Wandervögel [1] by H. M.Brock [2]
"And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and, above all, to say what they liked." - D. H. Lawrence [3]
In his 1924 'Letter from Germany', D. H. Lawrence briefly mentions the queer gangs of youths and maidens carrying rucksacks, he has observed in Heidelberg. They strike him as strange and somewhat primitive; "like loose roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes" [4], full of a new kind of faith born of the silent forest and the unalterable German soul.
Later, whilst in flowery Tuscany in the spring of 1927, Lawrence is stirred to comment on two German youths striding purposively southwards toward the sun. And this time he even names them for what they are:
"Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys [...] They were dark-haired, not blondes, but otherwise the true Wandervogel type, in shirts and short trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the rucksack, shirt-sleeves rolled back, above the brown muscular arms, shirt-breast open from the brown, scorched breast and the face and the neck glowing sun-darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the narrow street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as if oblivious of their surroundings [...] And they strode with strong strides, heedless, marching past the Italians as if the Italians were but shadows." [5]
Emphasising the uncanny, almost inhuman, but nontheless wonderful aspect of their presence, Lawrence continues:
"In spite of the fact that one is used to these German youths, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt, each time they appear and pass by. If swans, or wild geese flew honking, low over the Arno in the evening light [...] they would create the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, far-off lands which these Germans bring, and that sense of mysterious, unfathomable purpose." [6]
For whatever strange reason, the Wandervögel "make a startling impression" [7] on Lawrence in a way that other youths tramping about - including the English - do not. Watching them, transports him back in time and "Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: the mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and the Drachen and the Greifen" [8].
There's nothing ridiculous about the Wandervögel: they are simply extraordinary and one is left not quite knowing what to think or feel about them; genuinely other, they seem to belong to an unknown race and far-off land.
Perhaps that's why having been sent to Dresden as teenagers in order to complete their education, both Hilda and Constance Reid gave the "gift of themselves" [9] to sturdy German youths with whom they talked, and sang, and camped under the trees; for there's nothing as exciting as loving "creatures from the beyond, presaging another world" [10].
Notes
[1] The Wandervögel were members of a bourgeois anti-bourgeois youth movement or subsculture that existed in Germany between the years 1896 and 1933 and who subscribed to an eco-völkisch philosophy that rejected many aspects of modern urban-industrial civilisation.
Mostly, they went hiking in the woods, sang songs, sunbathed, and dreamed about reviving old Teutonic pagan values. They might be thought of as a more radical version of the Boy Scouts, although some commentators, such as Gordon Kennedy, prefer to regard them as proto-hippies. At its peak, the movement - which was divided into three main national groups - had up to 80,000 members. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the movement was outlawed and members were absorbed into the Hitler Youth or, if female, into the League of German Girls.
[2] Henry Matthew Brock (1875 - 1960) was a British illustrator. Many works of Victorian and Edwardian fiction contained his drawings.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 6-7.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Letter from Germany', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 151.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Flowery Tuscany', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Smonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 239.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 240.
[8] Ibid.
[9] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover ... p. 7.
[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Flowery Tuscany', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, p. 241.
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