Today, if you visit the wooded parks and lakelands that hug Berlin, you’ll find them filled with hikers, cyclists, and mushroom hunters. But less than a century ago, this suburban wilderness was the haunt of feral children who had renounced the adult world for one forged of their own primal fantasies. They were known as “wild gangs” or “wild guilds,” and in the late days of the Weimar Republic and into the early Nazi period, there were some six hundred of these gangs roaming the city’s woodlands— largely made up of 14-to-18-year-old boys, most of them gay, dedicated to a life of sexual freedom, criminal enterprise, and fresh forest air.
Rejecting the society that rejected them, these teenage misfits modeled themselves on Romantic fringe-tropes: mountain men, Indian braves, gypsies, and bandits. They cribbed their identities from the westerns of Karl May. May, who had never been to the American West, popularized a Romantic vision of it for early twentieth-century Germans (he was reputedly Hitler’s favorite writer) with novels about noble savages, the intense bonds of male friendship, and the promise of a more authentic, instinctual life beyond civilization. Among the gangs that prowled Berlin’s forests in the early thirties were Blood of the Trappers, Wild West, Girl-Shy, Gypsy Love, Forest and Field Sleepers, Schnapps Guzzlers, Forest Pirates, Red Apaches, and Santa Fe.
When the gay anarchist French writer Daniel Guérin, on a walking trip across Germany in 1932 (chronicled in his brilliant travel memoir The Brown Plague), bumped into one of these wild gangs on the outskirts of Berlin, he was mesmerized by their flamboyant, pirate-like appearance:
“They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums and the most bizarre coverings on their heads: black or gray Chaplinesque bowlers, old women’s hats with the brims turned up in ‘Amazon’ fashion adorned with ostrich plumes and medals, proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelweiss above the visors, handkerchiefs or scarves in screaming colors tied any which way around the neck, bare chests bursting out of open skin vests with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewd tattoos, ears hung with pendants or enormous rings, leather shorts, surmounted by immense triangular belts—also of leather—both daubed with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as Wildfrei [wild-free] or Räuber [robbers]…. In short, they were a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.”
Intrigued, Guérin sought to learn more about these young gender-bending ruffians. This led him to Christine Fournier, a journalist who had just done a lengthy piece on the gangs in Carl von Ossietzky’s renowned left-wing journal Die Weltbühne. Fournier had befriended a 19-year-old gang leader, or “bull,” who was turning tricks at a seedy sailor-themed pickup bar. His name was Winnetou, after the Apache chief from May’s novels. Winnetou let Fournier embed with the gang, granting her rare firsthand access to their life in the forest.
There she learned that the gangs interfaced between two seemingly unrelated worlds: hiking clubs and organized crime. The hiking clubs, as one would imagine, were benign organizations that attracted working-class kids looking for a bit of camaraderie and freedom. But they also served as the prime recruiting front for the gangs, funneling the more anti-social and depraved among them into the wild gangs and their life of crime. These wild boys served as the grunt troops of the grown-up underworld, robbing and pleasuring the citizenry of the demimonde. But after plying their trade in the city’s nocturnal dives, they would retreat to their forest lair, where they created their own culture in defiance of all adult authority.
The mainstays of wild gang culture were sex and violence, often combined. To become a full-fledged member, one had to go under a “baptism.” Fistfights and knife fights would kick things off, followed by acts of sado-sexual exhibition such as timed masturbation, gang rape, and coprophagy. Newcomers were often bound, smeared with piss and shit, then tied to trees and penetrated with homemade dildos carved from tree limbs. Afterward, the whole gang, initiates and veterans alike, would celebrate with a drunken orgy. As for the more routine acts of sexual congress among the already inducted, these always occurred on the hallowed Stoßsofa, or “fucking couch.”
Fournier, with a sympathetic social reformer’s understanding, saw these lurid and brutal customs as the product of desperate coping mechanisms in the face of trauma and abuse. “In order to avoid depression and suicide,” Fournier wrote, “these gravely mistreated boys and girls create their own fantasy world as a compensation for the deprived existence they are forced to lead. It is a world with different norms, full of infantile and uninhibited drives, a world of hatred against the society that left them alone in pain and anguish.”
While orphans, youth gangs, and sadistic hazing rituals were nothing new, this particular type of gang—with its anti-civilized posture of ‘wildness’ and its explicit homoeroticism— began appearing in parklands throughout Germany toward the end of First World War. They came mostly from working-class families destroyed by the war and the economic collapse that followed.
The gangs’ distinctly gay, woodsy ethos emerged from the Wandervögel, or Roamers movement, of the turn of the century—a kind of freewheeling German Boy Scouts that sought to renew the nation’s vitality by getting youth out of the cities and back to nature while forming strong bonds of male fellowship. These hiking associations were part and parcel of a larger “Life Reform” movement that appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century, a combination of social hygiene and neo-Romantic rebellion against the enervating effects of modern industrial society. It spawned nudist colonies, vegetarian clubs, eugenics campaigns, and a whole cultural politics across the spectrum aimed at ‘regeneration’ and a ‘return to nature.’
The homoerotic dimension of the Wandervögel also coincided with a flourishing of gay culture across Germany, particularly in Berlin. The relatively permissive sexual climate of the city in the twenties (even though homosexual acts were still illegal), along with its many gay and lesbian bars and clubs, drew sex tourists like writers W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood, for whom “Berlin meant boys.” At the same time, homosexual rights advocates like Hans Blüher propounded the ideal of the Männerbund, exclusively male associations that, in his view, had played a key role in the education and governance of all successful societies since Ancient Greece. In the Weimar era’s polarizing political landscape, Blüher’s idea of the Männerbund was taken up by the right, where it merged with anti-Semitism and blood-and-soil nationalism, finding a home in Ernst Röhm’s SA, the most dynamic and youth-culture-dominated wing of the Nazi Party.
While both the Nazis and the Communists siphoned the youthful energy of the Wandervögel into their own movements during the twenties and early thirties, the more apolitical spirit of the hiking clubs found outlet in the wild gangs. Yet Guérin, who as a fellow young wanderer had been drawn to Germany for its sexually-charged youth culture, saw the gangs’ dangerous political potential. “I couldn’t dismiss a real anxiety: those who would know how to discipline these masquerade Apaches could make real bandits out of them.” Sure enough, two years later, Guérin recounted, after Hitler had taken power, the journalist Fournier was walking down the street in Berlin when a menacing-looking Nazi stormtrooper marched by and called out her name in a friendly tone. Shocked, she turned and looked. “It was Winnetou.”
But the Nazis did not succeed in absorbing or decimating the wild gangs entirely. It’s true that some like Winnetou were lured into either the Hitler Youth or the brownshirt ranks of the SA, which itself was later gutted by Hitler in the Night of the Long Knives. Others, once the war started, were shipped off to Poland to become the speartip of Aryan colonization or to Russia as machinegun fodder. And many, of course, who were deemed irredeemably dissozial [anti-social] or arbeitsscheu [workshy], were sent to concentration camps. But a few of those feral boys must have gone to ground, or at least their spirit did. For, later during the war, the wild boy gangs bloomed again on the wooded outskirts of German cities, sporting the old Edelweiss emblem of their Weimar forebears and functioning as a kind of spontaneous resistance group within the Reich.
According to the historian Detlev Peukert, the Edelweiss Pirates were a legion of wild boy gangs (aged 12 to 17) across the western cities of Düsseldorf, Essen, and Cologne who fled the Hitler Youth and flocked to the forests to sing subversive songs. Here’s a snatch of verse from a popular melody they repurposed with their own lyrics:
Hitler’s power may lay us low,
And keep us locked in chains,
But we will smash the chains one day,
We’ll be free again.
We’ve got fists and we can fight,
We’ve got knives and we’ll get them out,
We want freedom, don’t we, boys?
We’re the fighting Navajos.
Get out your cudgels
And come into town
And smash the skulls
Of the bosses in brown.
But they didn’t just sing. The Edelweiss Pirates carried their campfire fantasies onto the streets, regularly brawling with Hitler Youth teens, assaulting uniformed functionaries, scrawling anti-Nazi slogans on public buildings, and driving the Gestapo mad.
Even in the dungeonous confines of Hitler’s Reich, the wild spirit lived on.
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Sources consulted:
Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity; Daniel Guérin, The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany; Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin; Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life; Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945.
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