ABSTRACT
A PRODIGIOUS wave of enthusiasm swept over German youth at the outbreak of the world war in 1914. ‘We had not known the reason of our existence . . . youth had seemed to us a burden and a curse,’ wrote Ina Seidel, in her poem ending: ‘O holy fortune, to be young today!’1 Those who had previously found no dominant aim in life now felt that they knew the meaning of their destiny-total identification with the Fatherland in its hour of utter most peril. ‘How stupid it is to ask what is our attitude to the war! Anyone who finds time to think about it shows that he does not know how to feel with his people, and is shutting himself up against the blessing that fate intended for him.’2 If any explanations were needed, they were to be found in the first appeal by the Wandervogel leader Neuendorff; the war had come ‘because the other peoples could no longer hold their own in peaceful competition with German power, German industry, and German honesty . . . they perfidiously sought to defeat Germany by brute force and weight of numbers.’3
