“Masquerade Apaches”: Race, Sexuality, and the Wild in the Wilde Cliquen, 1921-1933

Abstract

In 1931, the German psychoanalyst Christine Fournier explained the violent and erotic initiation rituals of the Wilde Cliquen [literally, Wild Gangs]—groups of working-class German youths who roamed the forest outside of Germany’s major cities, surviving on theft and other crimes—as an “imitation of primitive rituals.” Fournier’s comment was only part of a much larger, though short-lived discussion about the Wilde Cliquen. Much of the scholarship on the Wilde Cliquen has focused on class dynamics and the groups’ connections to the political Left in Germany. However, to date, there has been little to no engagement in Wilde Cliquen scholarship with the notions of wildness or the primitive, which saturated both the Cliquen’s self presentation and the contemporary commentary that surrounded them. This thesis seeks to remedy that by highlighting how various ideas about the wild—enlivened by colonial, racial (particularly indigeneity), classed, gendered, and sexual discourses—were central to the history of the Wilde Cliquen. To do so, I mobilize Jack Halberstam’s 2020 theories on wildness, particularly his idea that wildness is created by contradiction and the upending of binaries in the history and archive themselves. In doing so, this thesis aims to establish that there was not a singular source of wildness based on a dichotomous definition of civilization versus savagery. Rather, this thesis maintains that the history and archive on the Wilde Cliquen are scrambled, with different perspectives across multiple decades, ranging from Karl May’s 1893 Wild West series Winnetou to the professional commentary and the public debate among hikers in the 1920s and finally the Cliquen themselves in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This thesis ultimately argues that the meaning of wildness in this history was not drawn from a single source nor static, but that its boundary-defying nature is a part of what makes the Wilde Cliquen wild.