here is that offered by Walter Laqueur when he wrote of ‘the youth movement proper, the autonomous groups’ (Laqueur 1962, xi). By this he meant that he was examining only those youth groups that regarded themselves as being independent of adult control; in other words, those for whom the slogan ‘Youth among itself’ (Mosse 1964, 171) was the watchword.

For some writers on the German Youth Movement, notably Stachura, this definition is too narrow, and indeed possibly places too much store on the notion of independence from adult control (Stachura 1981, 3). However, by following Laqueur's usage we can differentiate the German Youth Movement quite sharply from phenomena that arose at around the same time in other parts of the world, such as the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, which were not independent of adult control and had no pretension to such independence, and also similar non-independent youth bodies in Germany.

The German Youth Movement arose formally on 4 November 1901 in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, with the formation of the Wandervogel movement. This developed from a group of schoolboys based on a shorthand class in Steglitz in 1897, called Stenographia, which had organised rambles as far afield as Bohemia in 1899. The leader of Stenographia was Hermann Hoffmann, and his deputy was Karl Fischer. Fischer was the driving force behind the formation of the Wandervogel as a schoolboy rambling club and can be seen as the founder of the German Youth Movement. Borinski and Milch, in their history of the Youth Movement (an important English-language source, in that Borinski had been a member of the Deutsche Freischar and a leader of the Leuchtenburg Kreis Youth Movement groups), explain that it was no accident that the starting point was a shorthand class. Shorthand, they contend, had a rather esoteric attraction to the young at this time; it was something that adults were not au fait with (Borinski and Milch 1982, 6. Note that this and all subsequent references – unless stated – refer to the English text of this book.)