the first time in the history of German education the use of source materials was encouraged over the use of textbooks, and students were taught to enjoy discussions and debates. This was quite a welcome change in comparison with the previous emphasis on lectures, memorizing, and drill. There was also the introduction of so-called Wandertage (hiking days) and of camps and school houses in the country meant to accommodate youngsters on field trips arranged by teachers. Both of these innovations represented an inspiration of the German Youth movement.54
Side by side there existed in the Weimar Republic liberal and Volkish-conservative thoughts, and in that sense, the era may well be called one of experimentation. The Volkish thinkers, however, slowly gained the upper hand, in education too. Next to Rüttgers there were Otto von Greyerz and Martin Havenstein who not only emphasized the use of regional literature, German and Nordic Germanic folklore, along with German history, but who also rejected “foreign” influences on German culture and education, thus trying to confine children’s reading to national literature and folklore exclusively.55
To answer the question of why these educators gained such mass support in Germany, we would have to examine the emergence of various Volkish groups in the twentieth century that favored such an attitude. First, there was the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-Germanic League), founded as early as 1894, which stated as its main platform the introduction of German folk culture into education and all spheres of life. Its constitution defined as one of its major objectives the promotion of education on the basis of German ethnicity and a simultaneous suppression of all factors deemed contrary to German national development. Among other things, this meant the prohibition of using foreign languages at club meetings, a rejection of “foreign” influences, and a replacement of foreign place names by German ones. The League consisted of 44,000 members in 1917 and had a strong impact on the “Volkish interpretation” of Gobineau’s principles of race and culture in Germany.56
Plate 2
The Wandervogel Mood Still Prevailed . . .
Another Volkish group that strongly influenced the “Nordic” orientation of German literature and culture in the twenties was the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society), founded in 1917 by Count Sebottendorf. It was designated as a German order of medieval knighthood in the Nordic Germanic style. Its symbol was the swastika, and its values combined nationalism with the Norseman’s code of honor. Particularly in their rituals and festivals the members of the Thule Society paid homage to the Nordic gods, while they practiced Nordic customs and traditions, including solstice celebrations in honor of Balder. The renowned publisher of folklore for young people, Eugen Diederichs, was an active member, and so were a number of prominent intellectuals who later formulated the Nazi Party program. The Society’s journal, the Völkischer Beobachter (The Volkish Observer)57, like Stapel’s journal Deutsches Volkstum (German Ethnicity), at this time made substantial use of Nordic folklore and Volkish thought for political purposes.58
In 1924, F. K. Günther published his work Ritter, Tod und Teufel (Knight, Death, and Devil) which later became the German bible of anti-semitism and was also instrumental in developing the so-called “Nordic Renaissance” in Germany that influenced the Reich Peasant Leader Walther Darré and National Socialist thought in general. The work was sponsored by the Deutsche Nationale Volkstums-Partei (German National People’s Party) which called for “a German rulership by German blood” and “a protection from foreign invaders” by censorship measures that would “purify” law, science, literature, art, and the press from “folk-alien” elements.59 Günther borrowed his symbol of the knight from Dürer, but in his theory it came to represent a mixture of Nietzsche’s ideal hero and the saga hero of the Germanic North, of racial “Volkish” strength and Odin-Wotan’s spirit of defiance.
Class, President of the Pan-Germanic League, managed to join the various Volkish-political groups in an alliance early in the twenties.60 Many of them expressed their thoughts in Bartels’ journal, Deutsches Schrifttum (German Writings).61 These various Volkish groups were neither consistent nor uniform in their racial orientation, yet they believed in promoting nationalism through native folklore and Volkish thought.
The longing for community was also a characteristic trend of the German Youth movement. It included left wing and right wing groups, Christian groups and sports organizations, young workers groups and even the German Boy Scouts. Even the most prominent group among them, the Wandervogel Bewegung (Wandering Birds movement) was split up into different ideological groups, although all of them shared with the rest a love of nature and a desire to sing, to hike, and to work together for the unity of the fatherland. The movement which began in 1901, found a common goal during the renowned meeting of all members in 1913 on Mt. Hohen Messner (near Darmstadt), and it flourished vigorously even after the First World War had taken from their midst a great number of volunteers who fell in battle. The Wandervogel Bewegung never developed into a political group or party, yet its ideological convictions exercised a strong influence on German youth, and it left its mark also on the orientation of many teacher training colleges in Germany. Being dissatisfied with the growing atomization and alienation of urban life, its egotism, and liberalism, these young people yearned to find “youth among youth” within a classless community of equals. They symbolized a kind of non-political rebellion against the stagnant life pattern of the “petit bourgeois” in society. On the other hand, the movement as a whole also contributed to conservative thought and a growing nationalism in Germany, and even though it was non-political, its racial exclusiveness (at least in some groups) coincided with some of the Nazi trends.62
Plate 3
St. George or the Norse God Odin? (Illustration from a German School Reader of 1937: An Echo of F. K. Günther’s Thoughts)
The folklore revival of the German Youth movement resembled that of the German Romantic movement, although there was a stronger emphasis here on the actual uses of folklore in outdoor activities and celebrations. On hiking trips and around campfires the young Germans would sing and strum their guitars as they enjoyed their togetherness in the small communities. Nationalism was only a part of their program, although they tended to associate the bonds that united them within their groups with the bonds of the larger folk community. Walter Flex, who also wrote a popular book about the involvement of the members of the German Youth movement in World War I in Der Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten (The Wanderer between Two Worlds), composed the leading theme for them:
To remain pure
And to grow mature:
This is the most beautiful
And most difficult art of life.63
Even more popular with German youth at that time was Hans Breuer’s Der Zupfgeigenhansel (Jack, the Guitar Strummer) that was first published in 1908.64 Many of these apparently innocent interests in nature and the outdoors, in storytelling, folk singing, and solstice celebrations (in the old Nordic Germanic style) we shall rediscover a few decades later in the Hitler Youth program.
One of the more radical of the various groups of the German Youth movement was the Artamanen movement. It was a utopian type of community founded by Willibald Hentschel in 1923, which pursued not only nature and group activities of the Wandervogel type but also some Volkish-political objectives. Officially it stood for the “fight for German ethnicity”—a theme which we encounter again in many variations in the Nazis’ reading primers for young people. Like the Nazis at a later date, the Artamanen made active use
