Jaroslav Foglar - Scout Versus Youth Club Movement

Scout Versus Youth Club Movement

However Foglar worked as Scout leader, his relation to the Scout movement was not simple. He basically pictured the boy scouts only in few of his novels (especially Pod junackou vlajkou a Devadesatka pokracuje), preferring to write mostly about his own invention, the boy clubs. Foglar's idea of independent boy clubs is basically derived from German Wandervogel movement. As editor of Mlady Hlasatel, Foglar systematically build clubbist ideology (based on friendship, good deeds, personal sacrifice, love to the nature, etc.) on some and traditions and own terminology. Clubs were small groups between 4 and 8 youths. Some of them were informally led by young men few years older than other youths, like Rikitan in novel Hosi od Bobri reky or by best of the youths - like 'exemplary youth' Mirek Dusin of Rychle Sipy Club. Having Foglar's novels and his magazine articles as a pattern, many Czech youths established such a clubs. At its high tide, there were many thousand of such independent clubs, which were basically kind of Wandervogel concurrence towards the organized Scout movement. On the other hand, when Scouts were persecuted and forbidden during the German occupation between 1938 and 1945 and during Communism between 1948 and 1989 (with short exception of renewal of Scout during 1968 and 1969), boy clubs posed excellent informal alternative of youth life based on ideas similar to those of Scouts.