In 1913 the bourgeois youth movement in Germany fell under the influence of a radical minority who called for complete emancipation from adult control. The two most influential youth movement publications of that year joined the language of countercultural rebellion with unconventional discussions of adolescent sexuality. Hans Blüher's book The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon argued that the adolescent boys and young adult male leaders of Wandervogel groups were bound together by homoerotic attraction and that these male leagues were of great benefit to the German nation. Der Anfang, a monthly journal written by adolescents and university students only tangentially related to the Wandervögel, proclaimed that Germany's young people were perfectly capable of self-education in all matters, including sexuality. The countercultural trend of 1913 culminated in the Hoher Meissner festival in mid-October.

The League for the Protection of Motherhood (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, or BfM) was the largest and most active sex-reform organization in Germany before the First World War. The league was at the center of a broad debate about sexuality, gender roles, the family, and population policy, in which representatives not only of the women's movements but also of the Christian churches, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and the sexology, eugenics, and life-reform (particularly nudist) movements participated. Both this broader debate and the BfM itself have been the subject of intensive study over the past fifteen years. One major interpretive focus of the literature to date has been on the issue of the extent to which the biologistic, social Darwinist, and eugenic ideas prominent in the thinking of many of the leading figures in the BfM were or were not evidence of a turning away from liberal, individualist feminism and toward the political and social Right, or of deeper intellectual affinities between National Socialism and sex reform — a point regarding which there is still considerable disagreement.