World Youth Today-Germany

...its existence is unthinkable without the 19th century poets Josef von Eichendorff and Clemens Brentano...

...Something more is suggested...

...But the present high degree of dependence, particularly of middle-class youth, is undeniable...

...John Mander, an Englishman who taught for several years in Germany, is the author of two books on Berlin and a study of Bertolt Brecht...

...We have only to think of Goethe's Werther, of the Sturm und Drang, or of Schiller's early struggles...

...The quasi-parental dependence encouraged by the German student "fraternities" to which about a third of all students belong, is typical of the restorative tendencies of the Adenauer era...

...And many of the assumptions about how German youth, and German society, are likely to develop are based on its continuance...

...Foreign observers agree that the Schwärmerei of 30 years ago has given way to an astonishing placidity...

...The will to protest is there, yet the will to change society is weak...

...If economic and political stability can be maintained, there are social factors in Germany which should work against a return to political extremism, or a re-establishment of the old pattern of rebellion-andsubmission...

...This is plain enough in another, not dissimilar field: the emancipation of women...

...it implies a movement, an ethic, almost a way of life...

...The failure of the 1848 "bourgeois" revolution had several causes, and one of the most potent was just this siphoning off of social resentment into private protest...

...What has been taken for "Americanization" was no more than the rapid technical modernization of Germany after 1945...

...There will be no new Werthers...

...It is as though the great leap forward of the '20s was too much for the German social organism, resulting in retrenchment and a return to the status quo of 1910...

...Again, a school like Salem is evidence that some of the values of the old Youth Movement have made the transition from the bright dawn of 1920 to the greyer skies of the '60s...

...But its political ideas, insofar as they have taken shape, are often alarmingly unconstructive...

...Will it last...

...The story of the German Youth Movement has recently been told in an extremely thorough and illuminating study by Walter Z. Laqueur entitled Young Germany (Basic Books, 1962...

...Clearly, its pace has already slackened...

...Young Germans, in 1910, wished to shake off the oppressive weight of Wilhelminian family discipline and social restriction...

...The older polarities and contradictions which set Germany apart from its neighbors are fading gently into the background...

...and intelligent students seem increasingly reluctant to join...

...The pattern, it cannot be repeated too often, runs deep in German history and society...

...In the first half of this century, the foreigner's image of Germany has been closely bound up with the idea of youth...

...How far this latest "rebellion" will go—and whether it will go the way of so many other "rebellions" in German history—is not easy to say...

...To Anglo-Saxon ears "youth," in the German context, means not simply "young people" or "the younger generation...

...The answer came back, "because it is so secure...

...Was this pattern destroyed, like so much else in German society, during the collapse of 1945...

...West Germany is swiftly becoming a technologically advanced, democratic mass society, not essentially different from other mass societies...

...Whether one regards this as an optimistic or pessimistic conclusion depends on one's view of that society...

...but, at the same time, it was an escape...

...Again and again, talking to Germans of this age-group, one comes across a different, and far more interesting, mentality...

...By encapsulating themselves, by isolating themselves from the main currents of German society, the youth movements of the '20s have left curiously little trace...

...The Movement was a revolt against "the world of the Father...

...But these are minority groups and minority values...

...Similarly, there is no sign of the revival of militant Right-wing opinions among the young...

...There is, first, Germany's affluence: the Wirtschaftswunder...

...It was precisely the oppressive weight of reaction in 18th and 19th century Germany that channelled social dissatisfaction into individual protest...

...So, equally, might a political crisis in the course of which Germans were made to feel they had been let down by their Allies...

...The Wandervogel itself, to be sure, was an offshoot of the Romantic Movement...

...The acute sense of dependence on America which prevailed during the '50s is now on the ebb...

...The problems of German youth in the future are likely to be not different from those of young people elsewhere in the West...

...It is among these people that one encounters the real democrats, the real anti-Nazis, the people who saw it all at first hand and drew their own conclusions...

...They accept democratic concepts implicitly as part of the social establishment...

...What is certain though—and was encouraging for those who after the War set out to "re-educate" Germany—is that the most articulate members of this generation passionately desire a democratic Germany...

...On the other hand, we need only turn to Germany's historians in the first half of this century—to A. J. P. Taylor, Alan Bullock and H. R. Trevor-Roper—to Ieam that none of the youth movements for which the nation was famous (except, if it qualifies, Nazism) ever exerted the kind of influence on German society that the social rebellions of the 1920s exerted on British or American society...

...There is, further, the pervasive influence of modern technology, and the ever-increasing contacts between Germany and the other centers of the Western world...

...Not that Germany was a country where, socially or politically, youth counted for much...

...What I have just said of West German youth applies to those who are students and teenagers today, the youngest of whom were not born when Germany collapsed in 1945...

...But this was, and to a large extent still is, a "thinking" generation...

...And there is no Western country so resolutely international in its tastes in films, books, plays and travel as West Germany...

...For the pattern of the Jugendbewegung's revolt had deep roots in German tradition...

...The Auflehnung (rebellion) of the German Jüngling against the values of established society is one of the constant themes of German art and literature...

...The anti-American riots in West Berlin during August of last year could be a portent...

...I cannot help thinking that this is, on the whole, good news...

...This phase is now completed, and it is by no means clear that West Germany is at bottom any more "Americanized"—in the sense of adopting more than the superficial amenities of the way of life in the U.S.—than are Britain, Sweden or Japan...

...It is not difficult to see why...

...The best writers Germany has produced in recent years—Günter Grass...

...Together with the conformism bred in Germany, as elsewhere, by the familiar rat-race of the affluent society, these traumas may suffice to account for the placidity of West German youth...

...That distinctively German literary genre, the Bildungsroman, is largely devoted to this theme of a young man's Auflehnung in late adolescence and his subsequent Einordnung (integration) into traditional society...

...But despite this urge toward gerontocracy—or perhaps because of it—"youth" has long had a special meaning in Germany...

...But its sources again are largely economic...

...For the average young German, the United States is reverting to its former status of an admired, distant country with which he has basically less in common than with his fellow-Europeans of the Common Market—particularly, at the moment, with the French...

...Communism is no longer a live intellectual issue, as it is in neighboring France and Italy...

...On the one hand, Germany seemed—and contemporary accounts confirm this—the promised land of youth...

...Indeed, the Marxist interpretation of both these traditional failures seems close to the truth...

...And in time these factors will weaken the authority of the parental home...

...The young men and women now in their 30s are those who took their first jobs or went to universities in the years immediately after the War...

...Yet if this analysis is correct, it does suggest that the old social patterns are disintegrating...

...It is notorious that the "rebellions" of the heroes of Bildungsromane (Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, for example) come to very little...

...Uwe Johnson, H. M. Enzensberger—belong to this "postwar" generation, and bear its marks very plainly...

...But the "normality" of modern West German youth, its rather abject acceptance of the gods of the affluent society (what is often, wrongly, termed its "Americanization"), could well be deceptive...

...World Youth Today - II This is the second in a series of articles on the young generation now coming to maturity in various parts of the globe (the first was "Britain's Cautious Generation" by Ruth Langdon Inglis, in our April 15 issue...

...To what extent this "thinking" generation will influence German society in the long run depends on factors beyond its own control...

...To the outsider, inevitably, Germany then appeared the land of youth par excellence...

...It was, I still feel, a staggering response...

...In general, this generation is as much anti-Nazi as it is anti-Communist...

...but it has also made the idea of democracy acceptable to Germans as never before in German history...

...The famous Wandervögel, who imitated the strolling players of medieval Europe and, at the other end of the spectrum, the regimented Hitlerjugend under Baldur von Schirach, were part of a great upsurge of youthful aspiration...

...There have been, in effect, two generations of young Germans since 1945...

...The ironic truth is that young Germans between 15 and 25 tend to be good democrats because they are good conformists...

...When asked what they want to achieve in life, they reply, "to become a civil servant...

...Young Anglo-Saxons—Christopher Isherwood, say, or Thomas Wolfe—who visited Berlin between the wars were astonished at German youth's vehement self-emancipation...

...There may seem to be a contradiction here...

...It seems likely that youthful rebellions have tended to fail in Germany for the same kind of reasons that other German revolutions have tended to fail...

...Do these movements, in fact, have any real relevance to the condition of youth in Germany today...

...Germany, too, had its Frauenbewegung, closely associated with the Jugendbewegung...

...He has contributed to the New Statesman, Encounter and Commentary...

...AT this point, however, a distinction needs to be made...

...In a sense, they have not: the younger generation, when told of their parents' antics 30 or so years ago, find them merely ridiculous...

...The affluent society may have led to much timid conformism in Germany...

...even if successful, their rebellions are purely private affairs...

...Germany: The Decline of Tradition By John Mander "German Youth": It has not quite the ring of "British Youth" or "French Youth" or "American Youth...

...Yet German women and young people are today, in terms of dependence on parent or husband, a good deal less "emancipated" than their opposite numbers in Britain or America...

...An Allied surrender over Berlin—or what could be interpreted as such—might lead to a revival of nationalism among the young...

...But beyond these ages something rather different begins to emerge...

...In television, for instance, which has only recently become a dominant influence in German life, the influence of the younger generation—particularly of the "thinking" generation—is clearly detectable...

...It would be easy, no doubt, to put down this unadventurousness to the shocks many of these adolescents experienced in early childhood...

...Mostly these factors are humdrum and, to Anglo-Saxons, over-familiar...

...On the contrary, Germany was in 1910, and is again today, a country where a man's prestige increases in proportion to his years...

...Yet in joining the Wandervögel and similar groups they were choosing to contract out of society, not to criticize or influence it...

...The bombing, the sudden loss of one or both parents, the German collapse and the subsequent Occupation: these may well have had a traumatic effect...

...Unlike their immediate elders, young Germans have not had to fight for their democracy (though one should not underestimate the experience of having Walter Ulbricht on one's doorstep...

...It is a marriage of convenience rather than of love—but it is probably the stronger for being so...

...It is arguable whether this is the best way of having democracy, but it is certainly better than having no democracy at all...

...Thus Germany's unusual historical development, and the culture it produced, worked together to evolve that pattern of rebellion-and-submission which is found in the behavior today of both individual and nation...

...If West German youth does not appear to conform to it—and on the whole it does not—one cannot help wondering whether the present phase is not a transitional one, destined sooner or later to give way to a fresh, and more violent, polarization...

...From Laqueur's analysis, the reasons for the Youth Movement's ultimate failure emerge clearly enough...

...A severe economic crisis might upset the calculation and lead Germany back to the chaos of the '20s...

...Furthermore, the kind of mentality I have tried to depict, and possibly have caricatured, extends from teenagers to those now in their middle and late 20s...

...Of course, the factors making for greater social self-confidence and prestige in other countries (above all, the economic factors: the contrast between the affluent modern teenager and the depressed Victorian apprentice) are also operative in Germany...

...This new "European" loyalty may not go very deep...

...Yet there is, I think, good reason for optimism...

...To some extent, of course, they did influence it: Even today it is easy to spot the 50-year-old former Jugendbewegter with his progressive opinions, opennecked shirt and short pants...

...But a culture based on individual protest provides extremely unfavorable soil for organized political action...

...Talk of an "Americanization" of West German youth is, however, misleading...

...But, equally, there are unlikely to be any more Horst Wessels...

...Neither the rise of Nazism nor the theater of Expressionism are comprehensible without that upsurge...

...More than any other European culture, Germany has been afflicted by this sharp polarization between the ultra-conservatism of the old and the anarchic Schillerian individualism of the young...

...I am not saying that all members of this generation think in this way: Many have fallen back into indifference, some still show traces of Nazi indoctrination...

...The reason is not that Germany lacks the legislation—postwar legislation has been admirably progressive—but simply that social values are still highly traditional...

...German university teachers complain that their students lack all sense of adventure...

...When I was teaching English in Berlin, I once asked a class of girls—ranging in age from 16 to 18—why they regarded a state job of this kind as so desirable...

...One source of dependence in the past has been the meager state grants available to students...

...At first sight, as I have said, it would appear surprisingly irrelevant...

...The numerically powerful youth organizations of the '20s have no successors in today's Federal Republic...

...but this is improving and will improve further...

...As prosperity increases, the dependence of adolescent upon parent, or wife upon husband, will inevitably decrease...