THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the pot of dreams was filled with even more mud, and finally with his own blood. Although the open country was certainly meant to be liberal originally, with people
who did not belong to everyday life as guides to it and no everyday life within it. The Wandervogel had moreover found a certain nest in new schools, likewise
longitudinally through the classes, founded for the sons and daughters of liberal families. These were forest schools, Wyneken's free school community, and also a
federation of determined school reformers belonged here, represented by Danziger and Kawerau. Education was no longer handed down from above; the cultivation of
individual life, and a community spirit were attempted in these emphatic schools of youth. Noble general goals hovered about the picnic and the lamp of evening
gatherings, comradeship and even courage were cultivated. As was the love of verse; only the life itself which was afterwards in store remained unrhymed and absurd.
It lay behind a glimmer which lasted no longer than the youth that created it.
Which did not prevent this youth from feeling very rebellious. Especially as the city, seen from the campfire, seemed particularly corrupt and stunted. The word
bourgeois acquired a special resonance in the youth movement, Blüher spoke of the atrocities of the bourgeois type. He was regarded primarily as the aged and senile
type, his thrifty, economical, calculating, zestless nature was derived from this alone, and likewise the herd of bourgeois conformists: bourgeois society. There was far
less talk of exploitation, in fact the other side of the bourgeois, so lovingly elaborated even by Sombart: that of the entrepreneur, the man who takes risks, the
conqueror — met with sympathy. The hostility towards the bourgeois was therefore certainly not proletarian or akin to the proletariat; the bourgeois was regarded
instead as the counterpart to their own bohemian world, that of knights of chivalry. The society dreamed up by this kind of youth was to be ultimately ardent and strict,
anarchistic and class­bound at one and the same time. Nevertheless there was and is also a proletarian youth movement, only not an independent one, with a childish
land of its own. The young worker feels no more discriminated against by adults as such than the female worker does by men as such. The enemy of both is the
employer, their idea of the bourgeois primarily refers to the capitalist, not the nasty bourgeois conformist. Also the tension between father and son is absent or is
powerfully diminished in the working­class family; for whereas the bourgeois sees in his son only the heir, the class­conscious proletarian brings up his son to be a
comrade. Bourgeois youth thought it was being unbourgeois by carving people into age­groups, and by