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Bamberg: Die kolonialen Wurzeln der Pfadfinder

This chapter traces the early years of the Pfadfinder, an organization modeled on the British Boy Scouts. Like the Scouts, the Pfadfinder relied on imaginary adventures in colonial frontiers to reform how young people lived their lives. The movement drew support from young Germans interested in the exotic and adventurous but also faced challenges from powerful conservative critics who decried its ‘foreign’ character and predicted that its liberating potential would undermine any educational potential. Paradoxically, the changes critics forced upon the organization undermined the progressive colonial pedagogy that had proven so popular in the first place.