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May, who had never been to the American West, popularized a Romantic vision of it for early twentieth-century Germans (he was reputedly Hitler’s favorite writer) with novels about noble savages, the intense bonds of male friendship, and the promise of a more authentic, instinctual life beyond civilization. They cribbed their identities from the westerns of Karl May. Rejecting the society that rejected them, these teenage misfits modeled themselves on Romantic fringe-tropes: mountain men, Indian braves, gypsies, and bandits. They were known as “wild gangs” or “wild guilds,” and in the late days of the Weimar Republic and into the early Nazi period, there were some six hundred of these gangs roaming the city’s woodlands- largely made up of 14-to-18-year-old boys, most of them gay, dedicated to a life of sexual freedom, criminal enterprise, and fresh forest air. But less than a century ago, this suburban wilderness was the haunt of feral children who had renounced the adult world for one forged of their own primal fantasies. Today, if you visit the wooded parks and lakelands that hug Berlin, you’ll find them filled with hikers, cyclists, and mushroom hunters.