The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha by Mark Cornwall (review)

Mark Cornwall has written a superb and necessary examination of the life of Heinz Rutha (1897–1937) and his work as an influential youth leader and prominent figure in the Sudeten German nationalist movement. Rutha came of age in northern Bohemia, along an imagined language border dividing communities with majority Czech- or German-speaking populations. The reality was more complex and was reflected in his own mixed heritage: his mother was of Czech-speaking descent; his father, German-speaking. Rutha was raised in a primarily German cultural environment, but his childhood nonetheless reflected the fluid nature of identity in the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire’s destruction in the aftermath of the First World War ultimately tested the regional and international allegiances of a German population living within the democratic, but Czech-nationalist, state of Czechoslovakia.

Like many important figures in the German nationalist movement in Czechoslovakia, Rutha spent his formative years in the Bohemian Wandervogel (“wandering bird”). The movement originated in 1901 in Berlin’s periphery as a response of middle-class urban youth to the stifling conservative, bourgeois social mores of Wilhelmine Germany. In the Bohemian context, the movement took on special traits related to fostering a sense of German national community alongside the Czechs and within the wider Habsburg Empire. Following the First World War, the völkish aspects of the Wandervogel movement became more strident in tone as Rutha and some organization leaders flirted with an emphasis on racial purity and increasingly employed anti-Czech rhetoric.

Rutha left his very brief war experience maintaining an enthusiastic embrace for the camaraderie forged during battle and with a transcendent faith in service to a larger cause. During the 1920s he brought those considerable enthusiasms to bear on crafting a pedagogical program based on intergenerational mentorship and forging a Männerbund, an elite group of men united in spiritual and nationalist purpose. Many of the ideas Rutha drew from circulated in numerous youth movements, but his unique contribution was to shift the emphasis from broad cultural education to a nationalist cause suffused with eroticism. The German Wandervogel movement had frequently been subject to competing visions, but Rutha was clearly inspired by the writings of an early leader, Hans Blüher, especially his book, The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon (1912). As Cornwall summarizes Blüher’s conception of Wandervogel youth education, “for adolescents, the movement was a key part of an extended lifestage where their heroes were substitutes for bourgeois father figures and any heterosexual urge was delayed or sublimated through prolonged steeping in a homoerotic culture” (p. 83). Rutha shared with Blüher an interest in returning to a classical sense of pedagogical Eros partially inspired by the writings of Plato. While Rutha’s vision was not explicitly homosexual in conception, it did value Blüher’s emphasis on the value of erotic attraction within a homosocial environment as a key element to providing the movement with “procreative vitality.” Rutha never publicly linked his movement with pedagogical Eros, and the homoerotic aspects were only occasionally on view—a necessity in a time and place where homosexuality was barely tolerated by the Czech-German community and was criminalized by the Czech penal code.

Blüher’s interests were also influenced by his own ambivalence towards his sexual attractions. His diary and correspondence reveal a continual attraction to young men that eventually crossed from an emphasis on establishing purely emotional connections for pedagogical purposes to physical acts. On several occasions in the 1930s he initiated sexual contact with young disciples who made a pilgrimage to Rutha’s familial home and sawmill. He also had sexual contact with a fifteen-year-old boy who apprenticed in his custom furniture business. Rutha consistently denied that he was a homosexual and frequently depicted sexual contact with youths as the natural expression of a trusting, intimate mentorship.

By the mid-1920s Rutha also embraced...