Where Socialist Youth and Anti-Colonial Activists Met

This article advocates for an entangled practice history of interwar anti-colonialism and youth by exploring the political and cultural significance of the Indian News Service and Information Bureau in interwar Berlin. It was a place where young socialists from the left wing of the German-Jewish youth movement mingled with Indian anti-colonial activists, as well as a space for international encounters more widely. But how exactly did this fusion between these different groups occur, in what practices did it materialize, and how did it impact on the activists‘ lives in the 1920s, but also beyond? One of the connecting lines that stretched from the left wing of the youth movement to the anti-colonial activists was a progressive, experimental approach to sexuality that aimed at the overcoming of class, racial, and religious boundaries. Mixed relationships between cosmopolitan men from Asia and independent young women from GermanJewish homes, who had grown up with and in the youth movement of the early twentieth century, had more than an erotic appeal, however. They were also a political statement, a lived rejection of the middle-class conventions of the prewar period and, from the perspective of the Indian activists, also a critique of colonial emotional regimes and the regulation of intimacy that often accompanied them

Colonialism · Human sexuality · Interwar period · Left-wing politics · Politics · Youth culture · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics