Youth Brigade
Youth brigades were socialist brigades in which mostly young people worked.
German Democratic Republic
In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), youth brigades were work collectives (brigades) or other groups in economic life, whose average age - at least when they were founded - should not exceed 25 years. They functioned as independent economic structures with their own objectives within the framework of the economic plan, their own accounting for services and, in addition, extensive socio-political interactions within the framework of the objectives of the youth organization FDJ ( Free German Youth ). As part of the transfers to the so-called “Young Socialists Account” (as part of the economic accounting) on the basis of worked out and / or calculated financial income, so-called “mass political initiatives” were installed in addition to material, cultural or tourist activities.
Example: Peter Kaiser's youth brigade in VEB Kombinat Tiefbau Berlin (around 1977). First “every day with a good balance”. Then “everyone has a good balance every day”.
Thus, youth brigades were an active part of the general penetration of society in the GDR with the political and economic content and objectives postulated by the governing bodies.
Yugoslavia
In post-war Yugoslavia , especially among the youth after the victory of the communists, the motivation to rebuild the country was great. In the absence of financial resources, the state built dams, power plants, steelworks, roads and railways with a kind of forced labor in which young people from the countryside were raised to work brigades with no prospect of employment. These young workers received no cash wages, only free room and board.
The first railway built by youth brigades was the 92 kilometer route Brčko – Banovići . It was built in just 190 days by over 60,000 young people, including 2,000 voluntary foreigners, and opened on November 7, 1947. 210,000 young people from Yugoslavia and 42 other countries, including Olof Palme , Pierre Trudeau , Pierre Alechinsky and Jurij Brězan, were involved in the construction of the Šamac – Sarajevo line , which opened on November 16, 1947 . In 1951, two youth brigades built the Doboj – Banja Luka railway line in ten months .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Youth Brigade. In: Duden (Online), Bibliographisches Institut , 2018.
- ^ Fritz Stöckl : Railways in Southeast Europe. Bohmann Verlag, Vienna 1975, ISBN 3-7002-0431-X , p. 50.
- ↑ Werner Schiendl , Franz Gemeinböck: The railways in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1918 - 2016. Edition Bahn im Film, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-9503096-7-6 , p. 200.
- ↑ Schiendl, Gemeinböck: The railways in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1918 - 2016, p. 201.