The relevance of countercultures and
visions of the future: examining the
historical example of Hashomer Hatzair
Ofer N. Nur
Hashomer Hatzair was founded in 1916 in Vienna as an independent and autonomous Jewish youth movement. The term “autonomous” is used here to describe youth movements founded by young people, for young people, and which were relatively independent of adult influence. The prime example of an autonomous youth movement is of course the German Wandervogel, which began its activities around 1896 and was more formally organised in 1901.1 In the history
of youth movements, only a handful of movements achieved such autonomy.
Hashomer Hatzair was founded in Vienna but did not originate there. It began its activities around 1911 in Eastern Galicia, an agrarian province of the disintegrating Hapsburg empire.2 It was a movement of higher-middle-class, assimilated Jewish youths. It started out as a merging of two organisations: the first was Tse’irei Zion (The Young of Zion), a Zionist movement founded in Lwףw in 1902 as a study group for high school students. This organisation practised extra-curricular education in the framework of study groups. It emphasised the value of belonging to the Jewish culture. Many members knew Hebrew and were interested in the study
of Jewish history and literature. The second organisation, Hashomer (The Watchman), was modelled in 1913 after the Polish Scouts. It was named after the Hashomer organisation in Ottoman Palestine, a Jewish vigilante organisation. The ears of the First World War were spent by many of the movement’s members, along with their families, as impoverished refugees in Vienna. In this intellectual metropolis, the members were exposed to a wide variety of intellectual trends such as anarchism, Nietzscheanism, spiritual socialism, youth culture and psychoanalysis.
Many of those trends, little known to non-Viennese circles at that time, have been adopted into the movement’s nascent worldview.
After the Vienna years, in 1918, many members returned with their families to their homes in Eastern Galicia. Without doubt, it was the trauma of the civil war that broke out in Galicia between Poles and Ukrainians in late 1918, with Jews caught in the middle, that was the ultimate driving force behind the immigration to Palestine of the several hundred members of the movement. Although deeply assimilated into the Polish nation, they felt rejected by that – now independent – nation because they were Jewish.
The movement began its immigration to Palestine in 1920. There, it came to be one of the founders of the kibbutz movement of the early twenties. Only several years later, in 1927, it founded its own political party. This party was called the United Workers Party and was always considered “the third way” in socialist Zionism, more radical than the two other parties, which eventually merged to form the Labour Party (1929), but not as radical as the communists. Politically, Hashomer Hatzair is quite marginal today. It is still represented in Israeli politics
as it constitutes one third of Meretz, Israel’s most progressive leftist party. It is also important to note that the United Workers Party was a strong supporter of the idea of a bi-national Jewish Palestinian state.
Counterculture as a basis for the movement
Until the founding of the party in 1927, however, Hashomer Hatzair was an apolitical
movement, indeed a fiercely anti-political one. One of the movement’s members wrote in her diary that, when her youth group met in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery to commemorate the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, they made an oath to never involve themselves in party politics. The early Hashomer Hatzair was a passionate, modern, countercultural movement, better described using Georg Lukבcs’ term “romantic anti-capitalist”.3 The fusion of Zionism as a form of ethnic nationalism with the universalist counterculture is a paradoxical
characteristic of the movement. On the one hand, Hashomer Hatzair was experiencing
a most sweeping and most profound rebellion. On the other hand, it was
deeply committed to actively “saving” the Jewish people, which for the members
was in an abysmal crisis.
The early years of Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine were shaped by these two motivational
poles. One pole was expressed in Zionism – a Jewish national framework, in which the movement sought to achieve individual and collective fulfilment in forming kibbutz communities. The other pole belonged to a broad Western cultural phenomenon – counterculture. The movement’s rebellion in its earlier years manifested itself, for example, in the publication of the poem entitled “The son’s rebellion” in the spring of 1922 in the opening issue of El-Al, one of the movement’s journals: “My son, do not obey your father’s instruction. And do not heed
your mother’s teachings … pave your own path. Depart from your father’s way. For
why should you betray the young generation. The generation of the future, so distant
and full of light.”4 In order to make the impression of this poem more poignant, the publishers chose to add two effects: they used an old Hebrew typeface – scroll type – and they placed on a facing page a reproduction of the “Prayer to the Sun.” This was a painting by the German artist Hugo Hצppener, then well known by the name of Fidus. Adopted by many German youth movements and other life-reform movements, the “Prayer to the Sun” depicted a young man
standing nude on top of a cliff with his hands spread: he appeared to be yearning
for freedom.
The publication of this poem in a Hashomer Hatzair journal stirred up widespread
fury in rabbinical circles throughout Poland. There were even rumours of an excommunication decree. The chief rabbinate of Warsaw declared the publication an abomination. The fact that the poem had already been published several years previously in a literary journal did not matter. The rabbis felt the subversive potential of such a publication only when it appeared in a youth movement journal because they saw it as a powerful pamphlet.
The publication of the poem and of the “Prayer to the Sun” suggested rebellion.
The most salient feature of this poem is the rejection of tradition. If we look closer, tradition here is associated with the family – the son is advised not to follow the ways of his father and his mother. The adoption of this poem by Hashomer Hatzair indicates a stark discontinuity through the rejection of the family and tradition. “The son’s rebellion” and the reproduction of the “Prayer to the Sun” expressed the combination of rejection of Jewish tradition and the
embrace of new ideas, previously unknown in the Jewish world.
The poem and the picture are a manifestation of a counterculture that had appeared among the younger generation of central European youths. This counterculture was, both in content and form, a particular central-European cultural phenomenon of German origin. At the end of this essay, this phenomenon will be crystallised into a historical hypothesis on anti-political attitudes in the West.
Modern Western counterculture is intimately connected to attitudes that do not favour direct political participation. It first appeared in an extreme degree in central Europe when a variety of protest groups developed a worldview alternative to that of the liberal middle class. It then spread throughout the West, and then to the middle classes of other nations.5 It is a multi-faceted phenomenon and overlaps with more concrete groups and categories such as anarchism, the avantgarde, bohemianism, movements for life reform such as back-to-nature
movements, nudism, vegetarianism, anti-smoking societies, communes and the hippie and green movements. Any given countercultural persuasion only attracted an extremely small number of followers, led by a handful of mentors, intellectuals or gurus. As was the case with Hashomer Hatzair, groups that belonged to the counterculture sought to provide a normative and regulating value system motivated by conflict with the values of the larger society around them, which was seen by them as powerful and oppressive.
Counterculture today, as well as in its historical outbreaks in the 1920s and 1960s, included groups that rejected the major Western values and attempted to replace them with an alternative set of values that stood in direct opposition to the values being rejected. The counterculture movement that originated in central Europe around the end of the nineteenth century was deeply anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal. Because its adherents came from the younger generation of the very centre of the dominant culture, the middle class of a society undergoing rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, the repercussions of countercultural
movements were sharply felt. Whether posing a subversive challenge to industrial
capitalism, upholding utopia, revolution, or anarchism, or consisting of the most hopeless of adolescent fantasies, the counterculture was fundamental and original in its challenge to Western values, and especially to liberal political values and political process. Its manifestations were always short-lived, vehemently anti-capitalist and motivated by a gaping generational conflict.
The transformation into a political party Hashomer Hatzair’s countercultural outlook involved several aspects, mainly involving the historical narrative it felt part of, the formation of the kibbutz society, and the foundation of a number of boarding schools in Palestine, which
employed the most progressive and up-to-date educational methods. For the purpose
of this analysis, it is necessary to examine the movement’s path from this
anti-liberal, romantic anti-capitalism to the foundation of a fully-fledged Marxist party between 1924 and 1927. The rhetoric of, for example, “a federation of autonomous communities” or “psychological utopia” and values such as voluntarism, spontaneity or authentic living, had now been supplemented with the rhetoric of “revolutionary struggle,” class struggle or a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The party even considered joining the Third International.
It is important to emphasise here what the meaning of the turn to political activism (the radicalisation into socialism and even communism cannot be elaborated upon here) was: it meant reaching the widest possible population in order to recruit young people as members into individual kibbutz communities. It also meant the use of the democratic political system in Jewish Palestine in order to reach a set of revolutionary goals, inspired by revolutionary Marxism.
How did Hashomer Hatzair make its way from a romantic youth movement to a Marxist political party, and what were the implications of this transformation?
This is a question that is difficult to answer. Perhaps the simple fact of becoming older, and less Sturm-und-Drang-oriented, played its role in the willingness to join the establishment – the enemy as it were – to accept its rules and plunge into the previously hated world of political participation. At the age of romantic rebellion, the members of the movement were usually between 15 and 20 years old. When they established their political party, they were usually between 20 and 25 years old.
In the context in which the young members were living, it became clear to them that political participation was an effective means of furthering their goals. The Yishuv – that is, the organised Jewish settlement in Palestine prior to the foundation of the state of Israel – established an effective political system with universal suffrage. Until the 1990s in fact, many public institutions from youth movements and sports clubs to hospitals and health organisations were originally established and organised according to affiliation with each of the parties. In that context, the
members of Hashomer Hatzair were convinced that political participation would further their goals, exploiting the democratic political system and playing according to its rules.
A vision of the future
An important difference between Hashomer Hatzair as youths in the 1920s and young people today lies in the fact that Hashomer Hatzair promoted a clear vision of the future. This vision was based on the proposition that certain ideals such as community, equality, liberty, authentic living or national autonomy were lacking, and that it was young people’s mission to recreate a society that would uphold these ideals. The imagining of future society has been an important characteristic of Western history and its revolutions. It often involved the creation of a “new
man.” Certain crisis points in Western history, which expressed discontent with human
society, combined with a utopian vision, have been accompanied by images of a “new man.” Such images in early Christianity or in the Italian Renaissance reflected an explicit wish to mold a new human personality that could fit into a new society and carry forward its vision.6 At one of the more influential of these crisis points, the French Revolution promoted an ideal of a regenerated “new man,” who could replace the old, obsolete man of the ancien rיgime. 7 Later on in
the nineteenth century, it was the pivotal role of Friedrich Nietzsche that generated
a number of diverse ideals of a “new man.” Nietzsche’s enormously influential call for human self-transformation was transmitted and incorporated into the vision of the major artistic and ideological movements of the early twentieth century.
The political myths of the Russian Revolution, Italian Fascism, Nazi Germany and
The National Revolution of Vichy all incorporated very similar images of a “new man” into their social and political visions, which included an exaltation of youth and masculinity, of heroism, of dynamism of action, and one version or another of a leader principle.8 These ideological regimes devised official educational programmes whose purpose was to promulgate this image into the real lives of people.
A clear vision of the future, which could also entail dangers of oppression, was art and parcel of the utopias these movements had promoted.9 In the twentieth century, young people have been mobilised by images of a better future. The majority of young people in the West today have lost faith in promises to revolutionise society. In view of many historical cases where such promises have brought terror, oppression and distorted ideals, perhaps we stand on firm ground
when such atrocities are concerned. We are still faced with the problem of political apathy, which seems to be the price to pay for a stable liberal democratic hos. In other words, to make democracy and liberal values a future-oriented vision for young people still remains a challenge.
In the case of Hashomer Hatzair the optimistic, clear vision of the future was manifested in the movement’s political posters, most of them based on socialist realism. It is also evident in the movement’s gamble on its own future expansion: as it formed its political party, Hashomer Hatzair had five kibbutz communities. Within thirty years, this grew to over seventy communities (out of a total of approximately 300 kibbutz communities at the height of the kibbutz movement in the 1970s).
Conclusion
The European liberal democracies, on the other hand, have no conception of a future to offer their young people. This situation is reflected in the image of the political system. It is believed that, once civil rights, human rights and stable democratic institutions have been effectively established, there is no need for a change of political system. It is perhaps time to hypothesise the importance of the conception of the future as a mental construct and as a constructive fantasy for youth and adolescent age-groups in particular. In the late modern age, young people are encouraged to only think about the future with regard to their individual professional career. This condition depresses the potential of youth to find interest in the political process, as it encourages them not to hope for a better future because this “better future” has already been achieved.
Western concepts and sets of practices related to youth culture and its themes, interests and venues originated in the central European counterculture and its youth culture, first conceived and experienced in Germany. This Jugendkultur, a variation of the German Kulturkritik, was rebellious and contained the anti-liberal seeds of anti-politics. It despised liberal of politics, that is, political parties, parliamentary debates and facts of political life, such as loose political alliances and coalitions. Hashomer Hatzair’s embracing of politics, therefore, is an exceptional
case of a return to the establishment, not dissimilar perhaps to the act of hippies turning into “yuppies”. In other words, the return of countercultural movements to the very establishment against which they rebelled is possible.
Judging from youth political participation in Europe today, the vestiges of counterculture
have had a damaging effect when it comes to the lack of trust in politics qua politics, which is so widespread among young people. The absence of a programme for the future and the historical seeds of anti-politics have combined to leave their imprint in the form of a lack of interest in democratic political participation and the blatantly unheroic liberal values underlying European democracies.
Endnotes
1. On the German youth movement, see Laqueur 1962 and Stachura 1981.
2. The best accounts of the history of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in
English and German are Margalit 1969 and Jensen 1995.
3. On this concept, see Lצwy 1979.
4. See, for example, Lamm 1998: 26.
5. For a very useful introduction to counterculture, see Nelson 1989. A historical
discussion of the origins of counterculture in central Europe is found in Green
1986. See also Kerbs & Reulecke 1998.
6. Kenzlen 1994.
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