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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
What drew German teens by the millions to the Hitler Youth? The uniforms, the camaraderie, the cultish adoration of Der Fuhrer -- and lots of Aryan sex.
Dec 3, 2004 | While it remains blasphemous to say so, the post-9/11 era has made the political struggles of World War II appear just a bit retro. I dare anyone to rent Agnieszka Holland's film "Europa Europa" and try to feel as urgently implicated as they did when it was an arthouse hit in 1991. The Cold War had recently ended, and here was the first chapter of a book we'd just put down -- a story of a Jewish boy who joins the Soviet Komsomol during the war and later passes for a Hitler Youth. When the film came out, it seemed a profound statement on the interconnections and hypocrisies and brutalities of European (and therefore global) identity. What does it have to say about global identity now? Despite writers like Paul Berman who point out that Saddam Hussein's Baath Party borrowed its moves from Hitler as well as Stalin, to most people it seems as though our current global crisis has little to learn from 20th century fascists.
That's why reading a book like Michael H. Kater's "Hitler Youth" now feels so perversely like a leisure pursuit, like opening up the latest nonfiction title from Oliver Sacks and learning about the diseases other people have. And Kater is happy to guide us in our totalitarian tourism. Having previously written a book about Nazi doctors, and a trilogy on musicians in the Third Reich (published at intervals during the '90s), this new study of youth is the latest piece of his August Sander-like project, cataloging the various Nazi personas one by one.
If it's details you're after, you won't be disappointed: "Hitler Youth" is as carefully comprehensive as it is morally careful. Kater is an expert compiler of data, beginning with the early 20th century roots of German youth leagues and ending with the hideous details of 12-year-olds being sent to fight on the front lines. He makes clear that the Hitler Youth instigated its share of atrocities, but also that its members were forced to face the gory reality of war, and suffer accordingly, at a terribly young age.
What's not so well covered in this history is the question of the myth and allure of the Hitler Youth leagues for young Germans during the 1930s. Kater touches on this quite sensitively in the first few pages, and returns to it in the book's final paragraphs, but the 260 pages in between are woven almost exclusively from statistics and incidents and anecdotes. Kater's implicit argument throughout is that young Germans in the '30s gravitated to the Hitler Youth (before membership became compulsory in 1939) because the league offered them a sense of autonomy from their parents, a sense of pride and a real measure of power. His conclusion is that while Hitler Youth were not always culpable of Nazi crimes, they were certainly complicit.
Like most books about repressive regimes, "Hitler Youth" is laced with irony: The HJ (to use its standard German acronym), for instance, grew as quickly as it did because it got a leg up from the old German tradition of apolitical youth groups, which had primarily begun as individualist rebellions against "materialism and bourgeois complacency." These proto-Youth were into Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and roamed the countryside in homemade clothes; today we'd call them hippies (with the difference that they idealized war in general and World War I in particular).
