ABSTRACT
It was in the spring or summer of 1907 that girls took part in a Wandervogel outing for the first time. This was a truly revolutionary event, as for the first decade of its existence the youth movement had been exclusively a boys' society. Karl Fischer took a dim view of the presence of girls in these groups; he thought they would be a distracting and disruptive element. In January 1914, during a debate in the Bavarian Landtag, a speaker of the Catholic Centre Party denounced the Wandervogel as a 'club of homosexuals' and a den of free love. Liberal and socialist well-wishers at one time wrongly considered the German youth movement an ally in the struggle for sexual emancipation. There were such stirrings among the members of the Anfang group and there was a demand to put an end to the 'sexual monopoly' of the adults. Wyneken observed in 1915 that the youth movement needed a new 'erotic orientation'.
