“Who has the youth, has the future!” At the turn of the century this shibboleth, sometimes attributed to Luther, became the battle cry of a nascent campaign launched by middle-class reformers to capture the hearts and minds of young urban German workers. Soon male laborers between the ages of fourteen and twenty, or “between primary school and barracks” in the then current phrase, became the cynosure of public debate and policy. The campaign was undertaken to protect them from a host of ostensible moral dangers associated with urban life, to save them from the unpatriotic influence of the Social Democratic party (SPD), and to better their health and upgrade their industrial skills as means of promoting national efficiency, both in the economic and military spheres.

Dating with exactitude the origin of the youth salvation campaign that was to sweep late Imperial Germany is impossible. Like most moral crusades, it germinated slowly before erupting forcefully into public consciousness. Although there was no sense of a generalized problem with young workers in the 1870s, one can certainly discover examples of the concerns and rhetoric adopted by the turn-of-the-century youth salvation campaign. Thus, in 1878 Fritz Kalle, a Saxon factory owner and well-known advocate of popular education, in a speech before the Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik), an association of influential government officials and academics opposed to Manchester liberalism and committed to state financed social reform, denounced the spread of youthful wildness (Verwilderung) and loss of moral restraint that, he believed, were results of the decline of the artisanal order and the rise of the factory system.