Dietrich Bonhoeffer has gone down in history as one of the most famous dissidents against Nazi Germany. Ultimately, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, a mere three weeks before Adolf Hitler took his own life. When Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, Bonhoeffer was a student chaplain at the Technical College in Charlottenburg. The next day he appeared on a radio show to discuss an essay he’d written entitled “The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Führer.”

Today, this appearance is remembered chiefly for two things. The first is that Bonhoeffer warned that “if the leader (Führer) does not repeatedly provide the led with clear details on the limited nature of the task and on their own responsibility, if the leader tries to become the idol the led are looking for—something the led always hope from their leader—then the image of the leader shifts to one of a misleader, then the leader is acting improperly both toward the led as well as toward himself.”

The second is that the broadcast was abruptly cut off. No one is sure who was responsible for ending the broadcast but it seems to be an example of preemptive censorship, since the Nazis had not had time yet to gain control of what was permissible to say on the radio.

What interests me though is that the conversation was focused on the younger generation. Bonhoeffer opens the discussion by asking,

Why all these constant questions about the younger generation, about their thoughts, their hopes, and their strengths? Why these questions at a time when, as never before, it is practical ability, acquired skills, and well qualified knowledge that are important: that is, experienced adults and certainly not youth? Is it the anxious curiosity of insecure parents who want to know how things will continue after they are gone that finds its expression here? Is it the sensationalism of our times, which is as impatient for the “new” associated with the younger generation as it is for the latest in summer fashion? Is it an unnatural basking in their own reflection on the part of youth themselves, made vain by old fools because of their uniqueness and beauty?

These questions are asked about every generation of young people, but some generations more than others.  Bonhoeffer’s questions could have been set in America in the 1960’s when people also noticed a significant rift between youth culture and the values of their parents. At that time, the impact of commercialism was a major focus, with long hair and infrequent bathing becoming a form of protest against soap, shampoo and deodorant advertisements. Hippies went off the grid, joined communes and tried to go “back to nature.”

An earlier form of this arose in Germany in the late 19th-Century.

In 1896 the Wandervogel, a popular movement of youth groups who protested against industrialization, was founded in Berlin, and its members soon derived many vital concepts from the ideas of earlier social critics and Romantics, ideas that had extensive influence on many fields at the onset of the 20th century.

To escape the repressive and authoritarian German society at the end of the 19th century, its values increasingly transformed by industrialism, imperial militarism, as well as by British and Victorian influence, groups of young people searched for free space to develop a healthy life of their own away from the expanding cities. Expressing a romantic longing for a pristine state of things and older diverse cultural traditions, they turned to nature, confraternity and adventure.

This was called the German Youth Movement, and it developed quite strongly over the first third of the 20th Century. After World War One, it took on a different and more mainstream character, with organized foreign trips and even competing ideologies. But the movement also shared German culture’s broader disillusionment with the outcome of the war and onerous conditions of the Versailles Treaty that ended it.

Just as the rock and roll music of the 1950s and 1960’s had moved from the countercultural to the mainstream by the 1970s, and the Hippies of the 1960’s became Yuppies by the 1980’s, the countercultural impetus for the Wandervogel in the 1890’s had morphed by the early 1930’s into something parents embraced for their children.

In fact, many kids in these (often expensive) youth groups saw themselves as a privileged elite. So, when the Nazis came to power and established the Hitler Youth, the more established youth groups looked down on them as an unsophisticated rabble.

…there were also many in the German Youth Movement who saw their associations as an elite superior to the more primitive Nazis. Some groups were genuinely democratic, or even left wing. Many more, even some of those who tended to the right, still wanted to carry on their independent work and existence as organisations. This led inescapably to a confrontation with the Nazi state, since the Nazi state did not allow any youth groups separate from the Hitler Youth.

This led to an interesting development. Some youth organizations persisted despite no longer being permitted. And, as with every generation, there were young people whose idealism would not allow them to go along with the demands of the system. They dropped  out. Some became juvenile delinquents. When war eventually came to Germany, just as with every war, there were deserters. And, in Nazi Germany, there was also no shortage of shunned and persecuted people who sought shelter and refuge from the state.

All of this coalesced during World War Two into an underground movement of kids. It wasn’t only their youthful idealism and rebellious nature that made this possible. Military service was only compulsory at the age of 17, so anyone younger than that could act almost like a normal teenager.

One of the more notable examples of this were the Edelweiss Pirates.

The Edelweiss Pirates were a loosely organized group of youths opposed to the status quo of Nazi Germany. They emerged in western Germany out of the German Youth Movement of the late 1930s in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth…they consisted of young people, mainly between the ages of 14 and 17, who had evaded the Hitler Youth by leaving school (which was allowed at 14) and were also young enough to avoid military conscription, which was only compulsory from the age of 17 onward.

You could consider them ruffians. They took particular pleasure in beating up members of the Hitler Youth. They worked in the black market economy. And they acted out against the authorities in many ways, including in some cases by harboring deserters, Jews and other undesirables. They had secret urban hideouts but also defied free movement restrictions to go on camping trips away from the prying eyes of the police state.

But all of this took time to develop. When Bonhoeffer made his now famous radio appearance on the second day of the Third Reich, his impression of the youth movement didn’t account for this kind of dissent. In fact, he saw that the youth had come more in line with their parents over the last decade.

…the problem of the younger generation, at least in its very provocative form as a “father and son” problem, has been overcome, on the one hand, because this battle has been fought out. On the other hand, however, there has also been a major shift in the entire way of looking at things. Today—in contrast to the period ten years ago—the younger generation is no longer interested in being young and in its right to youthfulness. Instead, they see themselves as included together with their parents in serving a common future, although each in his own way.

Then as today, however, the guarantor for justice, sense, and success is the “Führer.” The image of the “leader,” as it arose in the youth movement, has undergone considerable transformation in the recent past, but it has ultimately become the only common denominator for the youth in all their desires, the symbol of the younger generation. The political, ideological, and religious ideas of the younger generation are symbolized in the image of the “Führer,” and its transformation mirrors their emotional and political history.

What’s interesting about this is that it shows that the thirst for a Führer among the German youth wasn’t a product of indoctrination in the Hitler Youth, but rather predated the establishment of the Nazi state. Bonhoeffer goes so far as to say that this thirst was the only common denominator of the youth and “the symbol of the younger generation.” But it was a new development.

Where does this particular fire, this brilliance, and this pathos contained in the concept of leader (Führer) as used by the youth of today come from? Those in their forties can assure us that in their youth such talk of a leader was completely unknown.

Ordinarily, I’d see this youthful desire for a strong leader to wipe away the establishment as countercultural, but as Bonhoeffer notes, by the time Hitler took power it had come closer to a consensus view shared by parent and child alike. This speaks to the failure of the Weimar Republic and the exhaustion of the German people in the midst of the Great Depression. There was no one left to protect and defend the institutions, so the institutions fell like a house of cards.

By the 1940’s however, particularly after the war began to go badly for the Germans, the countercultural element reemerged. If in the 1890’s German youth rebelled against “authoritarian German society and imperial militarism,” the same happened with the Edelweiss Pirates and like groups.

Nevertheless, government repression never managed to break the spirit of most groups, which constituted a subculture that rejected the norms of Nazi society. While the Edelweißpiraten assisted army deserters and others hiding from the Third Reich, they have yet to receive recognition as a resistance movement (partly because they were viewed with contempt by many of their former Youth Movement comrades because of their “proletarian” backgrounds and “criminal” activities).

I actually think of the Edelweiss Pirates a little bit like the punk rock movement in the UK and United States. Punk was partly a response to rock music going mainstream. You couldn’t make your parents angry with rock music when they were listening to Classic Rock radio stations. Punk was a new way to reject mainstream values. Of course, it was also an attempt to make virtues out of shortcomings–a way for misfits to fit in. In this way, it was no different from other youth movements, from the hippies to the Goths.

Just like punk curdled into the Skinhead movement, the Edelweiss Pirates curdled after the war, becoming known for attacking Russian and Polish displaced people and the occupying forces, including Brits and Americans. They were part of marginal society, virtuous mainly because the German establishment they resisted was run by fucking Nazis.

Still, they saw a shitty, repressive establishment and they resisted at great personal risk.

On 25 October 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the group, and in November of that year, a group of thirteen people, the heads of the Ehrenfelder Gruppe, were publicly hanged in Cologne.

With all appropriate caveats, the Edelweiss Pirates can serve as an example today. Resistance demands courage, and sometimes it comes from underground. Sometimes the kids show the way.

Help the oppressed. Be a punk. Be a pirate.