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."
Author(s): Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 436
City: New York
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Politics and Culture in the "Golden Age"
Chapter 1: Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties
Chapter 2: Understanding 1968: Youth Rebellion, Generational Change and Postindustrial Society
Chapter 3: American Mass Culture and European Youth Culture
Part II: Leisure Time and New Consumerism
Chapter 4: Music, Dissidence, Revolution, and Commerce: Youth Culture between Mainstream and Subculture
Chapter 5: The Triumph of English-Language Pop Music: West German Radio Programming
Chapter 6: Across the Border: West German Youth Travel to Western Europe
Chapter 7: Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism
Part III: Political Protest
Chapter 8: "Burn, ware-house, burn!" Modernity, Counterculture, and the Vietnam War in West Germany
Chapter 9: Youth and Antinuclear Power Movement in Denmark and West Germany
Chapter 10: "Youth Enacts Society and Somebody Makes a Coup": The Danish Student Movement between Political and Lifestyle Radicalism
Chapter 11: A Struggle for Radical Change? Swedish Students in the 1960s
Part IV: Gender Transformations
Chapter 12: Between Coitus and Commodification: Young West German Women and the Impact of the Pill
Chapter 13: Boy Trouble: French Pedophiliac DIscourse of the 1970s
Chapter 14: "More than a dance hall, more a way of life": Northern Soul, Masculinity and Working-class Culture in 1970s Britain
Part V: Cultures, Countercultures, Subcultures
Chapter 15: Utopia and Disillusion: Shattered Hopes of the Copenhagen Counterculture
Chapter 16: Juvenile Left-wing Radicalism, Fringe Groups, and Anti-psychiatry in West Germany
Chapter 17: The End of Certainties: Drug Consumption and Youth Delinquency in West Germany
Select Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
