ABSTRACT
The Jungdeutsche Bund had been founded in 1919 as the leading organization of the right, in opposition to the Freideutsche. But from the beginning this new movement was beset by difficulties startlingly similar to those facing their rivals on the left. The Wandervogel phase, the first period of the youth movement, had indeed come to an end, but the second era, that of the Bund, was about to begin. If the Jena convention in 1919 had been a serious setback for the Freideutsche, that which followed it in 1920 was a tragicomedy that quashed all hopes for the future of their movement as the great Bund of German youth. The Wandervogel had been a movement of reform and protest, but the society it hoped to reform and against which it protested—that of Wilhelmian Germany—had been swept away by war.
