Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.PostprintPeer reviewe

Auf der Suche nach dem wahren Selbst: Feminismus, Schönheit und Kosmetikindustrie in der Bundesrepublik seit den 1970er-Jahren

In evaluating beauty and cosmetics, feminists have developed different concepts of the ›self‹ since the 1970s, often in friction with the advertising strategies of the cosmetics industry. Alternative magazines like Courage and Emma offered important forums for such exchanges. In feminist critiques of beauty ideals and cosmetics, the articulation of a true or authentic self was important, and yet was regularly questioned, especially in feminist appropriations of punk. From the 1980s onwards, the concept of an entrepreneurial self has become increasingly evident in discussions of beauty and cosmetics; this entrepreneurial self uses cosmetics in specific contexts to present a versatile, self-assured subject. Working with the concept of vernacular ethnology – a method of rapid general cultural comparison which can be found in feminist analyses as well as in global advertising campaigns of the cosmetics industry – the essay examines how an understanding of alleged ethnic differences has contributed to these developments. In the twenty-first century, people (men included) perform their ›beauty work‹ in the context of ambiguous conceptualizations of beauty, which is regarded as being at once attainable, oppressive and liberating. * * * Feministinnen haben seit den 1970er-Jahren im Umgang mit Schönheit und Kosmetik unterschiedliche Konzeptionen des »Selbst« entwickelt, oft sich an den Werbestrategien der Kosmetikindustrie reibend. Zeitschriften wie »Courage« und »Emma« boten dafür wichtige Foren. In der feministischen Kritik von Schönheitsidealen und Kosmetik war die Artikulation eines wahren Selbst wichtig und wurde zugleich immer wieder hinterfragt, besonders in feministischen Aneignungen des Punk. Ab den 1980er-Jahren wurde im Verständnis von Schönheit und Kosmetik zunehmend die Konzeption eines unternehmerischen Selbst deutlich, das Kosmetika situationsbedingt zur Darstellung eines flexiblen, selbstbewussten Subjekts einsetzt. Ausgehend von Topoi einer volkstümlichen Ethnologie – einem Verfahren des schnellen allgemeinen Kulturvergleichs, das sich in feministischen Analysen finden lässt, aber auch in globalen Werbekampagnen der Kosmetikindustrie – untersucht der Aufsatz, inwieweit das Verständnis von angeblichen ethnischen Unterschieden diese Entwicklungen mitgeprägt hat. Im 21. Jahrhundert leisten Menschen (auch Männer) ihre »Schönheitsarbeit« im Kontext ambivalenter Analysen von Schönheit – die als erreichbar, unterdrückend und befreiend zugleich gilt

Jazz, rock, and rebels: cold war politics and American culture in a divided Germany

In the two decades after World War II, Germans on both sides of the iron curtain fought vehemently over American cultural imports. Uta G. Poiger traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly adopted the new styles. Poiger reveals that East and West German authorities deployed gender and racial norms to contain Americanized youth cultures in their own territories and to carry on the ideological Cold War battle with each other. Poiger's lively account is based on an impressive array of sources, ranging from films, newspapers, and contemporary sociological studies, to German and U.S. archival materials. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels examines diverging responses to American culture in East and West Germany by linking these to changes in social science research, political cultures, state institutions, and international alliance systems. In the first two decades of the Cold War, consumer culture became a way to delineate the boundaries between East and West. This pathbreaking study, the first comparative cultural history of the two Germanies, sheds new light on the legacy of Weimar and National Socialism, on gender and race relations in Europe, and on Americanization and the Cold War

‘Only one noble topic remained: the workers.’:sympathy, subtlety and subversion in East German documentary films

That the workers and working life should have been a regular topic of representation in East German film, documentary film in particular, is no surprise given the significance of the worker in the state's self-understanding as the ‘first socialist state on German soil’. This article considers the role of the worker in East German film before focusing on those directors whose representations of workers either directly challenged or subtly undermined the state's preferred presentation. While many films used the worker in order to legitimise the state as the dictatorship of the proletariat and to promote a worker's consciousness in the German Democratic Republic, some filmmakers were more interested in de-anonymising their subjects, looking past the working environment to portray the worker as an individual, not an ideologically coded figure. The article looks in particular at a selection of films made by Jürgen Böttcher, including Drei von vielen/Three of Many (1960), Stars (1963) and Rangierer/Shunters (1981), and argues that some of Böttcher's portraits are simultaneously sympathetic and subversive, looking at both form (audiovisual composition) and content (in particular his focus on leisure, on individualism). Finally, I argue that the later films demonstrate the politics of silence and reflect on the implications of abandoning both voiceover and minimising dialogue