Jungen, Die

(The Youth), a semianarchist group of German Social Democrats of the early 1890’s. It emerged as a specific reaction by certain petit bourgeois elements against the opportunism of the party’s right wing. However Die Jungen revealed complete incomprehension of the need for new tactics after repeal of the emergency legislation against the Socialists in 1890. The group opposed parliamentary methods of struggle, the use of legal recourse, and the formation of a bloc with the bourgeois democrats; it thereby pushed the party along a sectarian path. Many of the ideologists of Die Jungen (among them P. Kampffmeyer) later joined the revisionist camp. A. Bebel, P. Singer, and other party figures waged a determined struggle against Die Jungen, while simultaneously opposing right-wing opportunism. At the Erfurt Congress of the Social Democratic Party (October 1891), some of the leaders of Die Jungen were expelled from the party.