Post WWII german culture essays

Post WWII german culture essays In this ambitious study, Uta G. Poiger attempts to trace the developments of Post-WWII popular culture in East and West Germany, paying close attention to reaction and politicization that framed each sides discussions. The picture that emerges seems to be extremely accurate, but it is at the same time, very confusing. Reactions of all sorts of sociologists, pundits and commentators leaves the reader with an obfuscated view of what life in both East and West Germany was like after WWII. Poigers cultural scholarship focuses on interpretations of Hollywood movies, jazz, and rock n roll, and the class, gender, and racial anxieties that American cultural imports evoked. Poiger shows that every time new American music and fashion were made available, they inevitably 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 blatant 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 masculinity as less aggressive, more self-controlled than under the Nazis. This anxiety is not cut and dry, however, as Poigers narrative often illustrates contradictions in the perception of youth culture. West German reaction to Jazz, for example, ranges from ambivalence to apprehension to outrage to hatred to acceptance, depending on which magazine is cited and which year it is. Although Poiger uses an abundance of archival evidence to tease out the realities of German Youth culture, she concentrates mostly on the reactions of officials and media figures to do so. This creates a divorced view of German youth culture as it relies on the stereotypes used to describe them based on the reactions and fears of the older generation...