In The Rhythm of Eternity, Robbert-Jan Adriaansen asks scholars to rethink the youth movement in Germany from 1900 to 1933. Dozens of scholarly articles and monographs dealing with the Wandervogel have appeared since the 1980s, yet Adriaansen writes that we have missed the true meaning of this movement by focusing on its antimodern or Romantic aspects. He argues instead that it developed an alternative vision of modernity based on shared historical “experience” [Erlebnis] rather than a belief in material progress. In this reading the youth movement becomes an important component of what Peter Fritzche has called Weimar's “postwar workshop” (“Did Weimar Fail?,’ Journal of Modern History [2010]: 656), a location where Germans tried to give physical representation to their visions of the modern world. Its leaders hoped to remake historical consciousness in Germany via an intellectual revolution that focused heavily on the medieval world. The historiography of the Wandervogel is more diverse than the author states in his introduction, but his study nevertheless makes an impressive attempt to rethink the youth movement at a metaphysical level.

Adriaansen asks the reader to set aside the political context and focus wholly on the perspective of the youth movement: how did members and leaders interpret historical reality? He argues that they rejected the rational modernity of the Enlightenment in favor of lived experience in the present, and explains this using a theoretical framework drawn from the work of Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, a literary scholar and philosopher who maintains that the Enlightenment-based methods that most academics employ do not adequately take into account hard-to-quantify concepts like emotion and feeling. Adriaansen argues that the Wandervogel movement rejected the “meaning culture” that had originated with Descartes's mind-body dualism. This view assumes that if the mind could be properly taught to think, man could become God-like in his ability to solve problems in the material sphere—and thus build a better world. Instead, Wandervogel members decided in favor of “presence culture,” which assumes that the mind and body are one with the universe. The goal is not to control nature but to experience it.

To demonstrate this thesis, Adriaansen first provides the reader with historical background on the diverse strands of the youth movement, which is then followed by four erudite case studies. He does not shy away from the diversity of the Wandervögel: for example, the Altwandervogel existed on the far Left of the political spectrum, the Steglitzer e. V on the Right; later the Deutscher Bund für Jugendwanderungen served as a puritanical umbrella organization for numerous youth movement organizations. Adriaansen recognizes that finding a model that can bridge the gaps of time and culture between these groups is challenging. He begins with the notion that all Wandervogel leaders believed that history should be understood not as a linear path to greater rights and material prosperity, but rather as a lived experience that connected youths to previous generations. In other words, the goal of the modern world was not to create new and changing identities, but rather a stable one that kept the individual in harmony with the universe. Thus the youth movement rejected Baedecker tourism as a kind of false consciousness. Trying to find a way to act on this new principal presented practical problems, however. In 1914, at least some members saw fighting for the Reich as the ultimate way to experience the nation. It is doubtful that these notions survived more than six months on the Western Front for most combatants, but the examples Adriaansen mobilizes are certainly consistent with his argument. The Germans lost the war, of course; as a result, the experience of the nation had to be found elsewhere after 1918.

Adriaansen shows that many members of the youth movement experienced a religious conversion By this he does not mean that they went to church but rather that religion, liked lived experienced in the countryside, offered another way to arrive at the granite truth of national identity in the Nietzschean sense. Religious experience led some members to eschatology by the 1920s. In one fascinating chapter, Adriaansen looks at how Laienspiele (public theater performed by amateurs) offered members of the youth movement an imaginative way to recreate the national community by physically acting out a vision of medieval Europe. These plays allowed the youth movement to grow in size because women could take part, and the perceived connection to Catholicism no doubt made them seem less threatening to the authorities. Lastly, the author mobilizes the concept of Heimat to show that, for many members of the youth movement, Germany could be located in spaces beyond the borders of the Republic (e.g., in Estonia) and not in time. It was therefore less important that Weimar was so culturally and socially dynamic, for a stable German identity lay ready-made in the countryside if people would simply go out and experience it.

This is an ambitious, well-researched, and well-written first book that seeks to change the way we understand the cultural significance of the youth movement. Like any adventurous project, it has flaws. It is wise to ask readers to see the youth movement as its adherents in the 1920s understood themselves, but the study would have been stronger if this perspective had been more tightly inscribed within Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi political culture. As Vejas Liulevicius pointed out in War Land on the Eastern Front (2000), the notion that the idea of Germany also existed in rural eastern spaces had real consequences from 1915 to 1919 and then again after 1939. In other words, abstract ideas have real consequences and this book does not always reveal them. The study could also have intervened in other historiographical debates regarding youth. Andrew Donson has argued in Youth in the Fatherless Land (2010), for instance, that the war radicalized youth in ways that made them engage directly with the radical edges of Weimar culture: their goal was not to become one with nature but to change the political structure. These caveats not withstanding, this is worthwhile read for scholars of childhood, twentieth-century Germany, and the study of nature.