Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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68 elizabeth harvey
at the turn of the century Maurice Barrès condemned the degeneracy and “rootless-
ness” of French culture and offered salvation in the shape of vigorous young men,
while Moeller van den Bruck declared that Germany needed a blood transfusion:
sons had to rise up against their fathers, age had to be replaced by youth.
Alongside the fears of degeneration in fin-de-siècle Europe, uncertainties about
the future of nations and the survival of bourgeois culture sharpened anxieties about
the socialization of the young. Bourgeois reformers constructed working-class and
middle-class youth as different types of problem requiring different solutions, but
both requiring attention to youth’s special needs. Working-class youth was perceived
as a phenomenon of degeneration: social observers and criminologists saw them as
a vulnerable, but dangerous, social group. Juvenile delinquency and prostitution
loomed large in the arguments of social workers in favor of intervening to protect
and discipline urban youngsters: against images of delinquency emerged the redeem-
ing vision of slum children turned into healthy citizens.
Middle-class youth too was constructed as a site for intensified pedagogical
intervention. The late nineteenth century discovered “adolescence,” defining it as a
period in the life-cycle of bourgeois sons marked by prolonged dependency beyond
the age of puberty. A new knowledge about adolescence was created as medics,
psychologists, and sociologists proffered opinions on the physiology and psychology
of “normal” adolescence as a period of hormonally determined “storm and stress,”
requiring special care in order to ensure successful maturation into bourgeois
adulthood.
5
How bourgeois daughters fitted into this new thinking was less clear. Girls might
feel alienated from their parental homes as well, but what was their place in the model
of “storm and stress” as a prelude to mature independence? Like the dreams of
cultural rejuvenation through youth developed by radical intellectuals, the theory of
adolescence was deeply gendered. The notion of independent adulthood as the goal
of maturation remained a problematic aspect of theories of adolescence applied to
bourgeois girls in this period, for whom norms of conventional femininity required
as a goal for adulthood not so much independence as a new form of dependence – in
marriage. Nevertheless, debates about the education of girls formed a part – however
marginal – of the discourses on youth.
The spotlight on youth constructed the adolescent, normatively cast as male, as
difficult but different, biologically destined to be productively at odds with the world
of adults. Coupled with the gloomy tidings of a society in decline, the young could
easily be seen – and come to see themselves – as a creative resource from which
renewal and rebellion would come. From this belief could be drawn radically different
consequences, which found expression in contrasting formations of youth culture in
the decade before World War I.
Realm of Youth or Rebellion of Youth?
The early twentieth-century cult of youth constructed an antithesis between
male youth and an over-civilized world. From this antithesis some concluded that
the young should secede from a society that corrupted them; secession might
then give way to a constructive engagement in which the insights gained in the
“realm of youthful autonomy” would feed back into society. For others, rebellion
the cult of youth 69
rather than secession was in the foreground: youth was seen as the agent of cultural
destruction.
A “secession” reaction can be seen in both the prewar Wandervogel and in the
Scouting movement. The Wandervogel, a network of hiking groups that flourished
among German and Austrian grammar school pupils from the turn of the twentieth
century, stood out from other organizations of the era with its claim to be an autono-
mous movement of, rather than for, youth. Its group hikes aimed to give sheltered
urban youngsters a new sense of bodily freedom through robust exercise, the chance
to explore the countryside and the experience of comradeship within the peer group
under a scarcely older chosen leader.
6
The Scouting movement, by contrast, was an
organization founded by adults for youngsters; nevertheless, one of the keys to its
success was its incorporation of more “adventurous” elements into its activities and
a greater delegation of leadership tasks to the young than were typical for other
adult-led organizations of the era. Set up in 1908 by the imperialist war hero Robert
Baden-Powell, the organization offered a mix of woodcraft, badges for particular
skills, and camping. Rather than growing up prematurely, boys were to mature at a
natural pace through outdoor activities and challenges during which their self-
reliance, hardiness, and alertness could develop. Members sported a “frontier” style
of uniform complete with Stetson hat, scarf, and shorts that echoed Baden-Powell’s
earlier creation, the South African Constabulary, and acquired a repertoire of pseudo-
tribal rituals adapted from Zulu and other “native” sources. Baden-Powell’s vision
was of creating a realm – embodied in the Scout camp – within which the adult world
and “civilization” would be held at bay.
7
In different ways, both the Wandervogel and the Scouts offered a form of escape
from social conventions into nature and the comradeship of the peer group. In both
movements, young males’ pursuit of their “own values” was envisaged as entailing
them bonding with others in a world imagined as liberation from the bourgeois family
– and which specifically excluded girls and women. For the advocates of a new mas-
culinity to be achieved through male bonding, girls who wanted to join the organiza-
tions posed a problem. Wandervogel groups split over the issue, with girls joining
some groups but excluded from others. In the case of the Scouts, girls were quick
to grasp at what Scouting offered them, and Baden-Powell was not averse to girls
being more active and enjoying the outdoors life, but they were not allowed to join
the boys’ organization; instead, in 1912 the Girl Guides were set up as a sister orga-
nization with a rather tamer program. Baden-Powell’s primary interest remained the
idea of boyhood and the prolongation of male adolescence – a process that involved
denying adolescent sexuality as far as possible in the name of “clean living.” For
Baden-Powell, whose ideal was the more manly boy and the more boyish man,
boyhood was associated with imagination, daring, and a taste for adventure – qualities
which he believed might be cultivated even in suburban Britain through the campfires
and frontiersman rituals of the Scouting movement.
By 1913 the Wandervogel was established and already faction-ridden: if the novelty
of its hiking, singing, and sleeping on straw still fascinated new members, others
sought to push the German youth movement in a new direction. In the process, they
generated new slogans around the theme of youth and its mission to society. As a
new network for older members of the youth movement, the Freideutsche Jugend was
launched at the famous mountainside meeting on the Hoher Meissner in October
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1913 as a counter-festival to the jingoistic official celebration of the centenary of the
battle of Leipzig. The author of the summons to the meeting, the educational
reformer Gustav Wyneken, declared that if youth had been “discovered” by the
Wandervogel, it was now poised to start upon its mission of spiritually rejuvenating
the nation as a whole. The Meissner declaration, in which Wyneken’s influence was
also evident, declared that the Freideutsche Jugend was committed to “shaping its
own life according to its own calling, on its own responsibility and with inward
authenticity.” Endlessly repeated, the formula became the charter of the German
youth movement.
In Italy, youthful confrontation with the ills of bourgeois society took more
rebellious and scandalous forms. In his appeals to the youth of Italy, Marinetti (born
1876), author, founder of the Futurist movement, and master of the publicity stunt,
had no clearly formulated political program but a definite political purpose. Marinetti’s
myth of youth was coupled with a cult of technology and calls to destroy the past:
“We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destruc-
tive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for
women.” An election manifesto of 1909 declared: “We Futurists appeal to all young
geniuses of Italy to fight to the last breath against the candidates who align themselves
with the old and the priests.”
8
In 1909, still claiming to be under 30, Marinetti stated
in the “Founding Manifesto of Futurism” that he was the leader of a movement of
youth that would before long – by its own logic – rightly be swept away by a still
younger generation: “The oldest among us are not thirty: this means that we have
at least ten years to carry out our task. When we are forty, let those younger and
more valiant than us kindly throw us into the wastebasket like useless manuscripts.”
9
In a speech in 1910, he declared that “to youth we grant all rights and all authority”
and evoked a “Government of Youth” that – according to him – could hardly make
a worse job of ruling Italy than the present government.
10
Through his lectures,
writings, exhibitions, and theatrical stunts Marinetti forged contacts with anarchist
circles and gained something of a following among students and young workers.
By 1914, Marinetti had amplified a cult of youth already pervading Italian avant-
garde circles and extending more widely in prewar Europe. Marinetti’s version of the
“youth myth” was crudely anarchistic and aggressive set beside the bluff “boys’
adventure” world of Baden-Powell and the convoluted intellectualism of the German
youth movement. But some traces of a common pattern can be found in the words
of an Italian student explaining his support for futurism at the end of 1913. All the
elements of the prewar cult of youth are there, recapitulated once again in a new
variation: “The young generation wants to live, LIVE, LIVE their own life, a life that
is intense and strong, without fear of tomorrow, without being afraid of what lies
beyond the tombs. LIIIVVVEEE!!! [Fighting + Enjoying] a life of true freedom, of
courage, strength, paroxysm, sport, desire, lust, pride, recklessness, of madness if
necessary!”
11
The “Youthful Face of War”
“Sacred youth,” declared the Italian poet and agitator Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1915,
was called upon by the “priest of Mars” to create a new world through war.
12
D’Annunzio had in his prewar nationalist poems exalted youth and youthfulness;
the cult of youth 71
now, as one of the most prominent spokesmen of the interventionist movement, he
urged Italians on to embrace war. The cult of youth that had emerged within literary,
artistic, and student circles since the late nineteenth century provided a ready frame-
work for interpreting World War I. Images of young men would come to pervade
literary and artistic representations of the war experience, and they left a deep imprint
in turn on the popular imagination and memory of the war.
One common theme of early reactions in intellectual circles within the European
nations entering the war was the notion of war rejuvenating nations and individual
participants alike. The plunge into war conjured up for the supporters of war the
prospect of new beginnings, the breaking of political molds, the strengthening of
patriotism, perhaps even – in newly unified nations – the forging of a popular national
identity for the first time. Imagining the renewal of the national community through
war found its counterpart at the individual level in the notion that – regardless of
age – those who participated in the fighting would be invigorated by being plucked
out of bourgeois life and its mundane concerns and plunged into an existence more
intense and more adventurous.
At the same time, the war was associated specifically with the young. The young
were depicted as enthusiasts for war; for instance, in the case of Italy, nationalist
students were an important element in the interventionist movement that pressured
the government in late 1914 and early 1915 to enter the war on the Entente side.
The young were also imagined as bearing the brunt of the fighting and the sacrifices
of war, even if those who fought included many men in their thirties and forties. The
young urban middle-class volunteers who flocked to join up in the early phase of the
war straight out of schools and universities became a familiar and potent symbol of
the identification of youth and war. Qualities crucial to prewar images of “youth” –
daring, idealism, exuberance – made the young seem predestined for heroics on the
battlefield. In Germany, the reckless courage and patriotic zeal of young volunteers
was encapsulated in the catastrophe of Langemarck, in which a regiment formed from
members of the Wandervogel suffered overwhelming losses in an assault upon an
enemy position. The military record of this episode depicted the troops advancing
while singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”: this was quickly reported
throughout the German press in November 1914 and the young soldiers singing
their way to their deaths acquired a mythical status. Meanwhile, the image of the
Wandervogel in uniform as the embodiment of ideal youth and courage was given
lyrical treatment in Walter Flex’s posthumously published memorial to his friend
Ernst Wurche, Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (Wanderer between Two Worlds).
A bestseller, with over a quarter of a million copies sold in the two years following
its publication in 1916, it would become a cult book for the German youth move-
ment after the war.
For educated young men primed by the mood of the prewar period to question
social conventions and to long for “authenticity,” male comradeship, and a simpler
life, becoming a soldier could appear to fulfill these aspirations. Enlisting could
initially seem to bring – as the playwright Carl Zuckmayer recalled – “liberation from
bourgeois narrowness and pettiness, from compulsory education and cramming, from
the doubts of choosing a profession, and above all from that which we – consciously
or unconsciously – felt as the saturation, the stuffy air, the petrifaction of our
world.”
13
Rupert Brooke wrote to a friend in January 1915 of his (already tarnished)
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hopes of war transforming society (“I had hopes that England’d get on her legs again,
achieve youth and merriment, and slough the things I loathe – capitalism and femi-
nism and hermaphroditism and the rest”) with a bravado that he would not care if
he were there to see it or not (“Come and die. It’ll be great fun. And there’s great
health in the preparation”).
14
The experience of war inevitably deepened further the identification of youth with
young masculinity, and the association of war with youthful male bonding. Evocations
of the experience of the trenches underlined the physical intimacy enforced by
cramped living, the importance of male comradeship to survival, and the trauma of
witnessing at close quarters the shattered bodies of close friends and comrades. All
this contributed to the emergence of a concern with, and celebration of, soldierly
masculinity in wartime and postwar accounts of frontline experience. When consider-
ing the impact of the war on gender relations, one can see the cult of youth as a
factor militating against the visibility of women’s part in the conflict – notwithstand-
ing the degree to which women’s contribution to the war effort was publicly acknowl-
edged. For young women who volunteered for nursing or other duties at the front,
it seemed that their war experience was destined to be submerged by the narrative
of their male contemporaries. It was the men who were wounded and died, and any
hardships or dangers experienced by the nurses were seen as subordinate to the main
story of male heroism and suffering.
15
All the same, contemporary discourses of
“youth” could offer young women of the war generation a lever to assert their inclu-
sion in a bourgeois youth profoundly marked by the conflict. In publishing Testament
of Youth, and in attempting to get her wartime diaries published in the early 1920s
and again in the late 1930s, Vera Brittain appropriated the categories of “youth” in
which to frame her own experiences. Jotting notes on conclusions to be drawn from
her wartime diaries, she wrote, with a note of self-irony, “unfitness of youth of 1913
for its future – contrast between ignorance of that youth & knowledge of present
youth, yet universality of certain qualities which belong to youth in all ages – lovely
idealism, glorious faith, pathetic verbosity.”
16
The central significance accorded to youth in depictions of war and its victims,
coupled with the sense of the war’s destructive impact, gave a new inflection to the
cult of youth in those countries involved in the war. The idea that “the best were
gone” was widespread: the precious qualities of “those who will never grow old”
were all the more vivid in the contemplation of their loss. The war also gave a new
legitimation to the idea of the mission of youth. The sense that nothing could ever
be the same again after such bloodshed gave rise to an intensified thinking in terms
of a generation who had shared the experience from a similar age-specific perspective.
If before the war the imagined agency of social renewal and transformation had been
simply “youth,” the talk now was of generations with a mission, specifically the gen-
eration of those – young and less young – who were bound by the “comradeship of
the trenches.” Those who articulated this new consciousness depicted the soldiers
who fought and survived the war as a remnant of a generation, homogenized by the
experience of fighting, steeled and transformed by their experiences, a generation
conceived both in opposition to the “old men” who had been responsible for the
war and more generally in relation to the “old order.” The downfall of the old world
seemed destined to privilege those would be identified with the new – whatever that
turned out to be.
the cult of youth 73
Youth in Movement: The Cult of the Body
The cult of youth in the interwar period was not least a celebration of the beautiful
body, young, healthy, and whole. Multiple associations and meanings attached to
the youthful body in different contexts. In debates on eugenics, the body in its
youthful prime represented the repository of the racial stock for future generations,
to be managed for the sake of national efficiency. In the world of sport, the record-
breaking hero or heroine could be cast as the body-as-machine, tuned to peak
performance. In the illustrated press, the pared-down and fashionably attired young
woman’s body signaled the emancipation of the garçonne, the flapper, or the Neue
Frau. Body culture was also fundamental to the subculture of organized youth in
the interwar period. Within interwar youth movements, hardy and suntanned male
and female bodies evoked the movements’ celebration of the freedom to roam and
a life in harmony with nature. But the bodies of boys and young men could also
appear – in serried ranks and clad in uniform – as the marching columns of fascism.
Images of youthful bodies in motion thus embodied competing visions of interwar
modernity.
The growing attempts in this period to harness the principles of “rationalization”
to society included a quest to mold the bodies and minds of the young into healthful
habits and to promote universal and lasting youthfulness as a key to social efficiency
in a fast-moving world. Demographic developments pointed towards an increase
in life expectancy and at the same time conjured up the specter of an ageing and
debilitated population. The response by biologists and psychologists to this prospect
was to maximize the vigor of life across the life span, optimizing human potential
and human behavior. From this perspective, “keeping young and beautiful” (in the
words of the 1930s song) was not just about retaining one’s sex appeal and
having a good time. Instead, enterprising scientists, medics, and health reformers
promoted the message to keep fit, stay youthful, and maintain an active sex life as an
expression of a rationalized lifestyle.
17
“Rejuvenation” techniques included contro-
versial hormone treatments and anti-ageing surgeries as well as regimes of diet and
exercise. Magazines depicting implausibly lean and muscular figures wrestling nude
in woodland, or performing spectacular leaps on the seashore, provided images of
ideal body culture presumably designed to inspire rather than depress readers who
might be feeling their age.
The cult of the youthful body was boosted in different ways by the rise of sport.
At one level, competitive sport created a space for the display of outstanding
physiques. The Olympic Games, revived in 1896 by the Frenchman Baron Pierre de
Coubertin, provided in the interwar period a spectacular setting in different European
cities – Antwerp, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin – for record-breaking individual and team
performances, with events gradually added to open Olympic competition to women.
The Manchester Evening News in 1930 celebrated the record-breaking exploits of
modern British girls: “One of them won the King’s Cup . . . Another flew to
Australia. Another won the King’s prize at Bisley. More of them have broken motor-
ing, exploring and mountaineering records, and they hardly bother to swim the
Channel now. Before long we shall probably see a girl bowler dealing with Bradman.”
18
The appreciation of sporting performance was accompanied by a general increase in
popular participation in sports. The rise of the seaside holiday and the building of
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sports grounds and swimming pools by progressive municipalities gave young people
of both sexes, but girls and young women in particular, new opportunities for
experiencing increased bodily freedom – as well as attracting the scandalized gaze of
conservatives outraged by the advent of body-hugging swimwear for women.
For the popular press, it was not just the modern girl as sportswoman that made
her such an object of fascination. Across Europe, debates over urban modernity were
played out with reference to how the young women of today fashioned themselves:
how they looked and behaved in public seemed to sum up the transformations in
women’s aspirations and to set trends for society more broadly. The look of the young
became increasingly the fashion for all. To be in tune with the times, the modern
woman presented herself as youthful and, for at least the decade after World War I,
androgynous: these were the years of fashions that assumed a boyish figure and
haircut, to be offset by make-up.
19
Women were exhorted to diet and exercise, have
their hair cut short, and, if tempted by a 1935 tip from the British organization
League of Health and Beauty, go skinny-dipping in the middle of the night. The
goal was a “healthy, fresh-air body” unencumbered by the trappings of yesterday’s
femininity.
20
Youth movements were an important channel for spreading the cult of the body.
The interwar period was the era of mass-organized youth, and, where democracy
survived, competing organizations reflected the mobilization of the young on the
basis of diverse political, religious, and ethnic identities.
21
While intense rivalries and
ideological divides separated youth organizations, they shared an emphasis on fresh
air and fitness, hiking and camping. Scouting and Guiding grew further in Britain
and spread on the Continent, while the hiking excursions of the prewar Wandervogel
were taken up by a whole range of youth movements. If middle-class youngsters
before the war had dominated youth movements, now young Catholic workers in
France and young socialist workers in Austria swelled the ranks of those heading for
the hills with bare knees, stout shoes, and a knapsack. Czech apprentices and young
workers in the 1930s escaped from the cities to “tramp” colonies in the countryside
that were given names drawn from the American West.
22
Hiking groups, youth
camps, and rallies became a characteristic sight of the era, with uniforms, insignia,
and flags heightening their visual impact. Such forays into nature were presented as
representing a lifestyle that was rational, moral, and “natural” – in tune with the
needs of the young but at the same time setting an example for the rest of society.
Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, a movement that provided a left-wing
alternative in Britain to Scouting, typified this in his 1926 statement of the move-
ment’s ethos: “We find new life among the green growing things, and new health
from the sun and four winds. And this health, together with our understanding,
enables us to fight tenaciously for the social betterment.”
23
Youth organizations of the interwar period were so successful because they could
build on the trend of the times towards celebrating and liberating the body – making
that freedom available to girls as well as to boys. It involved the enjoyable pursuit of
fitness, and escape from work, home, and the city streets. It entailed mobility, often
under one’s own steam, on foot or bicycle, or further afield or even abroad, with
companions of one’s choice. Coupled with this freedom and mobility was the satis-
faction of belonging, a feeling expressed in the paraphernalia that demonstrated one’s
identity as a group. The physical proximity involved in camping and the comradely
the cult of youth 75
intimacy round the campfire intensified the sense of sharing basic experiences. As a
template for group activities and group bonding, the strength of this formula of
tramping-and-camping lay in its openness. Young socialists or pacifists, Catholics or
Zionists, could all form groups within which to combine excursions, and opportuni-
ties for leadership and taking responsibility for others, with a consolidation of cultural,
political, or religious beliefs. Scouting jamborees – vast encampments with ceremo-
nies, competitions, and games lasting for days on end – could be seen as a way of
conjuring up an unsubversive “world of youth” spanning international boundaries.
24
But the uniforming of youth and the ostentatious display of massed bodies could
also turn into an aggressive challenge to the existing order, as in the case of Nazi
youth in the Depression in Germany and Austria and Falangist youth in republican
Spain.
The spectacle of youthful bodies on the move, signaling collective identity through
“gear” and insignia, staking out terrain and setting up camp, might convey a range
of possible meanings. It could suggest the expanding possibilities for modern travel
and adventure, the search for new experiences, and the chance of escape into new
worlds. It could suggest a process of democratization and pluralist political mobiliza-
tion, in which participants demonstrated their rival beliefs through their outward
show of strength, advertising their socialist, pacifist, Christian, or nationalist convic-
tions within the public domain. Alternatively, it could suggest a marching column
exerting mastery and power over the land it traversed. In an era when popular politics
was typically played out on the streets and in public spaces, the deployment of a
mobile mass of young fit bodies could be a key political resource – even an offensive
weapon. In that process, the rhetoric of generations with a political mission could
prove a vital ingredient.
Youth and Fascism: “The Mission of the Young Generation?”
“Modern European politics from Versailles to Munich can be largely explained in
terms of a conflict of generations,” declared a German political scientist in 1939.
25
Sigmund Neumann, director of an adult education college in Berlin before being
forced into exile in the United States, argued that while generational conflict as a
social and political phenomenon was nothing new in itself, it was fueled in the con-
temporary era by specific factors. He identified these as being, firstly, youth’s new
consciousness of itself and its value (“We are living in the age of self-confident
youth”); secondly, the accelerated pace of change in the contemporary western world,
with the consequence that “today not only fathers and sons, but older and younger
brothers live in a different world, speak a different language, adhere to different
values”; and, thirdly, the historical rupture in the continuity of generations brought
about by the war, which “not only clearly separated the prewar and postwar period,
but also meant the weakening, if not the elimination, of a whole generation.”
Neumann’s speech went on to analyze the political impact of this generational
conflict in contemporary Europe. Prominent in his analysis was the link between a
younger generation formed by their war experiences and the rise of European fascism.
Fascism in Italy was “the revolution of the war generation par excellence”; the Nazi
seizure of power was “accomplished almost exclusively by a younger war generation
who, different from their elder co-warriors, not only had a romantic concept of war
76 elizabeth harvey
but also lacked experience balanced by a prewar career . . . The Third Reich is led
by a capricious generation of young soldiers who, although they returned home, were
broken by the war experience.” Neumann also diagnosed a “problem of generations”
as a cause of weakness in the apparently stable democracies of France and Britain:
the missing war generation, he argued, left a gap at the heart of politics, and the
Munich agreement was the product of a 68-year-old politician failing to grasp the
mentality of the 48-year-old Hitler and the world he represented.
Neumann’s analysis is noteworthy as an example of the “generationalism” that
featured in political analysis and social commentary of the time. Leftists might
reject the talk of the “young generation,” seeing it as an obfuscation of the issues of
class and poverty. But occasional attempts to deflate the notion of generations
were not sufficient to discourage those – even on the left – for whom the idea of
generational identities and generational missions had a seductive and even common-
sense appeal. Political parties everywhere had, after all, created youth sections in their
quest to reach out to new constituencies and shore up their legitimacy. Conservative
and nationalist parties saw youth as an agency of cross-class national solidarity; on
the left, the rhetoric of youth was combined with the language of class to present
youth as a vanguard of socialist revolution and, increasingly in the 1930s, of
anti-fascism.
26
Across the political spectrum, parties and movements claimed to represent “youth”
and with it “the future.” However, it was fascism and Nazism that appeared to con-
temporaries as the arch-practitioners of the cult of youth. To comprehend interwar
fascism, as Neumann was trying to, required a grasp of the power and appeal of the
idea of “youth” and “young generation.” That said, historians have revised some
common assumptions about fascism and Nazism on the one hand and youth, the
cult of youth, and the “mission of a young generation,” on the other.
Italian fascism, it is true, seems to fit the characterization of a “revolt of youth.”
Fascism was born out of a motley assortment of young veterans, futurists, and uni-
versity students who saw themselves as the shock troops of the nation, determined
to smash the left and overthrow the Liberal elite that seemed to have bungled the
peace. Its growth and success as a movement from 1920 onwards was largely brought
about by the violent actions of young men organized in squadre, typically sponsored
by landowners who admired their zeal for intimidating, beating up, and killing
socialist – and Catholic – activists who had been building the labor movement in the
countryside. This onslaught created a bandwagon effect: fascism was clearly where
the action was, and every funeral held for a fascist “martyr” was staged for maximum
propaganda impact.
The importance of youthful activists to the building of the movement was paral-
leled by the rhetoric of national rejuvenation in fascist ideology. Its hymn, Giovinezza,
evoked youth, beauty, and springtime. Fascist ideology was based on the notion
of the alleged senescence of Liberal Italy, against which the fascist movement was
mobilized to rejuvenate the nation. While the age of the squadre members and of
the emerging fascist leadership, including Mussolini, gave this claim some legitimacy,
Mussolini’s backstairs dealing in 1922 with ageing Liberal politicians to secure the
premiership rather undercut it – making it all the more essential to stage the “March
on Rome” and make the fascist “seizure of power” appear as a supremely energetic
and virile act. However, the notion of a permanent revolution of youth – say on the
the cult of youth 77
lines of Marinetti’s prewar invitation to the rising generation to come and tear up
the work of those who had reached forty – was the last thing Mussolini sought. The
youth organizations set up by the fascist regime set out to inculcate fascist values into
schoolchildren and university students and to create a show of regimented young
male and even female bodies to enhance the image of the regime, which by the 1930s
had developed a full-blown strategy to project and aestheticize the power of the Duce
and state through visual display.
27
In claiming to represent the “will of youth” determined to smash an enfeebled
political system, Nazism seemed to repeat the pattern set by Italian fascism. The cult
of youth figured prominently in Nazi propaganda before and after the “seizure of
power.” The Italian fascist cry Largo ai giovani! (“Make Way for the Young!”) was
echoed by Gregor Strasser in 1932 with his Macht Platz, ihr Alten! (“Make Way, You
Old Men!”). In his recollection of the Nazi takeover published in 1934, Hitler’s press
chief Otto Dietrich proclaimed the “oneness” of Nazism with youth: “Youth and
National Socialism are related to one another in essence, are ultimately two expres-
sions of one and the same concept. Youth is a grappling for a continuously new form
of life. National Socialism is the organized will of youth. German youth and National
Socialist movement are inwardly one, as spring is one with nature awaking to new
life.”
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Such a declaration could suggest not only strong youthful support for the
Nazi movement, but also link Nazism with commitment to the radical and the new,
and imply a role for youth in shaping Nazism’s future. It was true that the Nazi
movement had strong support among university students before 1933, and that the
SA was an organization largely of younger men. On the other hand the Hitler Youth,
while it had grown rapidly from shaky beginnings, was at the end of 1932, together
with the smaller Bund Deutscher Mädel, still easily eclipsed by other mass-membership
youth organizations, particularly those of Protestant and Catholic youth. The simple
equation “Nazism = youth = the new” obscured much complexity. If 1934 was a
time for emphasizing claims about Nazism’s youth and radicalism, this reflected the
propaganda challenge of disguising to the movement the compromises with conser-
vatism that Hitler was at that moment set upon – not least at the expense of his
“revolutionary” SA. Like Mussolini, Hitler after the “seizure of power” sought to
institutionalize repression and to contain the more erratic elements of the movement
whose original function – to foment the crisis that his takeover of power promised
to solve – now appeared to be over. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear
that the role of youth within the regime was not to be assertive or creative, but, as
Hitler put it in 1933, to be “loyal and brave.”
Nazism, like fascism, claimed to represent the “front generation” in politics.
However, whereas in fascism the “front generation” could be identified with “youth,”
the passage of time posed difficulties for the Nazi movement even before it was in
power. Nazism could present itself as representing the “front generation,” whose
experiences of comradeship in the trenches had inspired them with the vision of a
class-free national community – a myth that disguised the fact that the millions of
Germans who had been soldiers during World War I had not only experienced the
war in different ways but had also drawn radically different conclusions from it. It
might alternatively pose as the “organized will of youth,” borrowing the rhetoric of
“youth led by youth” and the practices of the “excursion” (Fahrt) and the camp
from the German youth movement as the basis of its mass formations for boys and