"All Power to the Imagination!": Art and Politics in the West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens
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"All Power to the Imagination!": Art and Politics in the West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens
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| ISBN-13: | 9780803299856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 270 |
| Lexile: | 1590L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 731 KB |
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"All Power to the Imagination!"
The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens
By Sabine Von Dirke
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 1997 University of Nebraska PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9985-6
CHAPTER 1
Cultural Hegemony and Youth Subcultures in the 1950s
Ja dann wird wieder in die hände gespuckt
wir steigern das bruttosozialprodukt.
Yeah, now we roll up our sleeves again
We're raising the gross national product.
Geier Sturzflug, "Bruttosozialprodukt"
(Gross national product), 1977
The rock band Geier Sturzflug's "Bruttosozialprodukt," with lyrics set to a happy melody reminiscent of 1950s popular music, became a big hit in the early 1980s in the context of the country's political turn — the Wende, as it was called in German. After thirteen years with the Social Democratic-Liberal (SPD-FDP) coalition, the party credited with the postwar "economic miracle," at the helm, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian twin the Christian Social Union (CSU) took over and promised change. Geier Sturzflug's New Wave song captures in ironic fashion the spirit of mainstream West German society at both times — the 1950s and the 1980s — when the country, led by the center-right parties, focused all its energy on the economy. The song satirizes German Fleiß (industriousness), to which popular opinion ascribes the quick postwar recovery. The song tells the tale of elderly and disabled people secretly hurrying to the factory when the whistle blows early in the morning and turning into workaholics who sing in unison with the work rhythm. As the manager of Geier Sturzflug points out, the band had no intention of praising capitalism and the economic boom that materialized in the 1980s but instead wanted to ridicule the workaholism and consumerism of contemporary West German society. But even satire is not immune to reappropriation by mainstream culture and on the hegemonic forces' own terms.
Another song by Geier Sturzflug, "Besuchen sie Europa, solange es noch steht" (Visit Europe while it's still there), which thematizes the arms race between the two superpowers and the potential of Europe's going up in the flames of a nuclear war, points up to more parallels between the two decades. The introduction of a new weapon system — the neutron bomb — by the Carter administration in 1978 and Ronald Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric in the 1980s were direct descendants of the arms race and Cold War mentality of the 1950s. As a result, both periods gave rise to anticommunism and arms protests.
In light of these parallels, the popular 1950s revival occurring from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s did not come as a surprise. The mass media disseminated a picture of the 1950s as a happy time of swinging petticoats, asymmetrical design, and sentimental Tin Pan Alley music. Though research on all aspects of life in the 1950s was published in the early 1980s, detailed or critical assessments were ignored in favor of a mythical reconstruction of this era — the "falsche Fünfziger" as a Spiegel article commented with a critical pun. "Falsche Fünfziger" literally means counterfeited fifty-mark bills and figuratively refers to a deceitful person. From a 1980s perspective the "economic miracle" looked like a "fake fifty" in this double sense. On the one hand, West Germany experienced tremendous economic growth during the 1950s, which slowly but surely put more money into working people's pockets. On the other hand, the revival's mythical image of the 1950s as a happy-go-lucky time was as insubstantial as counterfeit money. The prosperity was bought at the expense of the future: the safe and sound promises of the 1950s had turned into potential ecological and nuclear disaster by the 1980s.
The song "Gross National Product" points precisely to this deceptive image of the 1950s in their 1980s revival. It expresses the 1980s conservative political agenda — the appeal to the 1950s virtues of industriousness and a high work ethic — but in a highly ironic fashion, adopting the happy-go-lucky music of the most popular genre of the 1950s — the Schlager (Tin Pan Alley music). Its lyrics, however, are a far cry from those of the Schlager, whose world consisted of white marriage carriages and romantic nights in Florence and Paris. The Schlager's lyrics portrayed a world of fantasies and not realities such as work. They were affirmative and uncritical, reflecting the carefree attitude of the majority, which did not think of questioning society's materialism as Geier Sturzflug's lyrics do twenty years later. Geier Sturzflug's deliberate juxtaposition of a sentimental 1950s popular music form with modern social reality — work, the economy, and consumerism — imbues the whole song with an ironic and subversive effect. The song thereby criticizes the attempt to anachronistically revive the culture of the past and points to the sore spot in both the CDU/CSU'S invocation of the 1950s and the decade's mythical reconstruction by the entertainment industry. The material basis of life in the 1980s, when the CDU/CSU took over government, was quite different from that of the 1950s. In the 1950s the majority of West Germans gained in material wealth, and hardly anybody was left behind in the long run. This no longer held true for the 1980s, when the Federal Republic moved toward the "two-thirds" society, where a third of society is left to fall through the widening cracks of the welfare state while the other two thirds enjoy a higher and higher standard of living — a trend aggravated by unification.
Apart from its revival in the 1980s, the decade of the 1950s merits closer inspection because it was the formative period for the hegemonic culture of West Germany and for the generation that became the first carrier of a lasting counterculture a decade later, namely, the student movement. The members of the student movement generation were socialized during the 1950s primarily through the university track of Gymnasium (high school), which they attended in preparation for their future status as the professional and cultural elite. Their protest was a rebellion against the "fake fifties," which Margarete von Trotta referred to as "times of lead" in Die Bleierne Zeit, her film exploring the biographies of two members of this generation, Gudrun Ensslin, whose middle-class life ended in terrorism, and her sister, who became an activist in the women's movement.
Studying the material conditions and the hegemonic aesthetic culture under which these young West Germans were socialized is necessary in order to understand the criticism they raised a decade later. This chapter first examines the most important aspects of 1950s culture, particularly the correlation between the "economic miracle," political consciousness (or perhaps the lack thereof), and dominant aesthetic paradigms. Finally, we turn to instances of rebellion against the secure world of the 1950s, namely, the first youth subcultures in postwar West Germany: the existentialist youth and the Halbstarken.
The "Economic Miracle"
The "economic miracle" was made possible only by focusing all human resources on reconstruction and industrial productivity, quite as the song Gross National Product describes. This project indeed paid off by transforming the Allied start-up capital, the money provided by the Marshall Plan, into an economic success story. In 1952 the West German economy already had a trade surplus, and only two years later West Germany occupied the third position in world trade behind the United States and Great Britain. This economic boom was part of a larger global constellation, mainly shaped by the growing tensions between the two superpowers, whose confrontation the Federal Republic felt so harshly again in the 1980s. The first violent eruption of this tension, the Korean War (1950–54), gave the West German economy a hefty boost, leading to tremendous growth rates and virtually full employment by 1960, both unthinkable today. The "economic miracle" allowed all West Germans to get their piece of the pie, which amounted to an average increase in wages of 76 percent.
The controversy surrounding the currency reform of 1948 masterminded by Ludwig Erhard is forgotten in today's celebration of the "economic miracle." Since the Soviet zone did not participate, the currency reform indicated that a unified Germany might not emerge from the ashes of the Second World War. Lifting price controls and abandoning food stamps created at first more hardship than immediate benefit for the general population. Still, the hard new currency brought back plenty of goods previously available only on the black market. But at the same time, it produced price hikes, which put the merchandise in the shop windows beyond the means of most Germans, many of whom had been unemployed or had earned only low wages in 1948 and 1949. For all of these reasons, the reform initially generated resentment and strikes. But as soon as the majority of West Germans had the wherewithal to stuff themselves to match the portly physique of their economic leader, they embraced Ludwig Erhard's concept of the social market economy wholeheartedly. Erhard's economic program allowed the West Germans to find a positive moment of identification with their country after the Holocaust and World War II had made it difficult to develop a German national identity. The phrase "Made in Germany" filled the West Germans with pride and their wallets with hard DM currency.
The "economic miracle" had mobilized the good old German virtues of discipline and industriousness and turned society quickly into one big consumer club. "Wealth for Everyone!" became its slogan, which aimed at eroding class identifications. The hegemonic discourse no longer conceptualized West Germany as a class society but as a leveled-out or well-adjusted middle-class society. This ideological articulation of the "economic miracle" proclaimed the end of class distinctions and the beginning of a new era in which the performance principle would allow all citizens to rise as high as their talents and industriousness would take them. Most income went into consumption, starting with food as a top priority after the years of undernourishment and deprivation. A tremendous feeding frenzy, the Freß-Welle, washed over the country in the 1950s. As productivity rose and vacation time increased, the West German travel mania took the place of this preoccupation with food. Since the mid-1950s larger and larger numbers of vacationers flocked to the Hunnen-Grill, the Mediterranean beaches, for the sun, still unencumbered by worries about skin cancer or polluted beaches.
While the West Germans performed well in the economic arena, their progress toward the development of a democratic culture was less clear. The historically high turnout on election days should not deceive us about political interest in the 1950s. "Politics? No, thank you!" was the most commonly held stance among the West Germans well into the 1960s. Like burned children, the majority turned their backs on active political engagement after their stint with National Socialism. Instead of confronting the "most recent past," as the twelve years of Nazi rule were commonly referred to, the Federal Republic was happy to settle into a general amnesia about this time and especially about the Holocaust. Those who went to school during the 1950s and 1960s were drilled on history from Greek and Roman antiquity to the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire. One short period of German history remained, however, conspicuously absent — that from 1933 to 1945. Lack of information meant lack of knowledge and the danger of the subtle continuation of long-cherished myths and mentalities. Numerous opinion polls conducted during the 1950s show West German society still strongly influenced by authoritarian structures and thinking.
A retreat from politics altogether was the response of the majority of the younger West Germans to their experience with National Socialism and the hardship of the war and immediate postwar years. Particularly those who had fully participated in the Nazis' youth organizations saw their youthful idealism abused and betrayed. As a result, they had grown weary of political ideas and were prone to view politics only as propaganda and ideology. Moreover, for most of them no active political education took place — neither at home nor in school. In his groundbreaking study of German youth from 1945 to 1955, Helmut Schelsky, one of the dominant empirical sociologists in postwar West Germany, called this generation the skeptical one and hailed it for its dispassionate and pragmatic attitude toward life. He was not concerned about the depoliticization of youth and life in West Germany, but viewed it as a necessary development. According to his research, these young Germans were more interested in their professional career, material wealth, and private happiness than in the larger sociopolitical context. He finds the roots of this pragmatism in the immediate postwar situation, which required this generation to perform like adults in order to insure the subsistence of their often fatherless families.
Nevertheless, the 1950s youth accepted the Federal Republic's representative democracy. It approached the state, however, with a consumerist attitude, viewing it first and foremost as the guarantor of economic and social stability. It would be wrong to blame solely the young for this attitude. After all, they did as expected and emulated their parents, who had been focused on the material aspects of life since the end of the war. At the same time, a minority of this very same youth was the first to show signs of discomfort with the Republic of the "economic miracle" and dissent from mainstream culture.
Hegemonic Culture: Between Restoration and Innovation
Economic growth meant more spending money and leisure time, generating a tremendous expansion of the sphere of culture during the 1950s. Like the school system, aesthetic culture showed most clearly the differentiation of society, which the ideology of affluence and of the middle-class society tried to diffuse. An overarching binary structure of institutionalized culture developed from the very beginning of the Federal Republic, namely, the split into a minority culture of the educated elites and a majority culture of the less-educated masses. One feature was and until today remains absent: no genuine proletarian culture emerged in postwar West Germany. This was due not only to the new ideology of the satisfied middle-class society but to the Nazis' successful destruction of the thriving working-class consciousness and culture of the Weimar Republic.
Many of the left-wing intellectuals and artists who survived in exile did not return to the West but settled in the East. The result was a dearth of leftist intellectuals and artists in the Federal Republic, who could have helped to recreate a genuine proletarian culture. In addition, the GDR offered no convincing alternative cultural model. Quite to the contrary, the intensity with which state authorities shaped and controlled the sphere of East German culture was too reminiscent of the totalitarian Nazi regime for the taste of the West Germans and their allies. The anticommunism characteristic of Cold War rhetoric in the 1950s foreclosed an open discussion of a socialist aesthetic or any alternative, comprehensive cultural politics. Finally, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the unions had embarked on an integrationist course, realizing that the economic success of the Federal Republic was more and more eroding the remnants of working-class consciousness and culture. In a strategic move, the spd shed the last socialist planks from its party platform in 1957 in order to position itself better for being elected to govern the country.
Even though only a small proportion of the entire West German population shared the aesthetic paradigms of the educated elites, those paradigms remain central to this study for two reasons. First of all, this elite culture was hegemonic; in other words, these institutionally sanctioned artistic expressions represented the standards against which all other cultural expressions were measured. Schools and universities helped to establish the hegemony of these aesthetic paradigms by teaching them to the next generation of the elite, which in many instances happened to be the future student activists who attended Gymnasium during the 1950s and early 1960s. But schools were not the only source of aesthetic education. The parents' cultural preferences also played a significant role, as well as the debates carried out in the public sphere, primarily in the cultural sections of newspapers or specific cultural journals to which the children of the educated elites had access.
The hegemonic culture was not, however, totally homogeneous. Two dominant cultural paradigms emerged in close correlation to the agenda of the political parties, as Jost Hermand points out. He has labeled them the conservative Adenauer agenda and the liberal Erhard agenda, after the two leaders most prominent in shaping the Federal Republic during the 1950s. These two approaches to aesthetic culture differed in many ways, but they were not mutually exclusive. They rather formed the "historical bloc," "an alliance of ruling-class factions" that is necessary for establishing cultural hegemony, which is based, after all, on the consent of the subordinate social strata.
According to Hermand, the liberal spectrum was divided on the issue of the mass media and the entertainment industry into a populist group and an elitist-modernist group. For the populist liberals, the freedom of choice that the individual exercises in the sphere of economics applied also to the sphere of culture. They did not argue for a unified culture but saw its differentiation into a variety of cultural options as an expression of an open, pluralist society. But even those who embraced a pluralist culture made a qualitative distinction between "low" mass culture and the "high" culture of the elite. A characteristic of the liberal spectrum was its preference for innovation in aesthetic culture rather than preservation. Innovation meant finding new and different artistic forms. Though its proponents did not dismiss the classics or the heritage of Western culture in general, they rejected any form of a realist aesthetic, that is, content-oriented and referential works of art, as historically obsolete. In its most radical articulation, these liberal critics embraced a formalist aesthetic and viewed abstract art, serial music, and experimental literature as superior forms of art.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "All Power to the Imagination!" by Sabine Von Dirke. Copyright © 1997 University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction: Culture and Hegemony,
1 Cultural Hegemony and Youth Subcultures in the 1950s,
2 "All Power to the Imagination!" The Student Movement of the 1960s,
3 Post-1968 Blues: Spontis, Violence, and New Subjectivity,
4 "Objectivity? No, Thank You!" New Subjectivity from Tunix to taz,
5 "Do It Yourself!" Artistic Concepts and Practices of the Alternative Culture,
6 Between Politics and Ecology: Green Ideas on Art and Culture,
Conclusion: As the Story Ends,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,