THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and allowed out into the forest before it was called together and put to use, before they were no longer made to ramble but to march. The Wandervogel* is not just a
German phenomenon but above all a petit­bourgeois one, hence the blurred nature of his dream both in terms of class and content. This kind of fuzziness is different
from youthful vagueness, and it is only roughly connected with the striving for candour, with student fraternities, hatred of everyday life, and the longing for elemental,
unbroken life. One particular reason for it lay above all in the fact that youth was not merely experienced as a condition but wrongly as a class of its own. Or also: a
purely organic longitudinal section was drawn through all classes: that which fell on the side of youth thereby already seemed to have contents of its own, not just its
own tempo. Schultz­Hencke, one of the leaders at the time, thus spoke of an ‘overcoming of parties by youth’. A petit­bourgeois sense of harmony, a petit­bourgeois
deadening thus pretended to be Young German,† Free German,‡ an ‘advance guard’, even a ‘fountain of youth’ or various other things. That is why the youth
movement could be so easily captured, there were denominational federations, again in accord with the family, especially when the mother had an earphone hairstyle
herself, and the father plucked the lute himself. The longing for a community such as did not exist among adults finally listened to Hitler; for if there were no new
contents to counter old people, there were still new burning­blowing­overblown words, and to counter those old people who were not yet fired with blood lust there
was power. The tension between father and son and the revolt of the son against the oppressive father was replaced by the parents' fear of the member of the Hitler
Youth. With him the seemingly changing society enters the home; relationships which had been faltering for a long time through bourgeois insecurity were now
completely and most alarmingly overturned. The fact that the Father­Ego, against which the dream of the young was fighting, had merely been replaced by the much
harsher one of a murderous state did not occur to them. The young petit bourgeois obviously was not himself brought on to the path that could help him by his youth
alone, by the reform of life which was to pass through all classes with a green light. Silt, mud, mustiness, and business were little affected by cooking in the open air in
the forest and by the open country that shone beyond it;
* Literally ‘bird of passage’, a member of the Wandervogel youth movement.
† A reference to Das Junge Deutschland, a revolutionary group of writers after 1830.
‡ A reference to Freie Deutsche Jugend, a youth movement in East Germany.