ABSTRACT
Officially, the German youth movement was born in the late hours of the evening of 4 November 1901 in a back room of the Ratskeller in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin. Its roots can, however, be traced back for at least one hundred years, to the period of 'Storm and Stress', the Burschenschaft, and above all to German romanticism. Europe had made unprecedented economic and technical progress between 1860 and 1900. In Germany, because of the weakness of the liberal movement itself, the movement was pre-liberal, romantic, in some respects medieval. The romantics glorified the peasantry in its bondage and were opposed to the growth of industry and trade. The whole development of the German youth movement was shaped by the impact of romantic philosophy, by a glorification of the past fraught with misgivings for the future. In Germany proper the youth movement never really struck deep roots in such Catholic areas as the Rhineland, Hesse, Alsace-Lorraine, or Upper Silesia.
