-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Rory Hanna, Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe, German History, Volume 42, Issue 4, December 2024, Pages 616–618, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae053
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Joachim Häberlen has written a highly engrossing and informative study of protest and countercultural activism in Europe since 1945. The author’s previous research on the West German New Left informs several of the book’s chapters. The main strength of Beauty is in the Street, however, lies in Häberlen’s synthesis of a wide range of secondary literature within a compelling narrative which shows how activists, dissidents and rebellious young people helped to change their societies for the better.
Häberlen focuses mainly on Western Europe, using examples from West Germany and complementing these with other case studies, most frequently from France, Italy and Britain. Several chapters also consider how activism manifested itself under state socialism in Eastern Europe. Indeed, descriptions of subversive activities in Poland and Czechoslovakia provide some of the book’s most gripping passages.
The monograph’s fifteen chapters are divided into four themes and a final ‘coda’ section on the revolutions of 1989. Chapters 1 and 2 explain how early countercultural movements and, eventually, the upheavals of ‘1968’ challenged political and cultural orthodoxies in the fifties and sixties. Fans of rock ’n’ roll defied postwar mores with their unrestrained and sexually suggestive dancing. Non-conformist activists, meanwhile, rallied against what they considered to be a widespread fetishization of labour, which had neglected employees’ wellbeing, and consumption, which had stifled creativity. These dissenters often broke with the established guardians of the Left, such as communist parties and trade unions. This could be seen, for example, during Italy’s ‘1968’, where workers who had migrated from the south of the country were particularly prominent in labour militancy. Having been socialized outside of northern, working-class milieus, they were more inclined to express a fundamental aversion to many of the indignities of factory working which trade unions had tended to tolerate.
