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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."
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Youth, Consumption, and Politics in the Age of Radical Change
Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried
PART I: POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE "GOLDEN AGE"
Chapter 1. Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties
Arthur Marwick
Chapter 2. Understanding 1968: Youth Rebellion, Generational Change and Postindustrial Society
Detlef Siegfried
Chapter 3. American Mass Culture and European Youth Culture
Rob Kroes
PART II: LEISURE TIME AND NEW CONSUMERISM
Chapter 4. Music, Dissidence, Revolution, and Commerce: Youth Culture between Mainstream and Subculture
Peter Wicke
Chapter 5. The Triumph of English-Language Pop Music: West German Radio Programming
Konrad Dussel
Chapter 6. Across the Border: West German Youth Travel to Western Europe
Axel Schildt
Chapter 7. Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism
Uta G. Poiger
PART III: POLITICAL PROTEST
Chapter 8. "Burn, ware-house, burn!" Modernity, Counterculture, and the Vietnam War in West Germany
Wilfried Mausbach
Chapter 9. Youth and the Antinuclear Power Movement in Denmark and West Germany
Henrik Kaare Nielsen
Chapter 10. "Youth Enacts Society and Somebody Makes a Coup": The Danish Student Movement between Political and Lifestyle Radicalism
Steven L.B. Jensen
Chapter 11. A Struggle for Radical Change? Swedish Students in the 1960s
Thomas Etzemüller
PART IV: GENDER TRANSFORMATIONS
Chapter 12. Between Coitus and Commodification: Young West German Women and the Impact of the Pill
Dagmar Herzog
Chapter 13. Boy Trouble: French Pedophiliac Discourse of the 1970s
Julian Bourg
Chapter 14. "More than a dance hall, more a way of life": Northern Soul, Masculinity and Working-class Culture in 1970s Britain
Barry Doyle
PART V: CULTURES, COUNTERCULTURES, SUBCULTURES
Chapter 15. Utopia and Disillusion: Shattered Hopes of the Copenhagen Counterculture
Thomas Ekman Jørgensen
Chapter 16. Juvenile Left-wing Radicalism, Fringe Groups, and Anti-psychiatry in West Germany
Franz-Werner Kersting
Chapter 17. The End of Certainties: Drug Consumption and Youth Delinquency in West Germany
Klaus Weinhauer
Select Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Axel Schildt (1951-2019) was Professor of History at the university of Hamburg and Director of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg.
Detlef Siegfried is Associate Professor of Contemporary German History at the University of Copenhagen and Research Fellow at the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg.
Summary
In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age", a new youth consciousness emerged. This volume moves beyond the conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and sets out to show how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters.
Additional text
"...This collection...will be extremely helpful for all those researching and teaching socio-political change in Europe during and after the 1960s. It is particularly welcome as the book's focus on West Germany and Scandinavia covers precisely the most significant geographical omission in Arthur Marwick's The Sixties...a fascinating and innovative collection. It successfully conveys the competing and - at times - complementary pressures of political radicalization and the new consumerism during this stressful and exhilarating period of change." �����Journal of Contemporary History
"...undergraduates who purchase this book will not sell it back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. It is thoroughly readable and the translations and writings of non-native English speakers flow very well. It is also engaging and thought-provoking, with something to offer everyone, from the college student activist to the expert on youth culture and rebellion...In an impressive display of thematic unity for an edited volume, the authors' contributions are in dialogue with one another...the volume is one of the year's best books...By demonstrating the varying aspects of youth movements in different national settings, this volume takes the reader far beyond the parts of its whole."����H-German
