Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, 1918--1924 from eastern Galicia and Vienna to Palestine: A cultural history (Austria, Poland)

This Dissertation examines the early, pre-Marxist years of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement from a wider perspective of European intellectual and cultural history. The movement originated in the Habsburg province of eastern Galicia around 1911 and was founded in Vienna in 1916. During World War I the first cohorts of the movement arrived in Vienna as war refugees along with their families. It was in this intellectual maelstrom and thanks to their exposure to the Viennese Jugendkulturbewegung, headed by the Jewish intellectual Siegfried Bernfeld that the movement's members received their intellectual formation. In 1920 the movement began its immigration to Palestine and was one of the founders of the kibbutz movement.; In Vienna, the movement was exposed to a number of intellectual currents: Martin Buber's existential approach to Judaism and religiosity, Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie, Gustav Landauer's community oriented anarchism, Hans Bluher's theory of Mannerbund and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. These currents were incorporated into the movement's nascent worldview.; Part 1 of the dissertation examines the eastern Galician roots of the movement. Part 2 is dedicated to the movement's inculcation of the various intellectual currents in Vienna. Part 3 looks closely at the community of Bitania which the movement founded in 1920 in the Galilee. In this community the movement sought to experiment with the ideas it had brought to Palestine. Bitania was to become an "erotic community," where a set of practices was instrumental in intensifying the bonding experience.; In examining the intellectual orbit of Hashomer Hatzair and its peculiar brand of post-traditional Judaism, this dissertation claims that Hashomer Hatzair imported distinctly German and Central European ideas, concerns and modes of thought into its evolving worldview. This may serve to destabilize the preconceived dichotomies between Eastern European Jews as opposed to German Jews, and Jewish modes of thought as opposed to German ones.