Dossier: 1968 - A Critical Turning-Point

"More than 100 companies are currently mass-producing 150 types of merchandising bearing the faces or the names of the four Beatles: stockings, balloons, pullovers, underpants and shirts, shoes, hats, trousers, jackets, biscuit wrappers, lemonade glasses and scarves, egg cups, dolls, packets of chewing gum, brooches and rings – and of course the original Beatles wigs.” (Lamprecht 1965, p. 100)

By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had sold 150 million records, with a turnover of more than two billion marks. It was estimated that they had 360 million fans. Other bands had made 2,921 cover versions of the 88 songs they had released by then. On top of this there were thousands of amateur beat bands in Germany alone which only performed their repertoire live. Just in the Göttingen region, Dieter Baacke says, there were around 60 beat combos, as well as 100 in Essen and roughly 200 – and 20 “beat cellars” – in Hanover. In his weighty beat monograph, Hans-Jürgen Klitsch lists 84 Berlin bands, 78 from Hamburg, 39 from Gelsenkirchen … Major beat festivals were held each year in Recklinghausen, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg’s Star Club, and so-called Beat Battles were a regular feature at many youth clubs and pubs with a young clientele. In 1965, at the high-point of the beat wave, Germany had up to 150 professional beat bands living exclusively from that music.

Beat

After the rock and roll of the 1950s, the beat movement emerged from 1963, a second musical culture which was the “sole property of the younger generation”. “Once again, the younger generation is creating its own cultural world and is thus escaping the rules and prohibitions provided for it by society. Sexuality, alcohol, smoking, formerly privileges of the adults, have become part of everyday life for the younger generation, whether the parents like it or not.” (Shell Deutschland 2002, p. 53)

Once again, it was not political opposition (the majority of young people shared their parents’ political views anyway), but a rebellion in everyday culture which was getting people worked up. “Although the ‘beat kids’ rebelled far less aggressively than the yobs of the fifties, and were hardly violent at all, their provocation went further.” (Siebert 2002, p. 42) It was about music, “behaviour”, (even) longer hair and – sex. The sexuality of the younger generation was inexorably getting away from parental control. In the past, parents had been the most important references regarding questions of sexuality and relationships, but this role was being taken over by the media and by friends of the same age.

1962 brought a significant shift in the discussion: the contraceptive pill went on sale in Germany. There was a massive reduction in the tension between the fronts: in the same year, Beate Uhse opened her first specialist outlet for marital hygiene in Flensburg, Oswalt Kolle became the best known missionary in the field of sex education with films like Dein Mann/Deine Frau, das unbekannte Wesen (Your husband/wife, the unknown being) or Das Wunder der Liebe – Sexualität in der Ehe (The miracle of love, sexuality in marriage), and the Kinsey Report on female sexual behaviour found its way onto the bookshelves of more than 100,000 German households. Talking about “the world’s simplest pleasure” was suddenly en vogue. Morals were relaxing. Hemlines rose higher and higher, the miniskirt was born.

However, one should be cautious about misleading myths about the “swinging sixties”: the new liberal mood was still a long way from reaching all classes and age-groups in society. Many adults continued to try to turn the clock back – sometimes using rather odd methods. For example, a cinema manager used a rope to divide the auditorium into two sections for the first Oswalt Kolle film. “He places the female visitors on the left side of the rope and the male visitors on the right side. The first two seats to the left and right of the rope remain vacant. Better safe than sorry, is the motto. Morality and decency are maintained, at least for the duration of the film.” (Shell Deutschland 2002, p. 36)

“My girlfriend gave me a love bite on my neck – my mother went to see the ‘floozie’s’ mother, made a dreadful fuss, got thrown out, I was banned from all contact with my girlfriend – my mother would not have been surprised if this ‘whore’ had soon produced my child. (A year and a half later, I slept with a girl for the first time.)” (Jaenicke 1980, p. 24)

The majority of the younger generation regarded beat music as just one of the offers available on the leisure market, nothing more. It was only the excessive reactions from the world of the grown-ups that attached rebellious interpretations to what were basically harmless pleasures and fashions.

“In the home where I lived after my parents divorced, we all covered the walls around our beds with pictures and posters of the Stones, Beatles etc. During a visit, my mother tore the pictures down from over my bed in front of the other lads, crushed them up and left the home without a word. The anger, humiliation, desolation I felt ...” (loc. cit.)

“The beat separated us from our parents, it gave us an identity, it gave us a means of expression – it made us Us. In all our isolation, the beat gave us something in common, a context, an Us feeling for the people who liked the same music, wore their hair long, had the same feeling, suffered the same contempt. The beat aimed to speak only to us, the younger generation, it wasn’t something for everyone, not for the parents, the old people, the reactionaries, the unfeeling, or for the boy scouts, the well-behaved children who played music at home with their parents, who weren’t interested in the effects of alcohol, who had straight creases in their trousers and short hair on their heads. The beat separated us from the older generation and the rest. Its power engendered the new sub-culture of the younger generation, it gave us expression and identity. But it was only the bitter struggle by the older generation which made beat music an expression and identity AGAINST the older generation, the bourgeoisie, the rest.” (op. cit., p. 26)

By the mid-sixties, beat music only engendered this empathetic effect in a minority of the younger generation. This was because the beat fans had emerged as the dominant youth culture, cutting across all classes and social settings, smiled on rather than feared by the older generation. For example, for the Rolling Stones’ German tour at the end of 1965 even the Springer press’s conservative bourgeois television magazine Hör zu presented its own LP of “the world’s hardest band” on its own label: “… too many people measure the new age by old standards. And it takes a lot of courage to fight prejudice. Mick, Keith, Brian, Bill and Charlie are five individualists who have become world-famous as the Rolling Stones. The younger generation idolises them, and sometimes a few chairs get broken in the midst of their enthusiasm. The world certainly won’t fall apart due to idols like the Rolling Stones.” (from the back-cover text)

But as always when a sub-culture thrives and grows, eventually breaks down the walls built up round it by the majority in society and blends with the mainstream, smaller sub-cultures break away: the harder cases who preferred to listen to The Doors or Jimi Hendrix rather than the Beatles, and those who turned their passion for music and fashion (back) into a holistic lifestyle. The drop-outs, for example.

The Drop-Outs

“Then came the drop-outs. They didn’t revolt, or rise up. They lay down. The young heroes were tired. They created the slowest youth movement of all time: idleness.” (Der Spiegel 39/1966, p. 75)

Opinions differed on the drop-outs, who had become part of life in Europe’s cities by 1964 at the latest: “The attitude and clothing of the drop-outs was a living protest. Unkempt, and sometimes down and out, they disturbed the bourgeois sense of cleanliness; their long hair attacked the image of the manly man with a family, home, property and success. The drop-out unashamedly showed and wore what he was and what he possessed. He publicly placed a question-mark over the achievement-driven society by enjoying the sunshine, reading or making music whilst society worked hard to increase the national product. Without directly mocking authority, the drop-outs did mock it by despising rules and taboos.” (Hollstein 1969, p. 38)

And yet the drop-outs were neither aggressive like the 1950s yobs nor political like the hippie culture, which partly derived from the drop-outs. The drop-outs did not seek to change the way of the world, but rather wished to be left in peace; they mostly came from the middle classes and wanted to get away from the system of so-called “duties” which was forced on them. “... see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures” (from Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums, p. 75).

The drop-outs dropped out of the achievement-oriented society purely for their own ends, they “didn’t want to gain power, but to liberate themselves from its influence. But that was enough to worry the system.” (Hollstein 1969, p. 39) Their casual attitude alone provoked the generation, still marked by National Socialism, which was rebuilding the country. “As long as I am in power, I will do my utmost to destroy this monster,” promised Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in June 1966, and in its party newspaper, the NPD demanded “a radical solution to the entire problem in the interest of a healthy national attitude”. (Der Spiegel 39/1966, p. 72) “This would never have happened in Hitler’s day,” passers-by shouted when they saw the long-haired youths at Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche and at Georgsplatz in Hanover. But the majority of German citizens who were filled with self-righteous anger only knew the drop-outs from the media: there were probably no more than 5,000 to 7,000 of them, mainly congregated in Germany’s few large cities.

The Provos

The provos “turned the impulsive resistance of the drop-outs into conscious and deliberate provocation of the system. (...) They made the first conscious and expressly rational political attempts to set up alternative structures.” (Jaenicke 1980, pp. 55 and 57) But, unlike the hippies, the provos were not drop-outs, they were not interested in the establishment of an alternative culture which was as independent as possible from mainstream society. “They didn’t want a sub-culture, their actions aimed at breaking up rigid structures, they wanted provocation and infiltration, not independence. However, at the height of the movement, the provotariat did start to build a counter-society with newspapers, shops, communes, centres, self-help organisations, etc., in order thus to create the material basis for their ideas, actions and own lifestyles.” (loc. cit.)

Provos in the Netherlands, the movement’s birthplace, described themselves as “a youth movement which agitates, provokes and creates unrest”. Like the drop-outs, the provos did not form any proper organisation, but “an equally colourful and heterogeneous crowd of like-minded young people without leadership, hierarchy, institution or headquarters. Planning, calculation, organisation and the formation of cadres were anathema to the provos.” (Hollstein 1969, p. 55) Their main target was the authoritarian social structure, which was to be continually unmasked afresh by provocative actions.

The Wholesome World of Bravo

Organised refusal to consume – that went too far even for Bravo. The former mouthpiece of the rock and roll youth now tried hard to put on the brakes. For example, at the time when British teenagers were all fainting at the sight of the Beatles: “Today’s teens and twenty-year-olds have grown out of blue-jeans behaviour and are all heart and politeness, with trim hairstyles, smart clothes and freshly ironed creases.” (quoted in Herrwerth 1997, p. 40) “With their trademark hairstyles, the Beatles were an unparalleled provocation for the majority of the older generation. A young person’s room in the parental home covered with posters of the four musicians was regarded as an affront to the entire traditional system of values,” recalls Thommi Herrwerth, born in 1949. And yet the Beatles were only the beginning.

“A far greater terror for the parents was yet to come: the Rolling Stones. They were even more uncompromising, even more radical, more drop-out-like, and more obscene. There was no mistaking the sexual undertones of their behaviour, they moved their pelvises in ways which would have been unthinkable from the clean-cut stars of the previous years, their hair-cuts were even wilder than those of the Beatles, and unlike their rivals – and quite unimaginably for the time – they didn’t even wear ties. “I can’t get no satisfaction”, that was the battle-cry with which they stormed the charts around the world.” (loc. cit.)

But not at Bravo. “They let their hair hang uncombed and untidy on their narrow shoulders. They wear dreadfully shabby suits. And they look terribly starved and run-down!” was the merciless verdict from Bravo (issue 13/1964) on the Stones, probably hoping that that was the end of the matter. Of course, it turned out differently, and in view of the real danger that it might lose a large proportion of its readership, Bravo soon forgot all its pedagogical ambitions and placed itself at the forefront of the beat movement: just a year later, Bravo sponsored the Stones’ German tour, and from 1966, Bravo readers could choose their favourite beat band in the Otto votes. Admittedly, the Stones never won …

Bravo, owned from July 1965 by Axel Springer, emerged more and more clearly during the 1960s as a mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie. “The readers of Bravo are shown a nice, wholesome world. There is no war in Vietnam, no hunger in the world, no racial riots in America and no student rebellions in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. Whilst other Springer newspapers dismiss the young rebels at the universities as ‘crazy yobs’, Bravo says ‘the time has come to correct a prejudice’.” (Der Spiegel 7/1968, p. 65)

The message is that the “younger generation” is actually nice and well-behaved. And so the stars presented by Bravo were always decent, morally impeccable, prudish boys and girls. In Bravo, even Mick Jagger was transformed into a “faithful partner” and the wife of the Stones’ bass guitarist Bill Wyman was able to announce that her Bill was “not a dirty boy” and washed his hair every day. “My wife would always have to be there for me and mustn’t have any other interests than her family,” was a quote from film star Robert Hoffmann – one of innumerable statements used by Bravo to fight its main battle in the sixties – the feared dissolution of traditional gender roles and thus the emancipation of women.

“They placed real orgies of morality and bourgeois sensibilities in the mouth of their new favourite star: Roy (Black) complained about girls who smoke, who do not pay enough attention to their appearance, who use excessively provocative make-up or ‘only ever have one thing on their mind’. Nothing was more disgusting to him than ‘dreadfully short miniskirts. Because they are ungraceful and they always remind me of the coldly forward attempts of a professional coquette to gain favour.’ When it came to boys, he hated untidy dress and long hair. ‘Just as I don’t like a girl who cuts her hair militarily short and makes a parting and flattens everything right down on her head. That is masculine. And long flowing hair is feminine.’ The clean-cut Roy Black even spoke out vigorously against efforts to counter the prudishness of the post-war era with even a slightly relaxed attitude to sexuality: ‘I am against children seeing their parents naked. It destroys the distance which should exist between father and mother and children.’” (quoted in Herrwerth 1997, p. 53) And that was in 1969!

Strangely enough, there are also totally different quotes from Roy Black, who began his career as a rock and roll singer. For example, he spoke out against the Vietnam War (“This war is cruel and can no longer be lawfully justified by America”) or “absolutely in favour of the Pill. And it shouldn’t only be given to married women, but to every girl – say from the age of eighteen – who wants it.” If there was a contraceptive pill for men, “I’d take it.” (Löb 1997, p. 33) – an unusually progressive statement for the time from Roy Black – but he didn’t say it in Bravo. In return, he was awarded an annual “Otto” from 1966 to the end of the decade.

The Bravo stars simply did not have a sex life. The subject was largely avoided through to the late sixties, and when it was raised, it was in the style of 1950s Catholic guides for young girls. Masturbation is “self-defilement”, warns Bravo in an edition from 1966, because it “brings no peace, on the contrary, it almost always creates a feeling of inner emptiness and deep depression”. It could even make girls “frigid”: “they cease to be suited to a good and fulfilled marriage”.

The same goes for petting: “A girl who has indulged in long, continuous petting – and generally it won’t just be with one partner – becomes depraved and is depraved.” (op. cit., p. 71) “A boy who yields to the desire for himself fails fundamentally to understand nature’s reason for sex,” is what it says even in 1968 in the series “Youth and Sex ’68”. – So it will come as no surprise when Bravo agony uncle “Dr. Vollmer” declares that homosexuality is “degenerate” and recommends in such cases that male readers visit a psychiatrist or have themselves injected with “male hormones”, and advises “lesbians” to overcome their “deep unconscious fear of men”.

However, as the mismatch between the positions taken by Bravo and the attitudes of its readers became increasingly obvious (for example, in a survey from around 1968 89 percent of boys aged between 15 and 20 said that they would marry a girl who was not a virgin), Bravo switched track, and the “young Swedish doctor Kirsten Lindstroem” was able to announce in the 1969 series “love without mysteries”: “It is not long since girls in Germany were expected to retain their innocence until wedlock and to be a virgin on their wedding day. This double morality is at last consigned to the past.” (op. cit., p. 74)

As usual, the necessary push to change Bravo’s thinking came not from the editors, but from the marketing department. After all, it had found that the readers of Bravo increasingly came from the under-14 age group – and they did not have the necessary pocket money to buy all the nice products which companies advertised in the magazine. The conservatism and prudishness of the Bravo editors was tangibly bad for business: it became increasingly difficult for Bravo to find advertisers. A confidential readers’ survey showed the publishers “the point in time at which many young people gave up reading their celebrity mag: as soon as they began taking an interest in sex”. (op.cit. p. 64)

Just a few months later, in issue 43/1969, the time had come: Bravo established what in a statement it later called “a second pillar”, which alongside the cult of celebrities “has become a second key element in Bravo”: “A modern man talks to Bravo readers about their worries and problems: Dr. Sommer.”

The Hippies

The passive opting-out of the drop-outs and beatniks and the mere challenging of society by provocative “happenings” and other actions by the provos were not enough for the hippies. Anyone seeking freedom and happiness would have to turn his back radically and entirely on that society. Rather than trying to reform society from within, hippies wanted to get out and build a counter-society whose positive image should soon motivate other people of the same age in particular to opt out of society. Most of the hippies were not “politically” motivated, but they soon noticed that you cannot opt out of mainstream society without becoming political. After all, unlike the drop-outs, they wanted not merely to escape the pressure in society to achieve, but also to find new, more humane lifestyles and relationships. But the mainstream society of the sixties lacked the self-confidence to let the “escapers” simply go away, and so it regarded every attempt to find a different lifestyle outside the prescribed standards (salaried employment, nuclear family, consumer pleasures) per se as a radical political attack.

The aim of the hippies was an “anti-authoritarian and de-hierarchised world and value system without class distinctions, performance standards, oppression, cruelty and war. The society of fear, in which everyone is afraid of the boss, the neighbour, the police, fate and the anonymous was countered by the hippies with a community in which authority was to be dominated by freedom, competition by co-operation, hierarchy by equality, productivity by creation, hypocrisy by honesty, property by simplicity, conformism by individuality, and crude materialism by happiness.” (Hollstein 1981, p. 50)

However, their gaze was fixed less on creating a different system than on changing the individual. Capitalism, according to their central philosophy, had “only developed the material side of life and lost soul and spirit. All values have been emptied of their content and end up as mere rhetoric. People degenerate into receiver stations of a soulless bureaucracy.” (Hollstein 1969, p. 67) Capitalism had alienated the “natural” person from his true essence and transformed him into “plastic people” (Frank Zappa) addicted to consumption. “Authenticity, directness, honesty are now only to be found in isolated niches of western society – amongst the poor, the inadequate, the stigmatised.” (Willis 1981, pp. 122 ff.)

The hippies saw poverty and oppression more on a global scale, affecting entire peoples, preferably those who lived a long way away and who, like the Native Americans, were thus excellent subjects for idealisation and mystification since no-one had real contacts with or knowledge of them. Most were less interested in the realities on their own doorstep. The fact that the majority of them came from privileged backgrounds, had voluntarily opted out and despised material things often made them blind to social problems around them.

They came to regard “poverty” almost as something worth aspiring to, an ambivalence which was expressed in their style: “The clothing of the hippies always included symbols both of excess and poverty. Particularly magnificent garments were stained, dirty or crumpled; this denied the idea that they had a position in any class-based concept of clothing. Poor materials, colourless shirts, worn-out jeans or denim jackets were carefully washed and cleaned; this was to avoid any association with poverty. They defied the coldest days with bare feet, but when it was really hot they covered themselves in thick sheepskin coats, heavy cloaks and knitted jackets stretching down to their ankles.” (op. cit., pp. 128 ff.)

Inevitably, music also played a major role in the life of the hippies. They liked blues-influenced heavy rock based on a powerful, often virtuosic lead guitar à la Cream or Led Zeppelin, especially when – as in acid rock – LSD and other psychedelic experiences were clearly reflected in it (The Doors, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and others in America, “intellectual” and less rocky Pink Floyd in Britain). Since his LP entitled Freak Out (1966), Frank Zappa had become the rebellious god of all the underground groups, and he still observes with some surprise the shifts in history from thousands of (toilet) walls in communal apartments.

Hippies listened to LPs, not singles, preferably thematically programmed or conceptual albums like the 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles – a milestone in the collapse of old musical patterns, even if the band later said that it had not been conceived as a conceptual album, an LP which paved the way for many hippies into the scene – Happy Jack (1967) and Tommy (1969) by The Who – in other words productions which were no longer consumed publicly, e.g. in clubs and discos, and often could not be performed live, but demanded concentrating listeners who “don’t move much, sit quietly, do not busy themselves with other things and are willing to devote a considerable amount of time just to the critical reception of music”. (Willis 1981, p. 98)

Individual songs also became longer and longer (e.g. In-a-gadda-da-vida by Iron Butterfly or Live Dead by Grateful Dead, which filled three record sides), the texts more and more important, but also more abstract, or they transported nothing but dream images (like various songs by John Lennon) and did not admit clear interpretations. Concerts involved complex lighting, film excerpts, slides and taped textual interpolations, whilst asymmetric rhythms and distortion effects made dancing impossible. The hippies’ music was increasingly food for the soul, not the body.

“Surprise, contradiction and uncertainty were the very things that the hippies appreciated in their music. They wanted to be surprised and made unsure. The general call for clarity in pop music was foreign to them. They particularly trusted their music because its complexity and difficulty kept logocentric thinking in check and suggested spiritual meaning without trying to clarify this in a way that would have inevitably reduced it. Rather than ‘meaning’, this music had an ambiguity which concealed enough indications, gestures and pointers to make a spiritual interpretation possible for a group whose thinking already went in this direction.” (Willis, p. 201)

The weapon of the system was rationality, the cold logic of the achievement-oriented and consumption-oriented society. The hippies logically countered this with spiritual intensity, with feeling rather than thinking. “The hippies’ protests and lives were optimistic, colourful, non-violent, joyful. Their rejection of Western industrial culture was total. They also rejected the logic, rationale, systematic approach and purposefulness of Western culture, their protest was intuitive, feeling-led, unsystematic, hedonistic. The interesting things were not analysis, not Marx and Marcuse, but intuition, spontaneity, untaught theory and practice, direct experience, creativity, communality and friends, they tried to learn to rejoice in little things again: dewdrops, sunrays, beads, flowers, colours – and they externalised this attitude in colourful clothing, in their smiles, their flowers.” (Jaenicke 1980, p. 61)

In order to increase their capacity for the relaxed enjoyment of the small joys of everyday life, the hippies (and many other mainly long-haired youths way outside the scene) tended to use marihuana as an aid, known variously as “grass”, “hash”, “joint”, “pot”, “Mary Jane”, “shit” or “ganja”. Alongside marihuana, the (semi-)synthetic hallucinogen LSD (“acid”) in particular was supposed to open up the “gates of perception” (Aldous Huxley) to the hippies crippled by society. “LSD can be a tool in the political struggle. But anyone who takes it should know clearly that he is thus exposing himself to experiences and insights which may refute his previous experiences and insights, and that this can spark off a mental conflict. LSD should only be taken by those who have already made a decision about society, have decided to drop out, and have thus already taken up the fight against the existing order.” (Salzinger 1982, p. 142)

On their chemically enhanced journeys of adventure into their own selves, the hippies discovered entirely new worlds – but frequently forgot the outside world. “Psychedelics tend towards passive social behaviour,” as even the cult hippie writer and LSD prophet Timothy Leary had to admit. They thus ultimately came to be more of a grateful field of recruitment for new religious movements than a “reserve army of the revolution”. “The hippies help to beautify capitalism, not to abolish it,” criticised the Berlin-based left-wing Extra-Dienst. (no. 91, quoted here in Schwendter 1993, p. 170)