dj.1.11

dj.1.11

dee-jay-one-eleven? is this a secret code? an explosive? a new star? no. or perhaps yes, a bit of all that: "dj.1.11" was a legendary youth federation, sparkling from creativity, absolutely new and, beginning from its name, of a quite other quality than the "nerother wandervogel" (="migratory birds of neroth"), "pfadfinderschaft st.georg" (="boy scouts of st.george"), "deutsche freischar" (="german free corps") and how ever the other youth groups of the german youth movement in the twenties of the previous century were named.

deutsche jungenschaft vom 1. 11. 1929

the full name behind this mysterious abbreviation, "deutsche jungenschaft vom 1. 11. 1929" (="german boys' federation from the 1st of november in 1929"), also tells nothing more than when this group was founded – and that they had just three years, until they were forbidden by hitler in 1933, to kindle a sparkling firework of new ideas and orientations which has coined the german youth movement until today:

dj.1.11 invented the "kohte", this black tent which is used by all youth groups now with an escape for smoke in its top so that you can make a "campfire in the tent"; dj.1.11'ers had seen the "koakhta", the fire-tent of the laplanders at the arctic circle, and changed the construction as well as the name to match our needs.

dj.1.11 invented the smart "boys' blouse", made from thick darkblue fabric and, like a sailor blouse, with a big collar, always looking good and always warm. the "boys' blouse" is worn by nearly all youth groups in germany now.

dj.1.11 opened the nationally confined horizon of the german youth groups of that time to a worldwide view, they were the first to make adventurous trips abroad, they became enthusiastic about japanese zen philosophy, and enriched the singing of the youth groups, who used to repeat the same old german folksongs again and again, by fresh foreign songs and instruments from all over the world.

dj.1.11 used - in comparison to the euphoric and bombastic romantic style of the youth movement of that time - a factual, short, and unemotional diction, and practiced a very reasonable orthography: to write everything in small letters.

dj.1.11 was also politically engaged in the end and took part in demonstrations and actions against the upcoming fascism; their speaker, eberhard koebel (tusk), was arrested at once by the new nazi government in 1934, he escaped to london, and after the end of the hitler regime in 1945 he went, like brecht, heym, seghers and other antifascists, to eastern germany; other dj.1.11'ers were active in the resistance, for example in the students' resistance group "white rose".

dj.1.11 was – after the outset of the "wandervogel" (="migration bird") movement in the first years of the previous century, and the "bündische jugend" (="youth in federations") in the twenties – the third wave of the german youth movement: the falcon on top of the three waves.

and at this time, when germany closed its frontiers to foreign ideas, when the germans began to fancy that they were the master race, and began to contempt the rest of the world, when also many of the formerly unpolitical youth federations became imbued with nationalistic ideas, and some of them even in a whole joined the "hitlerjugend" (="hitler's youth", nazi youth organization) voluntarily – at this time dj.1.11 was a single rebellion against the philistine, narrow-minded, chauvinistic spirit of that age.

autonome jungenschaft dj.1.11

autonomous – this adjective inspired us: to be autonomous, to give us our own rules, find our own standards, and determine our ways and aims ourselves – that was reason enough for us to name us, about ten years after the nazi dictatorship, "autonome jungenschaft dj.1.11" (="autonomous boys' federation dj.1.11") again.

all the other youth organizations had their prescribed aims: the boy scouts had to fulfill their boy scout commandments, the confessional groups strove for heaven, and the political groups strove for their political aims, and the "nerother wandervögel" had their castle ruins of "burg waldeck" to build and build and build...

our dj.1.11

our dj.1.11, in comparison to them, had no aims at all. we even had no organization. each group was autonomous, and when in 1960 most of the groups of the rhine-ruhr-area came together to form a loose "ring" each group could decide if they wanted to join or not.

to become a member of dj.1.11 was as simple – there were no membership lists nor admission ceremonies. when i gave up my well organized boy scout life in order to find my own way as a self-responsible person, i made myself a red and a gray tassel from wool, fixed them to the collar of my blue boys' blouse, and now i was a dj.1.11'er; when some more of my friends fixed red and gray tassels to their boys' blouses we were a group.

our group

in our group there was no leader. we all had the same rights and were autonomous in our decisions. if there was a question, and several different propositions were made, we discussed them and decided by vote.

uprightness, reliability, and solidarity were the self-evident fundamental rules of our group life. he who offended against these principles had to go through a hard time. but beyond that everybody was free to do what he wanted. there was a large tolerance even of extravagances, and colourful diversity was always welcome, if it was original and individual.

once a week we held our group meeting, and often we came together another time to attend at a public singing, or to listen to a concert, or to see a movie, and every weekend, in summer as in winter, we made a trip: two by two we hitchhiked to a place we had fixed before, pitched our black fire-tent there, collected a lot of firewood for the long night, and when the dusk came we sat around the fire in our tent with the humming kettle of "chay" on it.

"chay" originally means "tea", and tea possibly was in it, too. but more important were numerous bottles of red wine and diverse spices, clove and cinnamon, raisins and other fruits – each group had their own recipe. all this came together into the big kettle, was drunk hot and kept us warm and happy, even when our fire-tent was buried by snow on new year's day.

this was, after the strains and adventures of the day, always the great hour of our community: to sit around the fire with the best friends in the world you can go through thick and thin with, whom you knew so well, and who nevertheless could surprise you and make you laugh or reflective by their inventive ideas, to look into the flames and dream, or listen when someone told a new story, or, when someone took his balalaika and played a soft melody, to accompany him humming, singing, to reach for a guitar, for the drums, for the tambourine, and the banjo, and play and sing at full voice until the silent nocturnal forest was shaken by the singing from all throats.

our singing

singing played a big role. each one of us had some kind of instrument with him, and nearly everyone played the guitar and often also balalaika, ukulele, or banjo. the instruments were passed from one to another around the fire, playing techniques were exchanged, and of course everybody could handle the percussion instruments.

we knew a whole lot of songs. many of them were, in good dj.1.11-tradition, of foreign origin and where sung only in their native language. some songs were accurately arranged and were always celebrated with an instrumental prelude and postlude or in antiphony of precentor and choir. the most songs however were spontaneously sung in several voices with improvised instrumentation. we could do that really well. in our lonely fire-tent, our singing should finally please us first.

and when we once came to a youth hostel where we were not yet banned we of course put all the other groups in the shade. we performed ourselves with our singing and made it clear to everybody that we were an unbeatable troupe.

our autonomy

sure we were a wild gang. to be autonomous meant also: not to let anyone prescribe us anything. he who wanted to talk us into our self-chosen and self-shaped way of living had to bring forth good arguments in order to make us reflective. if he had nothing but prohibitions, laws, orders, and prescriptions, which he was unable to give plausible reasons for he was only laughed at.

of course this attitude brought us lots of trouble. permanently we faught out conflicts with parents, instructors and teachers, wardens, foresters, and policemen. we suffered defeats, we were beaten up, got house arrest, youth hostel bans, and charges – but they did not get us down: this life was our life, and we were determined to live it our way.

we had thrown over-board all morals and conventions of the adults and allowed only what we ourselves had found to be good. our most solemn song began:

leave the temples of the strange gods,
don't believe, what you didn't recognize yourself ...

we wanted to live free and self-determined, like the cossacks – fled russian bondmen who once had formed their own republic at the margin of the tsar's empire, led a free and anarchic and happy life there and had to defense their freedom against attackers from all sides.
weren't we also fled, run away from the philistine fug, the hypocritical moral of the adult world, and their silly conventions, who, whenever possible, escaped into the small autonomous republic of their youth group?
there we wore cossack blouses, cossack boots, ethnic furry caps, long knives, and cossack whips. now, who would dare to dispute our right to autonomy?

we lived the "dj.1.11 way of life"

we have followed in the footsteps of the old dj.1.11, and we have deliberately revived their traditions. whatever we could hunt up of their old scriptures was read aloud at the campfire, passed around from one to another, and intensely discussed.

some of the old texts were antiquated, and photos which showed dj.1.11'ers with leathern soldier belts and shoulder straps across their boys' blouses, standing at attention in rank and file in front of their group leader, recalled us the deep gap of time, back to those years before hitler and his world war ... but we, who still lived between the ruins of that war, were well cured from the belief in leaders, and soldiers' virtues, and military humbug. our answer to the lesson of history was our free and independent "autonomous boy group dj.1.11" without any obligation to anything or anybody higher than ourselves.

nevertheless we also learnt a lot that was valuable for our life, and whatever seemed to be of persistent importance was copied into a thick book bound in leather, which often went from hand to hand and was read again and again.

but we also went farther: we have lived "the dj.1.11 way of life" in our time. and so we did, what the old dj.1.11 had hardly found time enough for in their three years of existence, and in our way filled their good traditions with exuberant life:

the trips abroad we made every year in summer, far away from the popular tourist routes, were the climax of our group life,
we have lived together with people in foreign countries, have shared their meals and our wine, exchanged songs and tales and jokes, and made good friends with them beyond all cultural and political bounds,
we have learnt something about the customs of foreign cultures, and became thoughtful about the sense of our own customs,
and again and again we have looked out for adventures, have proofed our strength and our perseverance, and sometimes even risked our life – and won it each time anew.

our creativity was tremendous: our tent, our instruments were decorated with painted ornaments, our thick songbooks, bound by ourselves in fur or leather, had many hundred song texts written and illustrated by hand, and our drinking cups were a remarkable collection of coconut shells, bamboo pipes, cow horns and carved wooden cups of all shapes ...
we tried everything and learnt thousand techniques: we sewed our cossack blouses and embroidered their colourful braids ourselves, we burnt pictures in wooden cups and drinking horns, repaired and glued our broken guitars, sawed ornaments from sheet-steel and soldered them onto the buckle of our belts, punched patterns into leather, engraved sweeping initials onto our mess tin, carved a face into the pommel of our knives...
everything was changed, everything was to become more beautiful, and was to reflect our individuality above all.

the zen philosophy was studied and practiced, as far as we understood it. there were not many books on zen available at that time, but we read aloud at the campfire what we could find. a special lecture was "zen in the art of archery": we took a bow and arrows with us, and exercised, and tried to find out the moment when "it" shoots.
we were impressed by what we called "zen style": to achieve a huge expression without words and by minimal means – that what was expressed there remained hidden to us, and so our approachings to zen finally were only formal exercises. but they set free an enormous creativity: we tried to paint with japanese ink, tried calligraphy and ikebana, celebrated the tea ceremony, and began to learn karate, which about 1960 was a completely unknown zen art brought to germany by two dj.1.11'ers who had learnt it in a japanese zen monastery.

political engagement did not seem attractive to us in this era of stagnation and cold war.
we were too busy with ourselves and our permanent struggle against the obsolete moral and the authoritarian structures of the adult society, and there was still no broad movement which could point out the political dimension of this struggle to us.
but when this movement rose a few years later, and finally led to the revolution of 1968, i saw many of my old dj.1.11 comrades again in the demonstrations and meetings.

the most important thing however seems to be: by collectively rejecting the influence of the adults, we have made our group a free zone where everybody of us could find and form his own personality, and as a group we have given each other the strength to stick to our individuality also in civil life.
and a marked trait of this personality is given to all of us by the way of life in our group: to live simple, and upright, without pomp, hypocrisy, and self-deception, to take our fate into our own hands, and not to wait for wonders, but to get down to it, and lend a hand wherever it is needed.