Hamilton, Kuhle Wampe, Hitlerjunge Quex

Alice Hamilton’s article provides an overarching foreign perspective of the sentiments of the German youth and young adults that are portrayed in Hitlerjunge Quex and Kuhle Wampe. The article details the background of the youth in Germany in 1933 growing up in a harsh economic depression around adults who were at the forefront of Germany’s fall after World War I. Hamilton writes about a worker who described the children of the time coming into manhood without realizing the connection between work and food. Describing Hitler as a child himself, Hamilton gives the reader an understanding of the brilliant propaganda that repudiated internationalism, hatred towards the Jewish, and opportunity for the poor youth through an appeal to national pride, comradeship, and stability. An unidentifiable youth that grew up in miserable circumstances is exactly the portrayal of the characters in both Hitlerjunge Quex and Kuhle Wampe.

Hitlerjunge Quex’s storyline is about the exact dynamic that Hamilton describes between the Communists and Nazi groups attracting the German youth. Heini faces the same issues and was attracted to the Nazi’s in the same way that Hamilton describes the appeal to German nationalism as opposed to an international Communist brotherhood. The Nazi structure of uniforms, marching, and singing all appealed to Heini in direct contrast to the unstructured, evil-spirited, and immoral Communist youth group.

Kuhle Wampe gives a better portrayal of the young adults during the early 1930’s concerning the unemployment struggles, disparity with the older generation, and confusion about which direction to move in. While the young adults in Kuhle Wampe do not associate with a party, the growth of the generation is evident from the suicide at the beginning to the marching and singing away from the camera in the final scene. Everything that the Nazi party embodied regarding the end of social class as well as comradeship in an effort to make change are distinct features of the goals of the four young adults in the train scene when they bickered with the “ignorant” elder generation. Overall, Alive Hamilton’s article about the movement of the young Germans in 1933 is portrayed in both Kuhle Wampe and Hitlerjunge Quex: one about the need for change during the pre-Nazi movement depression, and the latter about the qualities of the Nazi Youth embodying heroism and unity.