Begun in 2000, this series of works explore the romantic spirit of the German Youth Movement as it was experienced before 1933, before the politicization and militarization of youth in Germany.
The second path took Deutschtum – Germanness – into darker and less innocent glades though it would be a mistake to assume that every forest tramper in lederhosen was a recruit for the Reich to come. The Wandervogel youth movement and the ramblers who communed, Siegfried style, around bonfires on forested hills, attracted not just those who saw themselves as the new generation of Hermanskinder, but also some on the left, not least among them the young Walter Benjamin. Left and right, after all, shared contempt for bourgeois urban materialism proclaimed by Riehl and were prepared to follow him in extolling nature, especially the sublime German portion of it, as of transcendent value. The craving was for some idealized, immutable rural community that had not been prostituted by industrial modernity.
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Der Holzweg