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Models for Young Nationalists and Militarists: German Youth Literature in the First World War

2004; German Studies Association; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4140984

2164-8646

Andrew Donson,

European Cultural and National Identity

In and 1915 war fictions of wildly patriotic crowds and an exciting war of movement overwhelmed the book and magazine market for youth, displacing fairy tales, foreign classics, girls' novels, and antiwar Socialist fiction. In the most lurid of these narratives, male teenagers volunteered against their parents' wishes and fought with stupendous prowess. Police records show that though some deputy commanding generals prohibited this fiction, youth from a variety of social classes regularly circumvented the bans. The reading experience of the war youth generation arguably prepared them for the nationalism and militarism of right-wing organizations after 1918. In the decades before the First World War, several developments in Germany sparked a thriving industry in books and magazines for youths. The liberal Reich press law of 1874 freed publishers from state regulation. Advances in printing technologies like the typesetting machine and the rotary press cheapened publishing and increased profit margins. Above all, the prosperity after 1893, the achievement of near-universal literacy, and the substantial increase in leisure time gave the first generation of youth from a broad spectrum of regions and social classes the money, time, and desire to buy and read printed matter. Even those who could not afford to own many books had access to them in the abundant public and paid lending libraries. On the eve of the war, reading had become by far the most popular leisure activity. After 1914, it gradually lost ground to cinema and radio as the dominant mass media for youths. Because of television, it never again achieved its importance. In youth reading culture was arguably more vibrant than at any other time in German history.1 Reading exposed the generation born after the founding of the Reich to nationalism and militarism. Because publishers targeted a national market in pursuit of higher profits, youth generally read the same magazines and novels in Stuttgart or Ulm as in Berlin or Hamburg. Furthermore, the majority of the authors who had the education to write for youth-and the publishers who had the money to finance them-came from aristocratic and middle-class families, and many were staunch supporters of German imperialism. These authors, such as the erstwhile elementary schoolteacher Wilhelm Kotzde, or the retired cavalry general Fedor von Zobeltitz, made it a priority to promote nationalism and militarism. Less concerned about bourgeois decorum, they adopted the lurid adventure story as their model, and the This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:08:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 580 German Studies Review 27/3 (2004) sensationalism ensured commercial success. The poor quality of most youth literature meant that, in contrast to Great Britain and the United States, Germany did not experience a golden age of youth literature in the Wilhelmine era (1890-1918). The period produced no corpus equivalent to the innumerable English-language classics like The Jungle Book (1894), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Peter Pan (1904), The Wind in the Willows (1908), The Secret Garden (1909), and Tarzan of the Apes(1912). To readers today, the stories for youth from the Wilhelmine period seem crass, chauvinist, even silly. With the exception of the cowboy and adventure stories by Karl May and a few others, none are still read. Nevertheless, novels of Germans fighting for national greatness had endorsement and financing from the military, middle-class nationalists, and prominent Pan-Germanists such as Heinrich ClaB and August Keim. Though the war stories were poorly written, youth found them engaging. In the decades before 1914, they became one of the most popular genres for male youth in particular.2 The reading of this literature, together with family, schooling, and recreation, transmitted the idea that manhood was tied to youthful vigor-what Theodore Roosevelt called and in Europe and North America became a dominant concept of manliness in the early twentieth century.3 In Germany more than other countries, the middle class saw this strenuous masculinity in the vitality of the soldier, whose prestige after 1900 grew in response to the international crises of colonialism and the public's fears of national effeminacy and degeneration.4 In youth literature, youthful manliness had origins that went back to the midnineteenth century in the military histories by Gustav Nieritz and Franz Hoffmann. After their commercial successes and the onset of German imperialism in the 1890s, authors turned to more graphic and violent stories of contemporary battles in the colonies. These stories projected a masculinity whose model was the courageous and merciless young soldier, the warrior fiercely loyal to the nation.5 In the years before the outbreak of the war, this literature inspired middle-class male teenagers like Georg Heym to fantasize in their diaries and letters that a European war would end their alienation and boredom.6 The promise of adventure and manhood in this patriotic youth literature doubtlessly inspired tens of thousands of other young men to volunteer in August 1914. This article suggests, however, that war literature was less popular than other genres for youth before but that it became the most popular genre during the First World War. Moreover, after the tone of the nationalism and militarism intensified. Youth literature during the war accordingly transmitted to a wider audience than before the myths of heroism, patriotism, sacrifice, afterlife, adventure, and manhood. Like teachers and leaders of youth clubs, most authors of youth literature wanted to mobilize youth in support of the war and reproduced the same patriotic portraits, shibboleths, and concepts ofthe Spirit of 1914 that dominated adult literature. They depicted the German people in August as transfixed by This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:08:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms