ABSTRACT
When Europe celebrated its liberation from Nazi dictatorship and the war’s end in 1945, it was young people who spilled out into the city streets in an outpouring of emotion after the horrible years of war. In London and Paris, young men and women linked arms, sang and marched, snaked through the streets in rumba lines, be-bopped, jitterbugged, and greeted Allied soldiers in a spontaneous explosion of freedom. It is conventional to understand youth culture partly as a rebellion against the unbending atmosphere of the 1950s and partly as an invention of consumer capitalism. There is no doubt that those origins were significant. But the first appearance of European “youth” as a social category capable of creative action was during the war and Liberation. Even the wartime resistance, from Germany’s Edelweiss Pirates and the French maquis to Ukrainian partisans, was in part a youth movement. The older generation, its values and politics, were bankrupt. Traditional class distinctions were broken down. The war was an experience of anonymity, uniformity, mass production, mass migration, and mass death. The future belonged to the young, who learned rebellion, anti-conformity, and their capacity for substituting and appropriating “found objects” as their own amid the ravages of war. Living within this collective experience, yet avoiding its facelessness and boredom through the assertion of individuality became the hallmarks of postwar youth culture. In liberated France, the “J3s”, as they were often called after the name of the food ration category for 15-to 21-year-olds, sported crew cuts and khaki uniforms in emulation of American GIs. They zipped along the streets on roller-skates once the curfews were lifted. Young German jazz fans in roll-neck sweaters and striped socks founded “Hot Clubs” and consumed pulp gangster and western novels amid the chaos and occupation that followed the defeat. French beats, decked out in black, jammed in Paris. These were the roots of contemporary mass culture, the everyday practices heavily influenced by the war and Liberation, by Americanization, and staged by the young people of Europe as the formula for their own identity. Youth was a metaphor for social change. It was a public sign of the shifting categories of memory, community, and social category. If youth distinguished mass culture, so did commodification and the absorption with lifestyle. Mass culture was carried on radio and television waves, on celluloid film and vinyl records to audiences of millions who absorbed the same images, shared the same values, and collectively engaged with the same cultural icons and issues. European high culture struggled for survival. Older cultural ideals, passed on through identification with social class and family, were diffused. In their place, consumer capitalism produced and marketed collective desires that perpetually reinvented themselves and became a universalized set of signs, a language of value explicitly associated with the
contemporary age. But if the promotional strategies came from corporate boardrooms, the creative core came from quotidian invention. Local culture was remade. The “street,” in this sense the populist culture of everyday urban life, became the vital laboratory for the spellbinding twists and turns of mass cultural imagery and practice. Beginning with this youth culture that emerged in the 1950s, this chapter focuses on the development of mass culture and its impact on Europe.
