From Folk Songs to Fascism: The Rise and Fall of Wandervögel
What can we learn from the 'wandering birds' of Germany?
Hello folks. I’ve been quiet lately, wrestling with my reasons for being here on Substack, writing, sharing etc. I’ve also been ferreting down this rabbit-hole about outdoorsy values, inspired by some 100-year-old encounters by the travel writer Robert Byron. Hope you enjoy…
Germans on the move
If you travelled around Europe a century ago, the gangs of marauding young Germans you’d meet were not goose-stepping into foreign cities brandishing rifles and grenades. They were peacefully rambling into the hills with guitars and sleeping bags. These were the starry-eyed hopefuls of the Deutsche Jugendbewegung or German Youth Movement, whose dominant sects – until the Nazis ruined everything – were freedom-loving ensembles calling themselves Wandervögel.
They believed some weird stuff (more on that later) but the Wandervögelers upheld healthy values too. It’s hard not to feel invigorated just thinking about them.
Should we be nervous about admiring a movement whose members went on to shape the ghastliest elements of the Nazi project? Was this a naive fad, or a Utopian vision we’d benefit from reviving in 2025?
You won’t get any concrete answers from me, but I would like to bring Wandervögling into the light. (I’m smudging the German word into an Anglicised participle here – a bit naughty, but let’s do it.) Most 21st-Century scholarship on Wandervögel groups has fixated on the sexuality of their members; I think more relevant (and less pervy) thought could be devoted to their overt ideals.
A potted history
From the turn of the 20th Century, hundreds of Wandervögel clubs began springing up in Germany. The name means ‘wandering bird’, and their nature-loving members comprised bands of teenagers with peacefully rebellious and broadly apolitical motives, set on exploration and frugal living – proto-hippies proclaiming ‘inner freedom’ while exploring Europe stirred by an alluringly wholesome sense of optimism. Over time, their factions came to experiment with blends of conservative and progressive thought; some banned alcohol during their recces, and some welcomed girls.
By the 1930s, the Wandervögel movement had grown to around 80,000 official members, plus many more thousands of displaced young Germans who persevered with the ideals of their youth into adulthood. Things would turn nasty in 1933 when all German youth groups were banned in favour of the increasingly militant Hitler Youth. By 1934, the Hitler Youth was six million strong, and in 1936 membership became mandatory for all young Germans.
The Nazis’ homogenising vision was a far cry from the original Wandervögel ideals of decentralised organisation and rebellion against adult direction. Strangely enough, for the fighting men of the Third Reich (including some of its sickest minds) the Wandervögel tradition represented a time of lost innocence.
Who were the Wandervögel youth?
“It is ‘Wanderlust’, say the young men; instead of becoming clerks, they set off into the unknown, chained to Freedom, carefully careless.”
Thus wrote the young English travel writer Robert Byron (no relation of the poet) about the bands of Wandervögel vagabonds he met during a drive from England to Athens in 1925.
For the final chapters of his story, Byron’s group adopts a pair of them on their way to Greece. Fleischmann and Schwert were in their 20s, both veterans of WWI (they must have been appallingly young soldiers) and recent university graduates. Despite being “absolutely without funds” they were embarking on a Weltreise, a world tour. “In England, they would have gone out to the colonies. As Germans, the call to Perpetual Youth had transformed them into parasites.”
Parasites… what a word. Byron, who would become an outspoken critic of Hitler, clearly felt some cynicism and distaste towards the naive optimism which drove the young Germans. “They hoped to be home in 1936. Thus can Youth and Wanderlust convert into a haphazard walking tour the life of a boy and then a man up till the age of 35; and what then?”
Despite his scepticism about their motivations, Byron’s account of his eventful days with the German pair is full of admiration for their character and companionship. Through his eyes we see Fleischmann and Schwert as self-sacrificing, musical, willing, industrious, careful, genial, vocal, without pretension and “faithful to the end”. Just the kinds of people you hope to meet on the road.
Romantic origins
We can trace ideological continuities between the Wandervögel movement and earlier German Romanticism. Enduring themes include the reverence for nature and a belief in its restorative powers, the criticism of industrial society, emphasis on emotional authenticity, and the celebration of folk traditions, folk music and German cultural identity.
Fresh air was all the rage; from Beethoven to Mahler, Schopenhauer to Freud, regular walking in nature had been a catalyst for deep and creative thought.
Among less bourgeois circles too, coming of age often entailed journeying on foot. In fact, when viewed in the context of the European ‘journeyman’ tradition, the impetus to strike out and hope for the best might seem less reckless than Byron’s scepticism implies. Since the Middle Ages, young craftsmen and artists in the German principalities (as well as a few other parts of Europe) had spent an obligatory three years on the move, practising their trade as they went. Perhaps it might be inevitable for this to instil an intrinsic faith in the idea that it is good and formative to be on the road, making your own way in the world, forging your ability to sustain yourself and the community you will return to by soaking up whatever the world can teach you, and earning your place by repeatedly proving that you are both useful and decent.
Funky ideas
Unsurprisingly perhaps, they also dabbled in some whacky thinking. Together with the wider youth movement, Wandervögel members sought to transcend cognitive experience in favour of a more direct, immediate kind of non-rational (or perhaps pre-rational) state of being, which they called Erlebnis. And thanks to Georg Götsch, a prominent youth movement leader in the 1920s, they even came to adopt their own concept of the flow of time. Instead of history being a linear sequence along a timeline, it was depicted as emerging from a more multi-dimensional kind of space, progressing outward from a central point of origin.1 (To be honest, the more I think about this, the less crazy it seems.) As Mike Tyldesley writes,
“The German Youth Movement did not just remember differently but expressed views and ideas based on a specific conception of history that cannot be equated with what we usually call ‘modern historical consciousness’ […].”
Researching what drove these ideas, it’s difficult to avoid getting sidetracked into the obscure webs of philosophising by such thinkers as Georgs Götsch and Simmel. (I’ve been dabbling in the shallows – my little neurons can only handle so much.) But it’s worth remembering that Wandervögel was not primarily an academic movement of mature minds; its increasingly fractious factions were, theoretically at least, the product of teenage instincts, exploring knotty relationships with dogma and authority figures.
We might speculate on what the Wandervögel movement might have grown into if Hitler hadn’t clamped down and delivered its members to slaughter. Perhaps it was doomed to fizzle out, undermined by its ironic commitment to decentralisation. Perhaps only its ideas, rather than its structures, could have survived.
What happened to Wandervögel after 1933?
Despite all this wholesome dedication to uplifting the human soul, the Wandervögel movement failed to inoculate the German conscience against the state-centric world-building of the Third Reich. Their ranks were not free from anti-Semitism, and Wandervögel enthusiasts would include one of history’s most evil human beings, Heinrich Himmler – Hitler’s right-hand man, typically referred to as ‘the architect of the holocaust’. It’s beyond the scope of this post to assess whether Himmler’s beliefs evolved from anything relating to the Wandervögel tradition, or existed in spite of it (I expect the latter), but the fact that he and so many Nazis had grown up in Germany’s various pre-Hitler youth organisations should make us sceptical of the ability of their members to generate a practical vision for a better world.
After the War, new youth groups dominated, often with more political motives than the Wandervögel. The majority of young people in East Germany joined the communist Freie Deutsche Jugend, ‘Free German Youth’, which still exists. Further west, echoes of the Wandervögel movement would influence hippie culture in the 1960s.
Today, the Wandervögel tradition survives in a small, tentative way, but my research hasn’t led very far. Relevant websites are mostly quite basic, defunct or out of date, typically plastered with self-conscious declarations about non-violence and apolitical motives – statements that seem calibrated to disassociate the Wandervögel tradition from the more militant strands of German Youth culture.
What we need
You don’t want me to rehearse the various ways in which we are psychologically maladapted to the world we have created – a world which may be breaking down anyway, despite humanity achieving many of the advances that our ancestors worked for. With the pace of change set to accelerate beyond imagining, it’s worth reflecting on which of our values will stand the test of time, and how integrated we really want to be with the engines of disruption that most of us now take for granted. A system that can not upgrade itself with the requisite speed will only run so fast before something snaps, bursts or catches fire. What will that look like for us?
Robert Byron, describing the shakey socio-economic conditions that were fuelling the Wandervögel trend in 1920s Germany, could almost be describing the post-2008 Western world with its growth of #vanlife, #tinyhome, #homeiswhereyouparkit etc. (By some estimates there are over 3 million Americans living on the move today.)
“Under the disruptive influences of the immediate post-war years [that war being WWI], with the fluctuations of the mark [the German currency], the uncertainty of employment, the threat of starvation, and the consequent break-up of many homes, the vagrant impulse of every young German has been accentuated.”
That ‘vagrant impulse’ may be a romantic ideal for an unencumbered Westerner like me, but I’d argue that the last thing the world needs is another rootless generation.
Perhaps instead of massaging an affection for gallivanting over the horizon, we can learn from the Wandervögel resistance against centralisation, the peaceful questioning of received structures of legitimacy, the rejection of consumerism, and the insistence on the value of sharing art and music and spending time in nature – especially for young people. It’s not a fully-fledged vision for a functioning society, nor does it claim to be, but these are ideas for peace. And they don’t require that you set off on a tour of the world.
“And what then?”
I’d like to find out what happened to Robert Byron’s two Wandervögel friends – whether they ever did complete their Weltreise before 1936 or were sucked back into Hitler’s machine, or both.
Byron’s description of them sleeping on the open deck of a boat to Greece in 1925 feels like a gift to us of a quietly historic moment, frozen in time:
“Perhaps in days to come, the memory of this couple of young men, floating fortuitously over the surface of the earth, will serve to recall not only the miserable tragedy of a European war, but also the unsettled mentalities and bitter disappointments created by the Peace that followed.”
Byron himself would die at sea in 1941, torpedoed by a German U-boat near the coast of Scotland.
Plenty of experimental philosophising regarding the nature of time had been bubbling away in the 19th Century. Friedrich Nietzsche had repopularised the classical notion of time being cyclical, rather than linear. The title for the opening movement of fresh-air fiend Gustav Mahler’s 4th Symphony (which he began in 1896, the year of Wandervögel movement’s founding, and completed in 1900) was originally to be Die Welt als ewige Jetzzeit – ‘The World as Eternal Present’ – until Mahler decided against adding any programmatic associations to his music.