This dissertation looks at two superficially dissimilar German youth cultures framing opposite ends of the twentieth century--the Wandervogel and West German punks--and proposes that they shared an important but unexplored commonality in their response to the subjective malaise of modern life, which has often been read through the discourse of boredom. Rather than define themselves through dominant societal and historical narratives, these groups of youth often instead oriented themselves to the future and attempted, through direct action and the recasting of their lives as unbound and autonomous, to move beyond the root causes of alienation that have led to the proliferation of modern boredom since the Enlightenment. For the Wandervogel, this direct action was expressed as Selbsterziehung--the belief that in order to discover and explore both their world and themselves, youth needed to teach themselves on their own terms. For punks in West Germany, the DIY (do-it-yourself) project at the core of punk led these youth to a participatory engagement in the same vein. This study further reads these projects through the related ideas of Wandern, a form of wandering that, for the Wandervogel, transcended a simple definition of aimlessly exploring nature and read in it instead a means of engagement with the world, and Anderssein, West German punks' expression of experiential difference, a concept heavily rooted in their intense desire for originality, their expressions of autonomy and their desire for freedom.
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