Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980

by Axel Schildt (editor), Detlef Siegfried (Editor)

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."

Genres: European History

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Georgina Koutrouditsou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ένα εξαιρετικό μωσαικό θέσεων & απόψεων για μια εποχή που χαρακτηρίστηκε ως "μακρά δεκαετία του '60".Ποιος ο ρόλος της νεολαίας σε κοινωνικοπολιτικά αλλά και πολιτισμικά ζητήματα;
Για εμένα αποτελεί ένα παράλληλο ανάγνωσμα της έρευνας του Κωστή Κορνέτη "Τα παιδιά της Δικτατορίας" για τα ελληνικά δεδομένα.
Δυστυχώς εδώ και καιρό είναι εξαντλημένη η ελληνική έκδοση,ενώ ένα τέτοιο έργο είναι απαραίτητο ανάγνωσμα ως γέφυρα ερμηνείας γεγονότων,καταστάσεων και διαμόρφωσης πολιτικών χαρακτήρων των ανθρώπων που ασχολούνται σήμερα με την πολιτική στην Ευρωπαική Ένωση (& όχι μόνο).

Εισαγωγή
Νεολαία, κατανάλωση και πολιτική σε μια εποχή ριζικών αλλαγών
Axel Schildt και Detlef Siegfried
Μέρος Ι: Πολιτική και κουλτούρα στη "χρυσή εποχή"
Η νεανική κουλτούρα και η πολιτική επανάσταση της μακράς δεκαετίας του '60
Arthur Marwick
Κατανοώντας το 1968: Νεανική ανταρσία, αλλαγή γενιάς και μεταβιομηχανική κοινωνία
Detlef Siegfried
Αμερικανική μαζική κουλτούρα και ευρωπαϊκή νεανική κουλτούρα
Rob Kroes
Μέρος II: Ελεύθερος χρόνος και νέος καταναλωτισμός
Μουσική, ανυπακοή, επανάσταση και εμπόριο: Η νεανική κουλτούρα ανάμεσα στο mainstream και την υπο-κουλτούρα
Peter Wicke
Ο θρίαμβος της αγγλόφωνης pop: Το δυτικογερμανικό ραδιοφωνικό πρόγραμμα
Konrad Dussel
Περνώντας τα σύνορα: Η νεολαία της Δυτικής Γερμανίας ταξιδεύει στη Δυτική Ευρώπη
Axel Schildt
Ιμπεριαλισμός και κατανάλωση: δύο τροπισμοί του δυτικογερμανικού ριζοσπαστισμού
Uta G. Poiger
Μέρος III: Πολιτική διαμαρτυρία
"Burn, ware-house, burn!" Νεωτερικότητα, αντικουλτούρα και ο πόλεμος του Βιετνάμ στη Δυτική Γερμανία
Wifried Mausbach
Η νεολαία και το κίνημα κατά της πυρηνικής ενέργειας στη Δανία και τη Δυτική Γερμανία
Henrik Kaare Nielsen
"Η νεολαία ενεργοποιεί την κοινωνία και μετά κάποιος έρχεται να επωφεληθεί από αυτό": Το φοιτητικό κίνημα στη Δανία ανάμεσα στον πολιτικό και στον lifestyle ριζοσπαστισμό
Steven L.B. Jensen
Πάλη για ριζική αλλαγή; Οι Σουηδοί φοιτητές τη δεκαετία του '60
Thomas Etzemuller
Μέρος IV: Μεταμορφώσεις του φύλου
Ανάμεσα στη συνουσία και την εμπορευματοποίηση: Οι νεαρές Δυτικογερμανίδες και ο αντίκτυπος του
αντισυλληπτικού χαπιού
Dagmar Herzog
Ανησυχίες αγοριών: Η ρητορική υπέρ της παιδοφιλίας στη Γαλλία της δεκαετίας του '60
Julian Bourg
"Κάτι περισσότερο από αίθουσα χορού, κάτι περισσότερο από τρόπος ζωής": Northern soul, ανδρισμός και η κουλτούρα της εργατικής τάξης στη Βρετανία της δεκαετίας του '70
Barry Doyle
Μέρος V: Μορφές κουλτούρας, υπο-κουλτούρας, αντικουλτούρας
Ουτοπία και απογοήτευση: Οι γκρεμισμένες ελπίδες της αντικουλτούρας της Κοπεγχάγης
Thomas Ekman Jorgensen
Νεανικός αριστερός ριζοσπαστισμός, περιθωριακές ομάδες και αντιψυχιατρική στη Δυτική Γερμανία
Franz-Werner Kersting
Το τέλος των βεβαιοτήτων: Χρήση ναρκωτικών και νεανική παραβατικότητα στη Δυτική Γερμανία
Klaus Weihauer

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting anthology of historical essays that reflect the importance of “1968” to scholars of Europe and especially Germany. I put “1968” in quotes, because that is not just a year, it is a phenomenon, almost a myth, among cultural scholars, a signifier as they would say that carries far more meaning than just the information carried in its alpha-numerical representation. Part of the problem with studying “1968,” and things that come just before and after it, is that so many of the scholars who work on it were active participants in the aspects of the event that have become mythologized – specifically youth culture, political protest, and social change. I don’t doubt that future generations of scholars will write off much of what has been written to date on these topics as biased and celebratory, if not downright hagiographical.

With that in mind, this book, which focuses on youth culture specifically, is an attempt to chronicle “1968” in a transnational perspective. The focus is decidedly on Western Europe, and most especially West Germany, but there are some good essays about other areas, including Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and France, and one comparison that takes East Germany reasonably well into account. The essays were drawn from two conferences held on contemporary youth culture, and they work together better than is usual for such anthologies; clearly a lot of work went into the editing process to make the articles effectively relevant to one another. Most of the analyses rely heavily on cultural approaches, with gender and social history also represented.

For me, both the strengths and weaknesses of this volume are best represented by individual essays, so I’m going to focus in on four of them from here out. This is not to say that the other essays don’t deserve equal credit, but these stood out to me due to my own particular interests, and so it’s worth it to me to record what I get out of them. Other readers will doubtless find other gems among the thirteen other essays.

The essay that annoys me the most is Rob Kroes, “American Mass Culture and European Youth Culture.” The concept or phenomenon of “Americanization” is deeply implicated in discussions of youth culture of the period, and Kroes is interested in how America served “as a model for rejection or emulation, providing views of a future seen in either a positive or a negative light.” He begins with three “vignettes” from popular films – Jour de Fete (1949), The Commitments (1991), and ‘Round Midnight (1986) – this latter is misidentified by the author as being called “Around Midnight.” I’ve drawn attention to the years to demonstrate how far afield from the supposed date range of the book he has strayed to make his points, but worse still, he gives very little insight to the cultural context or significance of these films. They are simply anecdotes he uses to establish credibility with the “cultural turn.” He then proceeds to make a series of overcomplicated assertions with minimal evidence, ending up declaring that “Boys and girls with the word Coca-Cola on their T-shirts are not the unpaid peddlers of American merchandise…They have transcended such trite connotations and restored American icons to their pure semiotic state of pleasure and freedom.” I believe there was a movement in post-modernism called “hyperconformity” that spouted this sort of nonsense all the time. They conformed themselves into nonexistence.

With that one out of the way, I’m going to jump ahead to my personal favorite article, “’More than a dance hall, more a way of life’: Northern Soul, Masculinity and Working-class Culture in 1970s Britain” (caps sic) by Barry Doyle. By far this is the closest to my own interests, being focused on the skinhead and Teddy Boy culture of the late 60s and 70s, rather than on the standard ‘68er generation. It is also a break from the continent within this heavily German-oriented work. Doyle gives a very sensitive reading of the significance of gender and demonstrates how gender studies informs our understanding of male cultural tropes as well as female. He finds that the “Northern soul” scene he is interested in was “a strong reflection of the parent culture” rather than a revolt against it, one that was attempting to “recover magically the lost world of traditional working-class east and south London collapsing in the face of the slum clearance and containerization.”

A more middling essay, although still useful, is Dagmar Herzog’s “Between Coitus and Commodification: Young West German Women and the Impact of the Pill.” This comes in the same section as Doyle’s, and is a broader usage of some of the same methodologies of gender and cultural analysis. I think a lot of it draws from her major work, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, so for readers familiar with that book it may not be as great, but for those (like me) who haven’t read it, this is a great introduction to Herzog’s analysis of the collision between sex and gender in the context of a society still dealing with its Nazi past. The conflict of generations here comes about because parents who had survived the Third Reich still associated birth control with Nazi racial policies and not with the individual freedoms, in addition to the usual squeamishness of parents who see their daughters becoming sexually active adults.

The final essay I’ll mention here is “Youth and the Antinuclear Power Movement in Denmark and Germany,” by Henrik Kaare Nielsen. It’s not great, and it suffers from the fact that the antinuclear movement was not at base a “youth movement,” but it represents one of the few comparative essays in the book, and demonstrates a good methodological approach to comparing two very different but interconnected case studies. It’s also, of those I have singled out, the closest to discussing “1968” in the more expected sense. He finds the importance of the extra-parliamentary work of these two movements in the rise of Green Parties across Europe in subsequent decades, and makes a decent argument that “1968” may, in fact, have contributed to some actual change in European culture and society.

The book deserves continued use and reference as our perspective on “1968” changes with time and distance, and no doubt several of the essays will serve as useful points of departure for future work and analysis.