... and to identify their cryptic nature with his traumatic break from Gustav Wyneken and the tragic failures of the youth movement. This involves, on the one hand, an inversion of his early Nietzschean influences into a political anti-Nietzscheanism, one that this essay explores through the figures of freedom...

... of ourselves. And then it can happen that someone feels, as we do, that he or she too comes to these questions from out of the spirit of youth—and may even give fresh impetus to them. Nevertheless, fellow stu- dents, we are not overzealous disciples of Gustav Wyneken; rather, we are conscious...

... as the climactic event in the prewar youth movement; Benjamin s mentor, Gustav Wyneken, played a leading role in the proceedings, emphasizing the need for young people to withdraw into the wilderness to acquire inner knowledge before 12 boundary 2 / May 2018 embarking on the struggles of adult life. A few days...

... mentor Gustav Wyneken, a leading educational theo- rist in Wilhelmine Germany and a founder of the coeducational Free School Community of Wickersdorf.11 This will be the central theme of virtually all Benjamin’s prewar publications. Like Wyneken, he means two things at once with the proclamation...

... on the Enlightenment theory of education, the key function of pedagogy for Benjamin becomes 6. What the young Benjamin, in the grip of Gustav Wyneken’s teaching, understood by “spirit” is, at the least, vague, if not potentially problematic. 30 boundary 2 / May 2018 one of actualization rather than...

... on school reform and youth culture, attending and organizing lectures and conferences on these two closely related issues, and serving as president of the radical Berlin chapter of the Independent Students Association under the aegis of his mentor, the educational theorist Gustav Wyneken. However...

... reformer Gustav Wyneken, and from 1910 to 1914 contributed to his journal Der Anfang (The beginning). Benjamin was the spokesperson of the newly founded Sprechsäle, where students could meet and discuss matters of the spirit. Already by that time, as the undeliv- ered speech to students suggests...

... of the bourgeoisie” (1999b: 206; 1977: 769). Benjamin refers here to the bourgeois discovery of “Jugendkultur” (1977: 767), originating from Gustav Wyneken’s Jugendkulturbewegung, youth culture movement, of Wilhelmine 72 boundary 2 / May 2018 Germany, to which the young Benjamin himself once belonged...