'Who Has the Youth, Has the Future': The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany

Virtually all discussions of the problematic character of youth and society in twentieth century Germany begin with the middle class Wandervogel and end with the Hitler Youth. In this revisionist study Derek S. Linton argues that youth emerged as an important social problem around 1900 without any reference to the Wandervogel. Instead, fears of socialism, urban disorder, mass culture, and youthful independence prompted Liberal social reformers to constitute young workers as a social problem...