Schism, Romanticism and Organization: Anfang, January–August 1914

Abstract

During its period of unity (1912 to January 1913), the radical youth movement Anfang (Beginning) best known through its eponymous journal Der Anfang1 successfully communicated its programme to Austrians and Germans in a way that would change public consciousness and influence events. It created a youthful public opinion ready for dialogue with adults over its demands: youth should express itself freely, even on sexual matters; at school it should be self-governing in direct democratic assemblies with the participation of teachers. Anfang's period of unity saw it do, in other words, what youth movements do best. This article, however, will focus on the following period of schism. Becalmed momentarily by government repression in Austria and Bavaria (27 January to March), the movement tacked enthusiastically to a more romantic course, then splintered into purposefully organized subgroups. This article attempts to understand these changes in political, social, economic and historical psychoanalytic terms. It employs a theory of the mentality and political and economic behaviour of youth based to some extent on the description and theorization of the changes by the charismatic Viennese student editor, Siegfried Bernfeld (1892-1953; later a Jewish Nationalist leader, psychoanalyst and synthesizer of Freud and Marx). The article shows how the changes followed a sequence that repeated itself in the youth movements of the 1960s: first, politicizing and publicizing deeply-felt personal needs; then increasingly stressing romantic ideas like youthful moral superiority; finally, schism. Anfang was the twentieth century's first left-wing political youth movement whose main concern was youthful independence vis-a-vis adult authority. The movement, centred in Vienna and Berlin, made itself known when three major figures, all Jewish, established Der Anfang, which first appeared in May 1913. Bernfeld was the group's leading personality. The other editor was Georges Barbizon (a Parisian living in Berlin whose real name was Georg Gretor; alongside university students, he was studying 'for himself', performing the technical editorial tasks as an apprenticeship for a journalistic career).2 The