Wandervogel
반더포겔
The German youth movement that began in Steglitz, Berlin, in 1896 and became an association in 1901. Mostly middle-class grammar-school pupils broke away from school and family to hike through the countryside in a Romantic way of life, launching the German youth movement. It ended in 1933 when the Nazis dissolved the youth leagues or absorbed them into the Hitler Youth.
In depth
It grew out of hikes that Hermann Hoffmann, a shorthand teacher at the Steglitz grammar school, led with pupils from 1896, and his successor Karl Fischer founded the “Wandervogel – Committee for School Excursions” on 4 November 1901 in the Ratskeller of Steglitz town hall, with local notables as its front. Within a few years it spread across the German-speaking world and split into many branches over questions such as girls’ participation and abstinence from alcohol. It mostly kept political neutrality, and it prepared the ground for the First Free German Youth Day on the Hoher Meißner in October 1913 without officially taking part. It gave strong impulses to progressive education, naturism and the life-reform movement. Hans Blüher, who joined in 1902 as its 33rd member, caused a scandal with the third volume of his 1912 history, which portrayed the Wandervogel as an “erotic phenomenon”, and developed this into his Männerbund theory; its patron Wilhelm Jansen was also a founder of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. At the time of the Eulenburg affair it was denounced as a “pederasts’ club”. After the First World War the movement lived on in new leagues, until in 1933 the Nazis dissolved the youth leagues or forced them into the Hitler Youth.