Chapter 2
The Myth of Youth:
The history of Langemarck is
a history of words, not deeds, and thoughts, not actions. An insignificant skirmish in a failed war became
important for interwar Germany because of the emotions that were to be
associated with it and the resonance it was to have in a turbulent and troubled
time. At the center of the history lies
a question mark, for it is impossible to know exactly what happened at the
Battle of Langemarck in November 1914.
The actual events that were to become uniquely significant for interwar
Germany were known by few at the time and by none today. Perhaps for that very reason, Langemarck
became the focus of a powerful war myth, a myth that was to inspire and animate
many Germans in the interwar period.
The account that circulated at the time was that a youthful regiment,
while singing the Deutschlandlied, a
patriotic anthem, had charged into battle and taken the French front
lines. I call this popular account a
myth, not because it was necessarily untrue (although it probably was), but
because it crystallized a number of German beliefs about the War and about
themselves, taking on a mythological significance regardless of its truth or
falsity. There were many other battles
during the War, and many other falsified battle reports, but no other battle
matched the importance of Langemarck in the public mind; the remembrance of no
other battle would have such serious consequences.[1]
The content of the myth of Langemarck cannot be easily
separated from its popularity; it was popular precisely because the values it
embodied evoked strong feelings in the German people. The resonance of the myth lay in its depiction of German youth
sacrificing themselves for the nation.
The report did not specify the number of dead, but this silence was
itself significant, since everyone knew that such a military action would be
accompanied by considerable loss of life.[2] The myth of Langemarck was essentially a
Romantic myth, its values dating back to nineteenth-century trends in German
culture that became very powerful amidst the confusion of the Weimar era. It postulated a German past of pseudo-medieval
chivalric values, an honorable history that had been forgotten in the quest for
modern efficiency represented by parliamentary democracy. The theme of youth formed the center of the
myth because of the position of youth within Germany as a symbol of
rejuvenation and energy. The prewar years
in Wilhelmine Germany were marked by the various youth movements, movements
that exalted the vigor of youth over the conventions and dullness of
established society; this cult of youth continued in the Weimar era. The myth of Langemarck combined the valorization
of youth with an implicit call to patriotism, to worship of the nation as an
ideal. Despite, or perhaps because of,
its short history as a unified state, Germany was filled with people who
abstracted and idealized “the nation.”
Langemarck became a concrete example of the nobility of Germans acting
for the fatherland. Finally, the myth
of Langemarck added to the values of youth and patriotism the idea of
sacrifice; incarnated in the mass of people who rushed to join the colors at
the outbreak of war in 1914, sacrifice was held to be honorable and noble, the
“redemptive death of the warrior.”[3] The values of the myth were generally
apolitical, but they could be used for more aggressive purposes: the cult of
sacrifice, nation, and youth eventually proved amenable to the antidemocratic
ideology of the Right as the myth of Langemarck became connected to a rejection
of Weimar society.
At this point in late 1914, Germany concentrated its
effort on the Ypres area, attempting to force its way through the newly
established Allied line at one of its most vulnerable points. Exposed on three sides to enemy fire, the
Ypres Salient was attacked from October 18 to November 22, but with little
success. Britain managed to hold this
exposed town for the duration of the War.
On November 11, the German high command (OHL) released a communiqué
about the ongoing battles around Ypres.
Virtually all German newspapers, regardless of their political
allegiances, reported this announcement on their front pages in the days after
the battle.[4] The basis of a long-lasting and influential
myth was formed by these deceptively simple words repeated across the nation:
We made good progress yesterday in
the Yser sector. West of Langemarck,
young regiments broke forward with the song “Deutschland, Deutschland über
alles” against the first line of enemy positions and took them. Approximately 2000 men of the French
infantry line were captured and six machine guns were captured.[5]
Furthermore, the events recounted in the OHL account
probably never occurred. Most
historians agree that there was probably never such a regiment of singing
youth; if they did sing, it was most likely not out of patriotic motives but
rather to keep track of each other.
Likewise, the regiment was not predominantly or even particularly young:
in most battalions of the Fourth Army, the proportion of young volunteers of
high school and university age was less than ten percent; at most it was not
more than twenty percent. Combined,
teachers and students made up only eighteen percent of those who fought at
Langemarck.[6] Further, the evidence indicates that the
Battle of Langemarck did not take place west of Langemarck, but rather near the
town of Bixchote (at best, north-west of Langemarck); the best reason anyone
has offered for the change of location is that “Langemarck” sounds much more
Germanic than the strangely spelled Bixchote.[7] Throughout the War, the official reports of
the OHL were constructed with greater concern for the morale of the German
people than for factual accuracy. There
was a belief that the numerical supremacy of the Allies could be countered by a
high fighting spirit; this fighting spirit would be deflated by poor reports
(however factual) from the front.[8] It seems likely that this account of Langemarck,
coming as it did in the middle of a futile German assault, was propagated for
reasons of morale. Unlike other such
reports, though, this report continued to be important after the War ended. “It lost its historical reference,” taking
on a life of its own that allowed it to remain influential throughout the
interwar period.[9] When Rudolf G. Binding came to write his
account of the Battle of Langemarck in 1925, he placed the events of the
singing youth in late October; this error was unimportant, though, for the
power of the myth of Langemarck never lay in its historical accuracy.[10]
The independent youth
movement appeared around the turn of the century. It can be seen, in large part, as a function of the status of
German society in the late 1800s. A
belated and quick industrialization and modernization had left its marks on
society.[11] The bourgeoisie, especially, felt endangered
by a rapid modernization that often left them merely bystanders, their position
“undermined by the new forces and values of urban-industrial society.”[12] The problems of industrialization were even
greater for the young; many felt ignored or threatened with marginalization by
modernization.[13] As a result, the middle class, and
especially the youth of the middle class, began to protest the problems of
modern industrial society. Summarizing
these developments, Peter Stachura has argued that the youth movement “reflected
an acute boredom with contemporary society, and this was basically caused by
the failure of the technological age and urban culture to offer youth either
emotional satisfaction or moral inspiration.”[14] With its roots in an emotional discontent
with the present, it was comparable to the futurist and expressionist movements
in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent.[15] Italian futurism had arisen in similar
circumstances, engendered by profound dissatisfaction with a social system
thought lifeless; likewise, it came after a belated, rapid, and incomplete
modernization. For all the
similarities, though, the German youth movement was uniquely German in its
values. Where Marinetti and the
futurists embraced machines and technology as a way out of the stagnation of
society, the German youth movement emphasized the very things dismissed by
industrial society. It extolled the
glories of hiking in the countryside, returning to Nature and the primacy of
humans and human interaction. It
combined a Romantic view of nature with an elevation of a perceived essential
German character found in the Volk.
“Because the landscape which inspires [the Wandervögel],” wrote one
enthusiast, “is the landscape of the German Heimat
[home], such love awakens love for Volk
and fatherland ... a national-Germanic background for all their culture and
style of life.”[16]
The “Wandervögel,” a so-called “Committee for Schoolboy
Excursions,” was officially established in 1901 in Steglitz, a middle-sized
town near Berlin. It was the outgrowth
of activity at the Steglitz Grammar School, which for several years had
sponsored weekend and holiday trips to the countryside. The school children had, for example,
traveled to the Harz Mountains in 1897, to Cologne and the Rhine in 1898, and
to the Bohemian Forest in 1899.[17] Concentrating on similar outdoor excursions,
the Wandervögel quickly spread to other towns and schools in central and
northern Germany; it had much less success in southern Germany where it was
resisted by the Church. It remained a
middle-class, urban, and Protestant movement.
It had few members from the aristocracy or the lower classes; tellingly,
Wandervögel groups were likely to be attacked if they traveled through
working-class areas. By 1914, there
were over 25,000 members of the Wandervögel in 800 local branches.[18] By this time the character of the movement
had also changed somewhat: it had become more directly involved in reforming
the perceived faults of German society instead of merely withdrawing into
nature, although nature was not forgotten.
Not surprisingly, the centerpiece of these efforts was educational
reform, a reaction against the dull technical education many students despised.
What is generally called the Wandervögel was in fact a group of various organizations modeled on the original Wandervögel. In 1913, an effort was made to bring these groups together. Over 3000 people assembled on a mountain, the Hohe Meissner, forming the “First Free German Youth Conference.” The proclamation announcing the meeting on this site sacred to the youth movement summarized their position:
German youth stands before a
historic turning-point in its development.
Youth, until now only an appendage of the older generation, excluded
from the public affairs of the nation and forced into a passive role of
learning—into a frivolous, negative role in society—is beginning to assert
itself. It is attempting, independently
of the dull customs of adults and of the constraints of hateful convention, to
shape its own life.... And youth
believes that our nation needs nothing more today than such a spiritual
rejuvenation.[19]
Free German Youth, on their own
initiative, under their own responsibility, and with deep sincerity, are
determined to independently shape their own lives. For the sake of this inner freedom, they will take united action
under any and all circumstances. All
meetings of Free German Youth are free of alcohol and smoking.[20]
As Robert Wohl
notes, “by 1914, youth had become a symbol,” a symbol of national revival.[23] The War altered the fortunes of the
Wandervögel as it did of the nation, but the symbolic importance of youth was
only intensified. Between 7,000 and
10,000 members of the independent youth movement were killed in the War,
roughly two-thirds of those who went to fight.
During the War, the movement as a whole was drawn further into
politics. The Wandervögel began to
splinter as leftist and rightist factions emerged within the movement.
The revolutionary period after the War initially reunited
many of the youth groups. With the task
of national revival, youth was given a purpose in the minds even of those no
longer young. Already in 1916 Fritz von
Unruh was writing in his novel Opfergang
[Way of Sacrifice]:
We are the decisive factor. Ours is the initiative! No one will ever again take our heart
captive! In us lives youth! Behind us lie the old men! I see the flame of our purification rise
high above all everyday things, and no common fingers will ever touch it![24]
The popularity and power of the myth of Langemarck depended on the central and controversial position that youth occupied in Germany, a position determined at least in part by the course of the prewar youth movement. The range of possible interpretations of the myth was limited by the connotations the idea of youth carried for the German people. I have sought to separate the discussion of the initial content of the myth, especially regarding youth, from the discussion of the subsequent use of the myth; while such a separation is undoubtedly artificial, it does reflect one important truth. The myth was not propagated by political forces; it was not fabricated by politicians or artists; rather, it sprang fully-formed from the single report of November 1914. Uwe-K. Ketelsen says that, from the beginning, the myth of Langemarck “marched within an already preexisting field of meanings.”[28] It resonated not because it was being used by the politicians for specific goals but because it referred to already existing images and emotions. In this way, it was an unchanging whole. Ketelsen notes this immobility, claiming that “the motif developed no productive dynamic; it was only repetitive. It set free no productive fantasies; again and again and again there were its three elements: youth, nation, sacrifice (and their immanent negations: establishment, society, materialism) which it repeated ... in predetermined paths.”[29]
It cannot be denied, though, that the myth of Langemarck was appropriated to serve various political ends. In fact, during the 1920s and 1930s, it became ubiquitous, annexed most specifically to the Conservative Right. The story of the uses of the myth of Langemarck will be told later (chapter 4), but the examination of the myth itself is not yet complete. The myth of Langemarck was not, in fact, an entirely innocuous one. Even though its primary connotations were limited and apolitical, there were other, more dangerous connotations that must not be overlooked. It was these connotations which slowly moved from the background to the foreground as the myth of Langemarck changed from an apolitical fantasy to a National Socialist rallying cry. These implications were not produced by the Nazis; rather, they lay latent within the myth of Langemarck from the beginning.
The “field of meanings” within which the myth marched was primarily that outlined by the youth movement: the youth depicted in the myth of Langemarck, though not necessarily the soldiers in the actual battle, were those of the youth movement. As a result of that movement, by 1914 youth was connected to a Romantic tradition that was largely set against modern rationalism. The language of youth harked back to an imagined time of chivalry when German character was more clearly expressed in its honor and valor. Through the Wandervögel, youth was connected with nature over against the urban world. The emphasis on nature was increased during the War; wartime poetry and wartime postcards both focused on nature as a supposed Arcadia, a refuge from the filth of the front and the city. For the Germans, writes George Mosse, “nature symbolised the genuine, sadness and resurrection—but always, at the same time, a piece of eternity that could be personally appropriated and that legitimised wartime sacrifice.”[30] Hermann Löns had written in 1910 of the superiority and power of nature, imminent in and transcendent of civilization: “What is culture, what meaning does civilisation have? A thin veneer underneath which nature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the open.”[31] Nature, which was connected to youth, was held against the limitations and weakness of modern society.
Detlev Peukert holds that “the mystique of ‘youth’ was a more pervasive part of public consciousness in the Weimar Republic than it was in other contemporary societies or than it had been in other periods of German history.”[32] This valorization of youth (and nature) was not unconnected to a rejection of rationalist society. Many looked to the energy of youth to provide a new, better world in the place of the fallen Empire and the lifeless Republic. Langemarck was remembered because it was seen as an example of the willingness of youth to give themselves to their country; it was a signal of hope for the future. If the students at Langemarck had been sacrificed, they had accepted it with equanimity and patriotism, singing as they marched to certain death. The battle was not notable because six machine guns were captured, but rather because it expressed the eagerness of youth to serve the nation in its time of need.
On the surface, the youth of Langemarck were unconnected to political forces. The myth expressed a Romantic longing for the past that was not easily converted into action. Hans Schwarz wrote in 1932 about Langemarck that “one does not die so joyfully and lavishly only to be used for politics.”[33] Some historians have agreed with him; Bernd Hüpauf, after studying the myth of Langemarck, concludes that it was a “continuation of the apolitical tradition of the middle classes in pre-war Germany.”[34] In emphasizing spontaneity, individualism, and personal responsibility, it went contrary to the values of hierarchical militarism. The connections that tied youth to a rejection of society, though, argue against this interpretation. The myth of Langemarck evoked the strong emotions surrounding the issue of youth in Germany; not the least of those emotions was a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. At the same time that youths were being praised for their patriotism, many “were seeking release from rootlessness and lack of hope by joining totalitarian movements.”[35] The myth of Langemarck, echoing the völkisch sentiments of the Wandervögel, elevated a pure vision of Germany over the practical realities. One nationalist later wrote, “The German student is völkisch, and no one knows better than the German student of today that—Langemarck was völkisch.”[36]
It was not insignificant that the backward-looking myth of Langemarck opposed the status quo. One of the Weimar Republic’s greatest problems was that of legitimacy. Many of its supporters tolerated it only for lack of better alternatives; few looked to the Republic as an achievement of which to be proud. A Romantic myth that emphasized a different, better time and a different, better culture could only exacerbate this lack of legitimacy. The supporters of Weimar could not mobilize any similar myths, and this failure was a sign of the Republic’s weakness. Perceiving this absence of an emotional core, Adolf Bartels wrote in 1920 that the supporters of the republic “have spiritually nothing and are spiritually nothing.”[37] The Republic was seen by many as separate from the real German, the Germany of youth, sacrifice, and patriotism. Ernst von Salomon characterized the split between the Republic and “Germany”:
The word stood wrapped in deep
gloom, weather-beaten, beckoning, full of secrets, beaming magical powers, felt
and not yet recognized, loved and not yet bidden to them. And the word was Germany. Where was Germany? In Weimar? In
Berlin? Once it had been on the front
line, but the front fell apart. Then it
was supposed to be at home, but home deceived…. Where was Germany?… Was
it in the state? But the state sought
its form garrulously and found it in renunciation.[38]
Langemarck was not synonymous with Nazism, or at least not until the 1930s. Rather, it was a myth about the War situated within a largely predetermined set of meanings that, despite its historical inaccuracy, evoked strong emotions within many Germans. This resonance, located primarily in the emphasis on youth in a context of noble sacrifice and patriotism, contributed to the ubiquity that Langemarck was to achieve in the interwar years. Even in its purest form, though, the myth of Langemarck was open to divergent interpretations and uses; the most obvious and common interpretation was apolitical and repetitive, but the myth, with its emphasis on the destabilizing power of youth and the necessity of transforming society, could also be mobilized for more aggressive purposes. The history of the legacy of Langemarck, which will be traced in chapter 4, details how these aggressive connotations of the myth were gradually brought to the forefront and eventually adopted and adapted into a Nazi ideology that, while generally rejecting regressive Romanticism, seized upon the powerful resonance the myth of Langemarck had for the people of Germany.
[1] The closest British equivalent might be the story of Captain W. P. Nevill, who started an attack at the Somme by charging across no-man’s-land kicking a football. He was killed instantly. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 27.
[2] Bernd Hüppauf, “The Birth of Fascist Man from the Spirit of the Front,” in John Milfull, ed., The Attractions of Fascism: Social Psychology and Aesthetics of the ‘Triumph of the Right’ (New York: Berg, 1990), 49.
[3] Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 1.
[4] Hüppauf, 47-8; Uwe-K. Ketelsen, “»Die Jugend von Langemarck« Ein poetisch-politisches Motiv der Zwischenkriegszeit” in Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler, eds., »Mit unz zieht die neue Zeit« Der Mythos Jugend (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag, 1985), 70.
[5] Quoted in Ketelsen, 70 (Am Yser-Abschnitt machten wir gestern gute Fortschritte.... Westlich Langemarck brachen junge Regimenter unter dem Gesange ›Deutschland, Deutschland über alles‹ gegen der erste Linie der feindlichen Stellunge vor und nahmen sie. Etwa 2000 Mann französischer Linien-Infanterie wurden gefangen und sechs Maschinengewehre erbeutet.).
[6] Hüppauf, 47; George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 71.
[7] Hüppauf, 48.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ketelsen, 72 (Er verliert seine historische Referenz).
[10] Ibid.
[11] The idea of a “normal” path to industrialization from which Germany diverged has come under criticism recently (especially with reference to the controversial Sonderweg thesis), but it is nonetheless clear that certain features of the German process had deleterious social consequences.
[12] Peter Stachura, The German Youth Movement 1900-1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 14.
[13] Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Penguin, 1991), 95.
[14] Stachura, 15.
[15] Ibid.; Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 46; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 57.
[16] Quoted in George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 173.
[17] Stachura, 19-20.
[18] Ibid., 20-21.
[19] Quoted in Stachura, 169.
[20] Quoted in Stachura, 33.
[21] Quoted in Wohl, 45.
[22] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 179.
[23] Wohl, 45.
[24] Quoted in Wohl, 53.
[25] Stachura, 38.
[26] Quoted in Stachura., 39.
[27] Ibid., 45-6.
[28] Ketelsen, 76 (es rückte ein in ein schon präexistentes Feld von Bedeutungen).
[29] Ketelsen, 79 (...entfaltete das Motiv keinerlei eigene produktive Dynamik; es war ausschließlich repetitiv. Es setzte keine produktive Phantasie frei; immer und immer wieder werden seine drei Elemente: Jugend, Nation, Opfer (und deren immanente Negationen: Establishment, Gesellschaft, Materialismus) in den einmal festgelegten Bahnen wiederholt.).
[30] George L. Mosse, “War and the Appropriation of Nature,” in Volker R. Berghahn and Martin Kitchen, eds., Germany in the Age of Total War (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 105.
[31] Quoted in Mosse, “War and the Appropriation of Nature,” 107.
[32] Peukert, 89.
[33] Quoted in Hüppauf, 55.
[34] Hüppauf, 55.
[35] Peukert, 95.
[36] Quoted in Ketelsen, 87 (Der Deutsche Student ist völkisch, und keiner weiß besser als der Deutsche Student von heute, daß – Langemarck völkisch war.).
[37] Adolf Bartels, “The Struggle of the Age,” in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 124.
[38] Ernst von Salomon, “The Outlawed,” in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 25.
[39] Hans Thimmerman, “Der Sturm auf Langemarck,” in Hans-Jochem Gamm, Führung und Verführung, 247-8 (Und um diese Stunde ist es gewesen, daß sie Männer geworden sind…. Es war zu spät, aber es geschah trotzdem. Was noch lebend war, baute sich in Sträuchern ein, machte sich aus Rübenblättern einen Schutz gegen Sicht, schmiegte sich an, Erde an Erde. Und schoß. Und Schoß.).
[40] Stachura, 51.