ABSTRACT
The first quotation comes from a publication giving west German young people an insight into life for their counterparts in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It argues that virtually all the youth cultures in the West were present in the East, even if they did seem to ‘lag behind’ in some respects. However, in the first comparative study of east and west German youth in 1990, Lenz (1991) showed that young people had the same priorities for their lives, attached the same importance to their peers, and that rather than being more conservative, east Germans were even more in sympathy with new social movements than western youth. The approach here echoes work by Hilary Pilkington (1994) on Russian youth cultures in arguing that simply analysing youth cultures in eastern Europe as a poor relation of western youth cultures is to miss their significance in reflecting the forces that shaped them and in shaping their societies.
