Gustav Wyneken

Gustav Wyneken (March 19, 1875, Stade, Province of Hanover – December 8, 1964, Göttingen, Lower Saxony) was a German educational reformer, free thinker and charismatic leader. His ideas and practice on education and youth became highly influential but were also controversial.

He was born to a Christian family, and studied Theology and Philology in Berlin. In 1900 he married Luise Margaretha Dammermann, from whom he was divorced in 1910. From 1900 to 1906 he worked as a teacher in boarding schools, where he was a colleague of Hermann Lietz.

Wyneken coined two influential terms.

The first term was "pedagogic eros", the name given to erotic attraction and/or love between a teacher and a pupil. Pedagogic eros (or Pädagogischer Eros in German) was embodied as a set of concepts popularised by Wyneken's in Germany, and based around the Ancient Greek Platonic 'Ladder of Beauty' model of same-sex pedagogic relationships, but blended with high Germanic philosophical ideas. Although focused on same-sex relationships, his ideas could also be applied to heterosexuality. He led the wider Free School (or Freie Schulgemeinde in German) movement, a movement that founded boarding schools across Germany.

The second term was "Jugendkultur"; this implied that wherever possible adults should refrain from overtly 'leading' youth groups, and older youths should instead lead younger youths. This was part of his deep influence on the German Youth Movement; notably the Jugendkulturbewegung, the Wandervogel and the Adolf Brand's Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. He downplayed the then-popular notions of the need for a restored Volkish German culture and was not known to be anti-semitic. His Free Schools accepted a large portion of Jewish pupils. In a sense, by coining and encouraging 'Jugendkultur' he was the founder of what would later become widely known as 'youth culture'.

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