? Photograph by Edith Tudor-Hart
Members of the Social-Democratic Youth Movement Marching Past the Opera House, Opernring, Vienna
Photographed about 1928
This is a very dynamic image showing members of the Social-Democratic Youth Movement marching in Vienna. In the wake of the First World War, the Austrian political parties had a youthful membership ? it is estimated that up to sixty per cent of the Viennese Social Democrats were under forty years of age. The limits of teenagers? political engagement was a particular source of controversy, with many arguing that the youth movement should be more educational than political. Memoirs of the period reveal that political identification was often fluid. A common joke amongst young activists was that you went to bed a Social Democrat and woke up a Communist!
