The Myth of Youth and “Non-Youth” from Imperial to Weimar Germany Hiroaki Murakami This essay deals with the change of imagination on “non-youth” in the German myth of youth, which was cultivated in the early youth movement and radicalized during the Weimar period. Though there are a lot of studies on Jugendbewegung or -mythos, no historian seems to have recognized so far the significance of “negative” sides of the myth. However it is clear that all positive imagination must inevitably depend on or be justified by the negative one and vice versa. That is to say, positive and negative imaginations are inextricably linked to each other. From this perspective the essay reconstructs first the image of “non-youth” in the early youth movement. This image functioned as a “suppressor”, who was represented by teachers in school or parents (especially father) in family, and from whom German youth had to be emancipated. On the other hand, however, the suppressor on youth disappeared after the First World War or rather was replaced by the old man who got stiff with age. The reasons for this change are the following: Demographers became conscious to trends of the so-called “demographic transition” in the very Weimar period; foreseeable terrors resulted from this transition were agitated eagerly by contemporary scholars; the great number of youth unemployed was one of the urgent problems for Weimar regimes, while old population seems to have defended their own working places. The transformation of “non-youth” caused anyway to change the mission of youth, that is to say, from emancipation of self to renovation of Germany through exclusion of “stiffened” old men.