Governing through Nature: National Youth Movements on Camp, 1900-1940

This paper, which was presented at the conference "Making a New World? Re-forming/designing Modern Communities in Interwar Europe (KULeuven, June 2006), serves as an initial exploration of a larger research project concerned with the modern condition of the camp. The paper focuses on the fundamental ambivalence between freedom and discipline in the nature/society connections implicated in the social practice of camping. __________________________________________________

National youth movements have, from their institution around the turn of the century, strongly invested in experiences of nature. At the same time, concepts such as Gemeinschaft, community and nation have figured frequently in the texts of early youth movements and organizations. Thus, through social activities such as hiking and camping, youth movements have evoked particular symbolic forms of collectivity. In this paper, we will conceive of the social practice of camping as a lens through which we can understand some of the changing relations between youth, nature and society.

Why were early youth movements attracted to experiences of nature? Which forms of communality are invoked through these experiences? And finally, how do the social practices of camping and hiking figure not only in the youth movement, but have a larger societal importance?

The paper starts with an examination of early youth movements around the turn of the century, and the experiences of nature and belonging they entail. In a second part, I focus on the communal camp as a ‘built’ environment with particular internal logic and organization. In the interwar period, the social practice of camping becomes part of a national program. Thus, I will look at the design and layout of organized camps in the late 1920s and 1930s, at a time when these environments became objects of large-scale governmental design, planning and management.


1. The German Wandervogel: Nature and Nation

In Germany, the youth movement originates around the turn of the century with the institution of the Wandervogel. This association of local bourgeois youth in Steglitz near Berlin started to undertake long hiking trips in the nearby region in order to be ‘in close contact with nature’. Although several confessional associations, such as the Boys’ Brigade and the YMCA (or Young Man’s Christian Association), already existed in other countries, the German Wandervogel movement has been considered exceptional in that is largely organized by youth rather than by controlling adults. In what follows I will contest this binary between so-called free and controlled or disciplinary movements.

Despite its local origin, the Wandervogel association very soon instigated a nation-wide movement of local groups, who consisted largely of members from bourgeois backgrounds and were united by the idea of a ‘free’ experience of nature. Their main practice was wandern, drifting or hiking through the German landscape. Although fed by heterogeneous and incompatible elements, the movement contained a naturalistic impulse to go ‘back to nature’. It was situated in the context of a more general bourgeois anxiety in turn-of-the-century Germany. Against the uncontrolled consequences of bourgeois modernization and urbanization, the idea of ‘Nature’ functioned to reinvigorate a pathological and corrupted Culture. Youth was thus experienced – paradoxically – as proponent of a more ‘natural’ culture.

Although in many Wandervogel representations the natural landscape was often depicted as a highly individualistic realm, and figured as a purely visual natural backdrop for a distanced panoramic appropriation, its concrete experience was actually a more communal one. Hence, the importance for the conception of nature in the youth movement is the changing tension between individual and communal experience.

The national Meisnerfest, also called Ersten Freideutschen Jugendtag, epitomizes this tension. Held in 1913 on the Hohe Meißner hills near Kassel, this event brought together 2000 young people of different youth movements. In the idealized representations of this camping experience by the famous Wandervogel photographer Julius Groß, the gently rolling hills of this near-ideal German landscape figure as the all-encompassing frame for the camp activities. Games and contests, dances and campfires were portrayed against this symbolic landscape of the German youth. The gathering signified not only youthfulness, but also and more particularly German-ness, as the location had been chosen for of its representational value (a century earlier the Germans had won a national victory which was celebrated in the Warburgfest). In the Hohe Meisner gathering, at the eve of WWI, the surrounding landscape functioned as a mythic place, where the youth movement found concrete experiences of nature and national community. As such, the communal camp provided a tactile demonstration of its values of natural experience and social harmony.

The Wandervogel hiking trips suggest that walking and hiking are not only to arouse feelings of natural beauty, but also, the love for the natural landscape as a communal world. The natural landscape thus came to be understood as a static Kulturlandschaft, in which a self-evident cohesion between natural landscape and national Gemeinschaft is assumed. This reflects an idea not only of natural conservation but also of the political Heimat: as such, the Wandervogel movement contains a desire for social closure of the natural landscape.


2. The Boy Scouts and the Duties of Citizenship

Around the same time that the Wandervogel evolved into a national movement in Germany, the Boy Scout movement was established. Taking previously existing groups, such as the Boys’ Brigade and the YMCA as a basis, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, famous founder of the Boy Scouts, was the first to transform the military practice of scouting (the exploration of enemy territory) into a peaceful activity for young boys. The first camping expedition took place on Brownsea Island in 1907, and quickly led to the institutionalization of the Boy Scouts as a nation-wide movement.

Scouting was to instill specific civic values in the inner character of the boys, values such as ‘resourcefulness’, ‘self-discipline’, and ‘self-improvement’. Many historians have pointed at the imperialistic undertones of the Boy Scouts, and the hopes they mobilized for upholding the British Empire at a time of difficulty - namely at the height of European nationalism in the beginning of the new century.

Representations and personal testimonies of the communal camp, as it figures in the Boy Scouts’ propaganda and contemporary literature, point at the ways in which the movement utilized nature as the pragmatic testing ground for making youth into good citizens. Already in 1908 Baden-Powell called the Scout movement “a school of citizenship through woodcraft”. Nature was thus conceived as the means by which good citizens could be created.

Despite their differences, the early German and British youth movements are both voluntary national organizations that employ nature to articulate particular values of nation and citizenship. Due to the distinct historical conceptions of citizenship, this national idea was expressed very differently in the respective youth movements. Whereas in Germany the inward-looking ideal of nationhood is understood as Gemeinschaft, the British concept of citizenship is defined as much by the famous English birthright as by the expansion of a maritime world empire. In the respective youth movements, these different kinds of citizenship are played out through different conceptions of nature: for the German youth movement nature denotes the German Kulturlandschaft, for the British, the natural environment is imagined as a foreign wilderness to be explored and controlled. In the early 20th century, youth movements thus become a stage for nationalism in which nature takes a prominent place.


3. The Spatial Organization of Camping: interwar Germany

In what follows I look more closely at the spatial organization of camping, which becomes increasingly central to these youth movements as they proceed in the period following the First World War.

Whereas during the prewar period, the early German youth movement negotiated a tension between individualistic and communal experiences of nature, in the 1920s, the various youth movements start developing particularly communal experiences through the development of organized camping. A second Meißner gathering, which was held in 1923, instigated the definitive move away from the bourgeois Wandervogel, towards a resolute philosophy of communal life. The newly formed and prewar groups, now called Bünde, took on new practices, many of which were adopted from foreign youth movements. Uniform dress code, an attribute that was previously considered too militaristic, became standard practice after the adoption of the uniform blue shirts and red neckerchiefs of the Austrian Rote Falken group. The strict discipline and regime of commandments of the British Boy Scouts also became major influences. Thus, at the same time that the German youth movement adopted a more militaristic and disciplined approach by looking internationally, it invoked a more profound communal spirit, internally. This is epitomized in the experience of the große Fahrt, or communal camping trip, which became increasingly central to the postwar German youth movements and was developed further in the 1930s.

With the NSDAP’s seizure of political control in 1933 and the subsequent Gleichschaltung, all German youth movements, including the Bünde, and the Pfadfinder, were incorporated into the Hitlerjugend. The political goal of the Hitlerjugend was to supply a form of pre-military education exclusively for German boys, who were prepared either for direct incorporation into the army, or for a political career in the new Reich. The National Socialists developed the Hitlerjugend as a driving force, a vanguard for the empire, in which the communal experience of the große Fahrt or summer camp was the essential feature for the Bildung of the projected community of millions of Hitler youth, and by extension, of the political-ethnic unity of the Third Reich itself. The experience of camping was to leave an imprint of specific values in the participants’ minds, achieved through the total design of the camping experience, including the design of uniforms and rituals.

The success of the camping experience was considered highly dependent on the layout of the camp environment, as evinced by the meticulousness of the official guidelines.
The Hitlerjugend did not invent the gender separation, which was already present in the earlier movements, but reinforced it and institutionalized it through spatial design. The Bund der Deutsche Mädel (BDM), the female equivalent of the all-male Hitlerjugend, was not allowed the experience of the tent camp. Instead, they were housed in Jugendherbergen. The homely atmosphere of these newly designed hostels was to instill domestic skills and values, which were regarded the primordial domain of the female.

The German boys, on the other hand, were to spend at least two or three weeks in the camp during the summer months. The camp was considered the ideal place for them to take the ritual step towards manhood. Despite the fact that the design of this camp experience was grafted upon the earlier experiences of the German and foreign youth movements, and thus adopted many of their features – camping was still a temporary installation of tents – it was meticulously re-imagined and designed by the National Socialist regime. Through encyclopedic manuals such as the Hitlerjugend Vorschiftenhandbuch, the German state prescribed the minutae of camp layout and management, in an attempt to control the ritualistic experience of young camp goers.

The layout of the boys’ tent camp was supposedly directly inspired by the imagined medieval German village. The representation of a tight collection of equal building forms was translated into the orderly arrangement of tents, similar in size and form: this formal cohesion symbolized the social cohesion of a desired organic community of German boys. Order in perception was the fundamental aspect of the planned camp arrangement. Similarly to the German Autobahnen, which were conceived of as ‘organically’ embedded in the natural landscape, the camp was join human and natural elements together in a harmonic whole. To avoid it being perceived as a Fremdkorper to the landscape, the Vorschriftenhandbuch considered a careful siting of the camp in the landscape essential to its success.

The correspondence of physical order and social structure was further suggested in the ideal camping plan as an anthropomorphic figure: the Feierstätte (the place for gatherings and festivities) functioned as head, the flag pole as heart, and the boys’ tent settlement as limbs of the corporal organization. The Feierstatte also reflected this militaristic-communitarian organization: the communal space was constructed not as a circle, but as a theatre, in such way as to communicate the inner opposition of community and symbol, obedience and leadership.

The space of the camp was fenced and gated with a symbolic entrance structure: the fence and gate did not have a direct military purpose, but functioned as a symbol for the identity of the community. The closed character of the camp as a limited world of experience was enhanced by explicit official prescriptions: nobody was allowed to leave the camp under any circumstances, and parental visits were only allowed on one special day. The layout of the camp directly reflects its social organization, and the volatile combination of organic communality with military order.

The meticulous layout and design prescriptions corresponded an equally precise choreographing of the camp’s social activities. Cleanliness, discipline, obedience and manliness were considered fundamental values of the ‘cultural labor’ in the camp, instilled though a strict day schedule: the boys’ day would start with a morning washing session, the raising of the flag, followed by a small breakfast and plenty of outdoor activities, the most important of which were fighting games and hiking trips. Whereas fighting games served the obvious purpose of pre-military training, the hike – which was distinguished from the military march – was a more ambivalent activity.

The leaders of the Hitlerjugend defined hiking through the landscape in clear opposition to its previous meanings associated with the Wandervogel movement. Rather than a selfish enjoyment, or a ‘romantic or dreamy experience’ – and therefore detached and foreign to the German people – the National Socialists envisioned the social activity of the hike as a part of the primordial service or Dienst to the German nation. Their hikes and camps were indeed goal-oriented and served ultimately as ‘practice’ for the expansion of the German Reich. This is illustrated by the various propaganda books published by the NSDAP, one of which shows the Hitlerjugend at the Eastern border of Germany. As such, the desire for German Lebensraum was conveyed through the experience of the hike. The maps published by the National Socialist regime illustrate how this social practice of hiking propagated a physical crossing and symbolic appropriation of the landscape as communal heritage.

In order to avoid simply dismissing this strong connection between nature and political community as exceptionally German, and simply due to the fact of the youth movement’s militarization and incorporation into the political project of the Dritte Reich, it is necessary to draw a comparison with youth movements in other countries.


4. Creating Happy Americans in the Wilderness

In the United States the phenomenon of youth camps emerged earlier than in Germany and not in the context of an independent youth movement. As a social practice, the American youth camp relates to the tradition of the summer camp, which emerged from the realm of elite schooling, as a so-called ‘free’ means for the improvement of ‘character’. When the Boy Scouts of America organization was instituted a few years after its founding in Britain, it adopted the earlier tradition of summer schools.

This establishes immediately the most striking difference between the American youth camps and their European counterparts: whereas the British and German camps were moving tent villages set up for a couple of days and subsequently dismantled, the American camps are permanent and stationary settlements of log cabins or cottages, temporarily inhabited during holidays and summer months.

In surveys made of early Boy Scout Camps (drawn up by its own members in 1919 and later on published by the BSA Department of Camping) the camping environment is a settlement of loosely arranged barracks or cabins, with centrally located facilities and groups of sleeping cabins. Such surveys show how the American camp differs from its European counterpart in its use of nature: nature now becomes, rather than a symbol of a primordial ethnic bond, a means for modern recreation. This can be inferred the standardization of designs including waterfront facilities such as aquatic slides and springboards – corresponding to the contemporaneous development of recreational environments in the United States.
The early camp layout of the American Boy Scouts responds to the natural and cultural condition of wilderness with a type of layout that combines the tradition of the summer school and the military encampment, while inventing a new recreational environment. Whereas 1930s German camp design is inspired by the imagery of the Medieval German village in the pastoral landscape, the American camp layouts attempt to evoke the traditions of Indians and Pioneers.

Before WWI most of the permanent youth camps – including the elite summer camp – were still privately owned and organized, but throughout the 1920s more and more municipal and commercial camps are constructed. The camps thus become a subject of large-scale modern management and technologically advanced design. The increase in scale and level of planning continued in the 1930s, when the design of camps became part of the larger federal initiative to provide recreational facilities for middle-class America. Since around this time large parts of the American natural territory are incorporated into National Parks and National Forests, camp planning and management shift from being local, private concern to becoming an official program administered by the federal and/or state government. These new camps are not only designed for youth movements, but more generally as collective recreational facilities for American families. During the 1930s, the National Park Service published official design guidelines, in which the various youth movements – in particular the Boy Scouts of America and the Y.M.C.A., which were the primary users of the camps – had an advising role.

Around this time, the National Park Service issues guidelines for the design and implementation of camping grounds in the form of ideal layouts and ‘typical plans’. Adopting many of the elements of the earlier Boy Scout camps, the now nationally endorsed camp layouts consist similarly of separate clusters of tents or cottages, spaciously distributed over an unbounded, mostly wooded, terrain. Like their predecessors, the layouts suggest a collection of smaller entities rather than a massive or centrally directed camp environment. The camp is to be accessible by car, and the gated entrance road leads to a central area, which contains the camp’s main facilities: the main administration building and communal facilities such as the dining hall, kitchen, infirmary, recreation hall and storage building. From there, different paths lead to the unit clusters and the recreational facilities such as the lake, swimming pool, campfire ring, etc.

The campfire or ‘council ring’ is seen a revival of Indian custom. Similar to the traditional settlement layouts of the Hopi tribe, the camp’s council ring, which serves the purpose of communal gatherings, is not located in the centre of the settlement, but at a distance from it, further down in the forest. This expresses an idea of collective living in which a representation of central power is consciously avoided. The main rationale for these cultural references from Native American tradition was the communication of a specific set of values, inspired by British conceptions of citizenships, but adopted for American society: campfire and story telling events were seen as activities that would create a sense of Americanness. Many of the actually constructed camps of the 1930s obey the above design principles, and have provided camping experiences to multiple generations of American youth.

The American organized camp exemplifies the ways in which planned environments and organized communal activities create inextricable connections between nature and modern governance. One particular chart issued by the National Park Service illustrates this poignantly (see figure). The chart lists all the factors that have to be taken into account for the design and management of an organized camp, the ultimate goal of which is the production or sustenance of ‘a healthy happy responsible member of society’. The main constituents for this goal include social factors such as personnel and facilities, but at the bottom are listed all the natural factors. The chart graphically demonstrates how nature is implicated in and forms a fundamental element of national government policy in the United States. More than the straightforward endeavor by middle-class adults to morally reform the nation’s youth through contact with nature (as in the practice of the summer camp), the organized camp of the interwar period exemplifies how the project of modern governance – the creation of self-governing members of society – operates through nature, and by means of nature.


Conclusion

Now we have arrived at the main argument of this paper. From the early 20th century onwards, the social emergence and emancipation of adolescence amounted to the formation of institutions that engaged them for communal purposes. This is a feature we find not only in the German but in many youth movements developing around this time. During the interwar period, the camp environments that were developed in Germany and the U.S.A. take this a step further: these nationally planned youth camps create connections between nature and society that not only implicate nature in the conceptions of citizenship and national belonging, but furthermore, fundamentally embed nature in the modern project of reproducing of governable subjects.

This complicates the categorization of youth movements as ‘free movements’ in contrast to ‘disciplinary institutions’. The early German youth movement, which originated as a ‘free’ movement initiated in a specific local context, soon evolved into a national movement that incorporated moral authoritarianism and discipline. The Anglo-Saxon youth movement, in contrast, originated as a purely disciplinary institution, but ultimately functioned to produce self-governing and self-controlling ‘free’ citizens. The history of national youth movements illustrates how ‘freedom’ as such cannot be understood in opposition to discipline; it shows how freedom is itself a discipline in the service of governance. The youth camp thus needs to be understood both as a place of exception, where normality in terms of social conduct is temporarily suspended, and as a ritual space of transgression, serving a particular role in the formation of modern subjectivity.

Governance here can thus be understood as arising in the concrete connections between environments – including nature – and individuals and organizations – including but not limited to the state. As such, the social practice of camping during the interwar period demonstrates how modern governance is intricately interwoven with the natural environment.

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