English Translation

93 It would be superficial to answer this question with a mere description of the organizational conditions in the Czech youth during the Republic and shortly afterwards. The reasons lie deeper. They are rooted in a peculiarity typical of the patriarchal family structure of the Czech people, and they are also rooted in an extremely educational statement of the then responsible Czech leading class. They are further rooted in the organisational inadequacy of Czech youth. For us Germans, in relation to the world war, the word was once spoken that we had to lose the war in order to win the revolution. Today, this sentence could be applied in retrospect to the Czech youth in opposite sentence. While the German youth after 1918 was faced with the need either to settle with the poverty of the November state or to become inevitably revolutionary - that it became this not in the Bolshevik, but in the National Socialist sense, speaks for the instinctual security of the German Youth as well as for the art-like nature of the Nazi world view -, the overthrow of 1918 opened for the Czech youth a golden age of prosperity and secure existence. It succumbed to the latent danger of degeneration of the idealistic impulses of its youth for each victorious state and fell into the state of the saturated spiritual and political comfort. The older generation has gratefully acknowledged this "dismissal of Czech youth for revolution" and, through the zealous promotion of the well-known liberation légende and huma- nicist-democratic euphemisms in this youth, it still strengthens the feeling that it will be protected from all spiritual and existential ferry in the future if it only treads well into the tried-and-tested footsteps of the elderly. To save young people the independence of their path of development always involves certain dangers. For the Czech people in particular, this had to be of concern, because the Czech youth itself included for imitating tried-and-tested recipes and because in this sense the Czech People hardly knew a generational problem. This is the patriarchal-family peculiarity that I meant above. All the slogans of "free way for the youth" aimed at opening up economic opportunities than at a fruitful mental influence. The then czech rulers, who with the folly of their youth so probably