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 of Nordic Germanic folklore, particularly in rituals and festivals designed to arouse their members to a feeling of “unity” for their common cause. Part of their program was to settle young Germans as peasants in the Eastern Provinces, particularly where they thought that German ethnic identity was endangered by foreign cultural influences. In 1925 the initial group of the Artamanen had only 140 members, but the idea for which they stood evidently caught on, for two years later their membership had grown to 1,800. Much of what we consider an integral part of the Nazi ideology, including the Nordic Germanic orientation and the emphasis on the peasant cult, was derived from the influence of the Artamanen on the Nazi leaders. Walther Darré, Reich Peasant Leader and also Agricultural Minister under Hitler, was a member of this movement,65 and Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS, was for some time a leader of the Bavarian Artamanen group. After 1933, the Nazis formally integrated the Artamanen into the Reichssiedlungsamt (Reich Settlement Office), and from their settlement program and community service the Nazis developed the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Workers Service). | Rödiger, | Eisenbeck, | and Kretschmer of the Reich Workers Service, were all former members of the Artamanen, thus providing a direct line of continuity.66 Robert Proksch, Head of the Reichsamt für Deutsche Bauernbevölkerung (Reich Office for the German Peasant Population) was also a former member of the Artamanen and continued to appraise its history even after Hitler’s seizure of power. Proksch saw a direct influence of the Artamanen on the Nazis’ determination to conquer the “living space areas” (Lebensraumgebiete) in Eastern Europe.67 The Artamanen, he said, believed in strength based on culture and race, as well as on God’s deepest knowledge. Their “blood-and-soil” concept motivated young people to become peasants and to move across the German frontiers into the Eastern Provinces, so as to “fight for German ethnicity” (it.), thus helping the nation as a whole. To achieve their objectives, the Artamanen felt that it was necessary to cultivate German and Nordic Germanic folklore within dramatic settings, so as to build up a “sense of community” among Germans at home and abroad.68 In that sense they considered folklore as a “weapon” in the struggle toward national unity.
The Nazis were quick to seize upon these ideas for their own purposes. In the Wandervogel movement and the Artamanen movement they perceived perfect examples of how German and Nordic Germanic folklore could be applied to festivals and rituals in such a way as to enhance the “feeling for community”—something toward which they aspired through their “folk education” program. Undoubtedly, they received some of their ideas from Severin Rüttgers, too, who, in various contexts, had emphasized the need to place folklore into “action,” in order to develop in children a strong emotional identifiction with the community of the nation. In earlier publications on literary education for elementary school children Rüttgers had begun to defend the idea that it was not enough to read folktales, myths, and legends but that children should experience (it.) them in the context of festivals and celebrations. His 1933 edition of Erweckung des Volkes durch seine Dichtung (The Awakening of the Nation through Its Literature) essentially underscored the need to employ children’s literature and folklore for Volkish-political purposes.69
The very fact that the Nazis did borrow a substantial number of ideas and customs from earlier Volkish groups and individuals, however, does not necessarily imply that these may be held responsible for their misuses within the Nazi Regime. Undoubtedly, some of the “roots” of Volkish thought came rather close to the Nazi ideology, and in extreme cases were identical with some of its aspects. Still, in pre-Nazi times, none of the writers or groups had ever attempted to adopt its ideology exclusively for the entire nation and to implement it by force, while making children’s literature and folklore their instrument of Volkish propaganda. Nevertheless, it appears clear that the Nazis did not invent ethnocentric and racial ideas based on the concept of German ethnicity.
In 1933, the German Youth movement was formally dissolved to make room for the Hitler Youth Organization