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This book examines the period around 1900 when young laborers were considered an official social problem in the German Empire. Chapter 2 demonstrates the structural foundations and preconditions of the youth salvation campaign. It analyzes the position of young workers in Germany's urban population, their rapidly changing roles in the labor force, and their legal status. Chapter 3 explores the image of young laborers as sketched by the youth savers, the concrete social ills they addressed, and the remedies they proposed. Chapter 4 compares the schools in Dusseldorf with those in Munich. Chapter 5 contrasts the youth work of the Protestant and Catholic churches and discusses the difficulties that both churches encountered in trying to win young workers. The genesis of the Socialist youth movement and its relations with the imperial authorities and the youth salvation campaign are the subjects of chapter 6. Chapter 7 explores the characteristics of the new, more intense, and more politicized phase and their consequences. Chapter 8 considers the inclusion of young females in the salvation campaign. Focuses of chapter 9 are young workers and youth cultivation in war. Chapter 10 draws conclusions about the significance of the battle for young workers in Imperial Germany. Questions are raised about lines of continuity between the youth policy of the Empire and the policies of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. The book contains 33 references, 56 pages of endnotes, and an index. (YLB)

Despite considerable apprehension on the part of government officials and army commanders, the response of young laborers to the outbreak of the war and their behavior during its first year and a half could be perceived as a confirmation of the considerable effectiveness attained by the prewar youth salvation campaign in instilling patriotic sentiment. Initially industrial continuation school students volunteered in large numbers for premilitary training, and generally they celebrated nationalist commemorations like the kaiser's birthday with enthusiasm. As the Social Democratic party acceded to the Burgfrieden, the peace of the fortress, suspending class struggle for the duration of the war, and as older members and advisers to the Socialist youth movement were drafted, the Free Youth faded into a shadow existence. The spirit of patriotic harmony also extended to youth cultivation activities. Swayed by the general nationalist euphoria, the Catholic Church, which had been disenchanted by the increasingly military direction taken by prewar government youth activity, a direction exemplified by the Young Germany League, at first stopped criticizing government youth policy. Even some sectors of the Socialist party and affiliated subcultural associations like the Worker Gymnasts moderated their criticisms and expressed some interest in incorporating their programs into the broader youth cultivation campaign. As one well-known Rhenish Protestant teacher, active in youth cultivation, proclaimed, echoing the kaiser, “The storm wind of war has swept away all the party haggling of the German people.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although some significant modifications in official youth policy were introduced during the Weimar Republic and several major ones under the Nazi regime, nonetheless, in large measure the youth salvation campaign during the late Empire had established the discourse, the range of policy options, and the bureaucratic and institutional framework available to public officials through World War II and beyond. Certainly various aspects of youth cultivation were given more solid legal underpinnings during the Weimar Republic. Indeed, legislators passed a raft of legislation concerning youth, and various ministries issued a battery of decrees. Thus, for example, Article 118 of the Weimar Constitution made possible legislation protecting youth against questionable public presentations and penny dreadfuls, and Article 122 stated that youth was to be protected “against exploitation, as well as ethical, spiritual and physical neglect.” The Youth Welfare Law of 1922 guaranteed youth the right to education and systematized some of the prewar experiments with welfare education for delinquent and wayward youths. The juvenile justice system and its procedures were regularized and generalized in the Youth Court Law of 1923. On the basis of Article 118 of the Constitution, a cinema law went into effect in 1920 admitting youths under eighteen only to films approved by special boards in Berlin and Munich. A similar law controlling youthful access to “trashy and dirty” literature went into effect in 1926. Blocked on financial grounds by the federal states was a law proposed by the interior minister and supported by educational reformers to mandate vocational school instruction for all post–primary school youths, including females, until their eighteenth birthdays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1911 marked a major inflection point in the trajectory of the youth salvation campaign. That year both the tendencies and developments characteristic of the campaign to save working-class youth since 1900 reached a culmination, and at the same time there was a sharp break from the campaign's previous direction and activities. In the first place, the Prussian state assumed a considerably expanded role as the motor force, steering mechanism, and coordinating center of youth activity. The drive for centralization undertaken by the administrative bureaucracy led to the subsumption of much local initiative under central state direction and resulted in far greater uniformity in youth policy. Because of the secular character of state policy, it also diminished the role of the Catholic Church in shaping youth welfare measures. Second, in response to prodding from the army, youth work underwent a pronounced militarization, with emphasis placed on building paramilitary formations like the Jungdeutschlandbund (Young Germany League). Third, as we have already seen in part in the previous chapter, these shifts were accompanied by a far more aggressive attack on the Socialist youth movement. The major source of impetus for the new course was the proclamation of the Youth Cultivation Edict by the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs on 18 January 1911. Even the date of the proclamation underscored its importance, since it coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Empire. Another clue to its importance was indicated by the neologism Jugendpflege (youth cultivation) coined to replace the previously standard Jugendfürsorge (youth welfare). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 30 April 1913, slightly more than two years after the promulgation of the Prussian Youth Cultivation Edict, the minister for religious and educational affairs, Trott zu Solz, issued a new edict that extended government financial support to youth cultivation activities for post-school-age females. The reason for this inclusion, according to the new edict, was that … whoever wishes to raise a physically and morally strong, God-fearing, monarchical, and patriotic generation must also help ensure that young females are healthy in body and soul, of firm character, and armed with the knowledge and ability that are indispensable for their future profession as helpmate of the man, educator of children, nurturer of family happiness, bearer and protector of good morals. Although the edict declared that, in general, youth cultivation for post-school-age females should be pursued in the same manner as that for young males, nonetheless some means would necessarily be gender specific: Essentially different are only such means that in part serve to protect against those dangers to which the female sex is specifically vulnerable and that lead in part to a higher evaluation of the profession of housewife and mother and should help teach and develop the necessary qualities and skills to this end. Among the measures recommended by the new edict were the promotion of physical culture through gymnastics, hikes, and gardening and the establishment of simple, homey rooms or recreational centers for economically active young women, where standard youth cultivation activities like lectures, religious instruction, singing, and sociable gatherings could take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most clerical youth savers favored establishing continuation schools and continued to support them after their establishment, many criticized the absence of religion in the Prussian schools. Others questioned whether these schools served as an adequate bulwark against secularization or the ostensible moral dangers facing young urban males, even in states like Bavaria, where religious education was mandatory. All agreed that however useful, continuation schools failed to provide sufficient moral fortification and could under no circumstances supplant pastoral care for the young. Hence as the youth campaign quickened at the turn of the century, both major churches undertook much more strenuous and systematic drives to recruit young employed males to religious youth associations. Despite certain differences in accent, such as the far more straightforward championing of youth welfare legislation by Catholic officials, the purposes, organizational forms, and activities of both Catholic and Protestant youth associations were broadly similar. Yet the results of these drives diverged considerably. Except in a few anomalous cases like Essen, Protestant efforts to woo young workers were minimally effective, whereas the Catholic Church was generally able to build, if not retain, a significant base of young workers. In order to explain these divergent results, we will examine the youth work of the Protestant Church before turning to that of the Catholics. By 1900 the Evangelical Church could already rely on a lengthy experience of working with youth. The first youth associations were organized in northern Germany during the Protestant revival of the 1830s, and the Inner Mission could look back with pride on a long history of charitable endeavor on behalf of orphans, the poor, and other endangered youths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins and development of systematic German youth policy were direct results of the fears and anxieties shared by government officials, teachers, clergy, and other social reformers about the growing strength and widening influence of the Social Democratic party. At one level, youth savers regarded socialism as a clear and serious menace to the unity of the nation and to the stability of the social and political order. At another level, they viewed socialism as a manifest symptom of a host of debilitating and pernicious diseases associated with an advancing modern economy and polity: materialism, hedonism, urbanization, mass popular culture, democracy, and secularization. Thus, as we have seen, major youth savers charged the Socialists with fostering pleasure seeking, demanding arrogance, and irreligiosity among the young. In whatever avatar the Socialists appeared, whether as actual social revolutionaries or as symbols of disorder, youth savers found them deplorable. The Socialists challenged both their authority and their most cherished beliefs and values, whether their intense loyalty to the Imperial State, their idealism, their religiosity, their notions of social and political harmony or their commitments to personal responsibility, individualism, and social inequality. Hence anti-Socialism became the keystone, holding together the disparate building blocks that constituted the youth salvation campaign. Almost all youth programs contained a strong dose of anti-Socialism prescribed to weaken the viselike grip in which the Socialists ostensibly held young workers. Civic education in the continuation schools was to teach young workers that their future welfare depended on Germany's strength, which in turn hinged on class cooperation rather than conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Georg Kerschensteiner, Oskar Pache, and the other youth reformers had advocated after the turn of the century, mandatory industrial continuation schools became the paramount municipally sponsored socializing agencies for young urban working-class males who had completed elementary school and entered the labor force. Although playing down the controversy these schools generated in Germany, in 1907 M. E. Sadler, an English historian of education in Manchester, concisely summarized the combination of concerns about national competitiveness and moral policing, of urban anxieties and schemes for reasserting discipline that inspired the decisive transformation of these schools: The view that technical training following upon a good general education has become indispensable to the industrial and commercial success of a nation commands the unreserved assent of the German people.… And therefore as soon as it was realized that modern conditions of industry and commerce threatened to deprive young people of the educational care that was previously provided through apprenticeship, the idea of compulsory attendance at suitable continuation schools rapidly grew in favour among the workpeople and, though more slowly, among the mass of employers also. But it was not to economic interests alone that the growth of this opinion was due. Moral considerations supported it. Fears were felt that the moral welfare of the nation would suffer if no measures were taken to counteract the deteriorating influences of town and city life during the first years of a youth's freedom from the discipline of day school life. Although it was only around 1900 that mandatory industrial continuation schools spread throughout Germany, they had a long prehistory, and their legal foundation had been laid during the early years of the Reich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mentioned in Chapter 1, in terms of the “natural history” of the youth problem, the conferences of the Center for Workers' Welfare Institutions and Protestant Social Congress and the Erfurt essay contest in 1900 began the progression from the stage of awareness to the stages of policy determination and reform. The conferences and writings of the reformers served three fundamental purposes. First, they traced the origins of the working-class youth problem in order to determine its elements and measure its dimensions. Second, they explored in detail particular facets of the youth problem that they considered most serious: the deteriorating health of young workers, the declining morals of urban youth, and the rising rate of juvenile delinquency, among others. Third, they attempted to hammer out programs of legislation, institutional reform, and officially sanctioned and financed activities that could ameliorate, if not eradicate, the youth problem. Behind these endeavors lay an image of young workers that would be sketched at these conferences and would persist through the war, albeit with some minor retouching. Many of the binary oppositions that are standardly used to characterize the “Great Transformation” originated in the social thought of Imperial Germany: Ferdinand Tönnies's “community” versus “society,” Max Weber's contrast between traditional and rational action. The rapidity of Germany's industrialization and urbanization in the last half of the nineteenth century gave rise to a widespread sense of displacement and estrangement that prompted numerous German thinkers to grapple with the meaning of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Who has the youth, has the future!” At the turn of the century this shibboleth, sometimes attributed to Luther, became the battle cry of a nascent campaign launched by middle-class reformers to capture the hearts and minds of young urban German workers. Soon male laborers between the ages of fourteen and twenty, or “between primary school and barracks” in the then current phrase, became the cynosure of public debate and policy. The campaign was undertaken to protect them from a host of ostensible moral dangers associated with urban life, to save them from the unpatriotic influence of the Social Democratic party (SPD), and to better their health and upgrade their industrial skills as means of promoting national efficiency, both in the economic and military spheres. Dating with exactitude the origin of the youth salvation campaign that was to sweep late Imperial Germany is impossible. Like most moral crusades, it germinated slowly before erupting forcefully into public consciousness. Although there was no sense of a generalized problem with young workers in the 1870s, one can certainly discover examples of the concerns and rhetoric adopted by the turn-of-the-century youth salvation campaign. Thus, in 1878 Fritz Kalle, a Saxon factory owner and well-known advocate of popular education, in a speech before the Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik), an association of influential government officials and academics opposed to Manchester liberalism and committed to state financed social reform, denounced the spread of youthful wildness (Verwilderung) and loss of moral restraint that, he believed, were results of the decline of the artisanal order and the rise of the factory system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the youth salvation campaign at the turn of the century was certainly conditioned by middle-class perceptions of young workers' heightened visibility in Germany's flourishing urban centers and of their ever-greater indispensability as a major component of the Empire's economically vital industrial labor force. Young workers became both symbols and symptoms of the rapid social and economic modernization that Germany was undergoing: the massive migration from rural settlements and small towns to large cities, the shift from employment on farms and in handicraft workshops to wage labor in factories and offices, the transformation of Germany from an agrarian to an industrial state. Thus an analysis of youth as a sector of the population and as part of the work force during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forms a necessary prerequisite for comprehending the anxieties, aspirations, and demands of the youth savers. In this context, it is also worthwhile to examine the legal provisions applying to youth in the Industrial Code. There are several reasons for doing so. First, since factory and apprenticeship regulations determined matters like the length of the workday and safety precautions, they concretely affected the physical and material well-being of young workers. Recognizing this, youth savers could propose amendments to the laws that would, for example, improve the health of young workers, thus safeguarding their fitness for military service or motherhood, as the case might be. Second, the laws embodied widely shared middle-class assumptions about the degree of autonomy youth should have from their families, the role of adults as moral overseers and preceptors, and the nature and importance of learning to labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]