THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 585
become wholly unsuitable. All the same, a cause for the dream existed and a goal of freedom; there also is or was real movement there and behind it, which is lacking in
all bourgeois full­scale utopias after Marx. Escape from minority, from the doll's house, from being a nation of pariahs was what was longed for in these movements;
this is the aim of the special utopia of their programme. The women's movement even contains its own utopian question: that concerning the border of sex, and it
entertains the doubt whether such a border exists at all. A piece of Thomas More, a late romantic stirring of liberalism circulates in these movements for the last time. In
places, that ‘draught of fresh air’ blows through them which a man like Ibsen wanted to send in all its lively purity through the bourgeois home and community. But the
movement ends at the bourgeois barriers erected for it and which tolerate only corruption or abstractness. Life was to resemble nothing but the nobility, nothing but
Sunday weather, but they did not see the connection whereby bourgeois life is not like that. For the liberal abstract element to come to an end, the necessary
information still lies solely in socialism even for these social dreams. Both things lie in socialism: the end of their movement and the end of the deprivation which caused
this movement to begin. The partial utopias of today repeatedly exhibit dreams of emancipation which are a sequel to or an after­ripening of the eighteenth century;
although or because the latter, apart from a few points in the programme of the Sturm und Drang, still did not in the least dream of such far­reaching emancipation.
Beginning, programme of the youth movement
The child is only to speak when it is spoken to. Even when growing up, it belongs to its parents, has always been more or less kindly enslaved. But around 1900 a will
surfaced among young people, on a fairly broad scale, to belong to nobody but themselves. Youth experienced itself as a beginning, wore its own costume, loved
travel, cooking in the open air, and was consciously green. It wished for a new life of its own, different from that of adults and better in everything, namely informal and
sincere. Family pressure was felt here to the same extent that it decreased. For only those parents no longer sure of themselves, only the home no longer stable itself
had children who renounced them and joined their contemporaries to make a fresh beginning. The former bourgeois home as well as the school corresponding to it still
at least gave a support which did