Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (review)

In this engaging book, Uta Poiger looks at the response of West and East German journalists, politicians, sociologists, and psychologists to the Americanization of German youth culture in the 1950s. Focusing on interpretations of Hollywood movies, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll, Poiger dissects the class, gender, national, ethnic and racial anxieties that American cultural imports evoked. The book interweaves a richly-documented discourse analysis with evocative accounts of the excited, even riotous, actions of youth at movie premiers and Elvis performances and the sometimes violent reactions of the police. Poiger shows that each new wave of American music and fashion crashed up against a counter-wave of adult panic about their effects on the morality, sexuality, and national identity of Germans. Commentators feared that the torrid, if often suppressed, sensuality of American films and the openly erotic gyrations of jitterbug and other dances would corrupt innocent German girls. They also worried that Westerns, gangster movies, and films such as The Wild One undermined efforts to reconstruct, especially, proletarian masculinity as less aggressive, more self-controlled than under the Nazis. On the one hand, they denounced movie violence for coarsening young proletarians into “hooligans” (Halbstarken) and, on the other hand, excoriated popular fashions and hairstyles for feminizing male fans of American movies and bands. Poiger traces the gradual metamorphosis, especially, in West Germany of discourse about American culture. A superb chapter on the evolution of jazz criticism begins with an analysis of conservative racist attacks on swing and bebop as a crude, low, and unwholesome music because of its African roots. By the late1950s, Poiger explains, a younger generation of West German music-lovers had become jazz afficionados who made much of the “respectability” of jazz and promoted it into the canon of modern high culture.

The responses to Americanization changed over time but, Poiger argues, they were always intertwined with the project of re-defining Germanness in both the Federal Republic (FRG) and Democratic Republic (GDR). This, her major, thesis incorporates several provocative arguments. Despite their intense antagonism to each other, Poiger asserts, Stalinist East Germans and conservative West Germans reacted similarly to American culture. Both perceived Americanization as an integral cultural process that linked mass culture to consumerism and, in turn, to selfish individualism and rampant materialism. Both viewed it through a political lens and, perversely, projected onto “America” and away from German society the social evils that bred fascist barbarism. Though conservatives faulted American “mass society,” while Marxists blamed American “imperialistic capitalism,” both groups believed that American cultural influence undermined the construction of a non-Nazi, but distinctly German, identity. Using the method and perspective of cultural analysis, then, Poiger has uncovered evidence of the common cultural discourse underneath the ideological divide in postwar Germany.

Yet one needs to keep in mind that, depending on their context, similar signs can signify different meanings. Poiger follows a recent trend in cultural studies that sees eugenic discourse as key to understanding European and American politics in the twentieth century. She quotes numerous sources to show that East and West Germans wrote often about the “decadence” of American culture and its “primitive” roots and “degenerative” effects. This language, Poiger theorizes, demonstrates the continued prevalence in the postwar Germanies of classic eugenic discourse and fear of biological degeneration and racial pollution. I am skeptical of this premise, particularly in the case of East German Marxists. Take her discussion of their critique of jazz. Though they eventually came to appreciate “authentic” jazz (blues and Dixieland), they continually denounced “inauthentic” jazz (swing, sweet, and bebop) as “degenerate” and “decadent.” She concludes that such language “placed [a prominent East German critic] on a continuum with those who had promoted racial hierarchies that positioned (white/Aryan) Germans as superior to Jews, blacks, and other groups, like Gypsies” (p. 153). The quotes provided do not warrant this inference. Instead, they suggest, as Poiger herself seems to...