Abstract
This article advocates for an entangled practice history of interwar anti-colonialism and youth
by exploring the political and cultural significance of the Indian News Service and Information
Bureau in interwar Berlin. It was a place where young socialists from the left wing of the Ger
man-Jewish youth movement mingled with Indian anti-colonial activists, as well as a space for
international encounters more widely. But how exactly did this fusion between these different
groups occur, in what practices did it materialize, and how did it impact on the activists‘ lives
in the 1920s, but also beyond? One of the connecting lines that stretched from the left wing of
the youth movement to the anti-colonial activists was a progressive, experimental approach to
sexuality that aimed at the overcoming of class, racial, and religious boundaries. Mixed relation
ships between cosmopolitan men from Asia and independent young women from German
Jewish homes, who had grown up with and in the youth movement of the early twentieth
century, had more than an erotic appeal, however. They were also a political statement, a lived
rejection of the middle-class conventions of the prewar period and, from the perspective of the
Indian activists, also a critique of colonial emotional regimes and the regulation of intimacy that
often accompanied them.