Krautrock Eruption

WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE .

Few phrases summarise the attitude to life of young people in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s better than this one: "We have to get out of here!" Out of a Germany that demanded one thing above all else from young people: to keep their mouths shut and adapt smoothly to the discipline of school and work (and, for young men, military service, which was reintroduced in West Germany in 1955). And this within a country in which the last traces of the consequences of that sort of discipline had only just been cleared away, and the leading personnel in business, politics, administration, the judiciary, and the military were largely identical to those before 1945. Even the minor authorities, the teachers, instructors, and heads of families, were largely moulded by the same ideology, which demanded submission and conformity from young people. This applied to both West and East Germany. As a young person, you only had one wish: to get out.

For young people in the West, there were several ways to escape the disciplinary grip on body and mind. You could drop out completely and wander around Europe as a drifter with a sleeping bag and a few books, heading north in the summer, where the air and love were freer, and chasing the sun in the winter, heading south. You could study philosophy for 40 semesters and avoid any economic exploitation. You could move to a rural commune, although you could only rarely live off the land. In most cases, you had to make a living from what you earned in the city or what your parents sent you. Or you could escape to drug paradises. Either with the help of the latest products from the Sandoz chemical laboratories into the vastness of the cosmos - not only because of the general enthusiasm for space travel. The future was still terra incognita, free of all identitarian attributions and prefabricated lifestyles. Another way out was to leave German normality behind with the medicine chest of a romanticised Orient. However, this harboured the risk of not only unintentionally connecting with obscure gurus, but also with a romantic anti-modernism, which was not entirely free of the misery from which one wanted to escape. Those who were serious about it made their way to the promised land of India and Afghanistan. As a rule, however, the hard labour in the poppy fields was left to the locals.

The years 1967/68 were something of a watershed in terms of drug use, as with many other things. Previously, stimulants had been the drug of choice for young members of the working class and lower middle class, for whom social advancement in the golden age of Rhineland capitalism seemed to be guaranteed. You could dance the entire weekend away on this stuff, and celebrate your own small part in the economic miracle. With the rapid politicisation of youth, the question of the drug of choice also became a political issue. Alcohol and amphetamines were regarded either as narcotics or performance-enhancing drugs, and were accordingly viewed critically. On the other hand, so-called mind-expanding drugs were seen as a way of overcoming capitalist normality, with its cycle of production, wage labour and consumption. At the beginning of the 1970s, when it became clear that the resistance was greater and the leaden years of the hunt for terrorists cast their shadows ahead, the use of narcotic drugs increased. The back-to-back deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison could have been more than a coincidence, or they were perhaps a symptom of this shift in climate. There was also a fair amount of recklessness involved. "Once you tell a lie, you're never believed." The authorities had told so many frightful stories about all the horrors that would follow that first joint, but which never materialised, so even justified warnings were thrown to the wind.

Another sign of the fatigue that followed the optimistic decade of the 1960s, was the shift from the anti-authoritarian movement to the formation of left-wing parties that followed the old model of the Leninist cadre party. While heroin was a problem for young people who otherwise hardly had much to expect from life due to their social background, membership of one of these "workers'" parties was more for middle class children. They wished to escape their privileged background and become members of one of the communist parties working for the benefit of the proletariat and world revolution. These groups disbanded at some point because the revolution failed to materialise, and there were hardly any proletarians who had enough trust in their bosses' children to join in the first place.

But before that happened, everything seemed possible. Published in 2014, We Thought We Could Change the World is the title of a volume of interviews with Peter Brötzmann, one of the most radical musical rebels of the 1960s. The sentence reflects the mood of a time that would later be labelled "'68". It had already begun a few years earlier. There is no cut-off date for this development, neither for its beginning nor for the fading of the spirit of optimism, which turned 180 degrees in the second half of the 1970s with the slogan "No Future".

The desire to get out gripped a youth that could have actually found it easy to get in. Precarious employment and the Hartz IV benefits scheme were still decades in the future. You didn't have to worry if your A-level average was worse than a 1.5. Turbo A-levels and bachelor's degrees were unheard of, and even skilled workers could look forward to their future in a terraced house with an adjoining party cellar with some peace of mind. While social mobility was as low as it is today until the 1950s, unusual opportunities for advancement opened up for a few years. This was due to gaps left by the war, which made labour a scarce resource that companies had to compete for. Added to this was the technological push, which demanded highly qualified personnel. The demands of critical young people for training reforms thus coincided with certain needs of the economy. If you were young back then, you didn't have to worry about your future. If you were young and left-wing, you were sure that the future would eventually bring a worldwide revolution. And until then, you could always go out and get a job.

Left-wing debates, which had previously centred on the exploitation of wage earners, increasingly focused on the question of the alienated life. Not that traditional exploitation had disappeared, but it had been outsourced to guest workers and the Third World. For the skilled German worker, the future looked rosy, with a building society savings contract and a regular income, two weeks holiday in Italy, a terraced house, a wife and two children. The only existential question was the decision: Opel or Ford? It was precisely this secure life, happiness through consumption, that young people were fleeing from. They mistrusted the family idyll, which demanded unquestioning conformity as the price for material security. One reason for this mistrust were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which brought to light the horror of the extermination camps. The fact that it had taken almost 20 years for the first legal reappraisal to take place also turned this development into a generational conflict, which lent additional energy to the debate. Added to this were the anti-colonial struggles, which raised the question of the extent to which the prosperity of the First World was based on poverty and oppression in the Third World. This culminated in the protests against the war in Vietnam and the military dictatorships in Latin America, where the leading power of the West, which had been seen as a democratic role model, took brutal action against these ideals. At the same time, the USA remained the place of longing that it had been since the wave of emigration in the 19th century. It was also the source of the cultural and political ideas that articulated young people's mistrust of the world they found themselves living in.

Leaving the false family idyll meant, quite practically, moving into a shared flat or commune. People hoped that life in a collective would bring them relief from the psychological wounds and moulding caused by the nuclear family. When the bourgeois citizen heard the word commune, they thought of the worst thing they could imagine after the abolition of private property: free love. Even if love was not as free as the young men and women had hoped, gaining control over their own bodies was a driving force behind this movement. The squares - with their bodies petrified by discipline, who could only escape their armour with a dirty joke at the bar or through an act of violence - were a repellent example to young people. Wolfgang Staudte portrayed them so harshly in his 1951 film adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel Der Untertan, that the film was banned in West Germany for years and was only released after being shortened. The fact that the completely un-emancipatory and temporary breakdown of discipline among the citizens, was usually only possible through alcohol meant that young people avoided the locals at the bar and their latent aggression, preferring to reach for a joint rather than a bottle. This oppressive atmosphere can still be felt in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's early films, such as Katzelmacher, or in Peter Fleischmann's Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern.

Breaking out of traditional gender roles was another door to the outside world. Even before 1968, a new self-confidence had...