Models for Young Nationalists and Militarists: German Youth Literature in the First World War

In 1914 and 1915 war fictions of wildly patriotic crowds and an exciting war of movement overwhelmed the book and magazine market for youth in Germany, displacing fairy tales, foreign classics, girls' novels, and antiwar Socialist fiction. In the most lurid of these narratives, male teenagers volunteered against their parents' wishes and fought with stupendous prowess. Police records show that though some deputy commanding generals prohibited this fiction, youth from a variety of social classes regularly circumvented the bans. The reading experience of the war youth generation arguably prepared them for the nationalism and militarism of right-wing organizations after 1918.