The Jewish Question

In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, at a convention of the Freideutsche youth, certain Franz Rust declared that the Jewish question was the most important problem facing mankind. The youth movement had appeared on the scene a few years after the great antisemitic wave of the eighteen-eighties and nineties had subsided. Karl Fischer had social contacts with Jews and wanted them to establish an organization of their own, so that nation would stand beside nation and each would know its place. He believed that the Jews should profess a Semitic culture. The anti-Jewish campaign reached its climax with the publication of a special issue of the Wandervogel Fuhrerzeitung which caused an uproar throughout the organization. Occasionally, the Jewish attitude revealed what can only be described as a certain lack of dignity. The 1913-14 Jewish crisis in the youth movement has to be viewed against the wider background of developments in Germany at that time.