by Geert Mak
Now, for the moment, I am back in my own town. I am at the cheese shop, and I hear one of Konrád's pretty girls beside me saying: ‘I want to try something wild with pastrami and pine nuts.’ Nowhere else do you see so many people eating out of rubbish bins as you do in Amsterdam, which has to do not only with the uninhibited nature of Dutch junkies, but also with the outstanding quality of Dutch rubbish.
I read in the daily De Volkskrant that, in 1999, fifty-three per cent of all Dutch fifteen-year-olds have a television in their own room, twenty-four per cent have their own computer, thirteen per cent have a mobile phone, five per cent own a weapon. The newspaper runs a special feature about the ‘hippest couple’ in Holland, a computer artist and his girlfriend. They spend most of their time on Ibiza. He describes his life as ‘the total integration of life, events, art and parties’. She says: ‘For me, just being liberating comes first, no matter what I'm doing.’ An amazing country, the Netherlands, especially when you have been anywhere else in Europe for a while.
In September 1965, as an eighteen-year-old student, I moved from the provinces to wild and woolly Amsterdam. The canals lay dreamily in the autumn sunlight, thousands of new experiences awaited, I was free and happy, and everything was possible. With a small group of friends, I explored this new world. We went to strange and unfamiliar cafés, bought our first foreign newspapers, met up at the municipal museum, watched the newest French films with mouths agape.
We also noticed that something unusual was going on in the city. Cigarette advertisements were everywhere being defaced with slogans like ‘Gnot!’ and ‘Hack, hack!’ A deathly silence settled over the student cafés when images of the war in Vietnam appeared on TV. There was a herb going around, marijuana, that produced the strangest visions. In the square at the Spui, around the statue of the street urchin called the Lieverdje – a gift to the city from the Hunter tobacco company in 1961 – so-called Provos were holding demonstrations.
In my attic I still have a few cardboard boxes full of newspapers and pamphlets from those astonishing years. I wriggle them out from beneath layers of dust and, sneezing as I go, begin to leaf through them. It is as though I am holding newspapers from 1910 or 1938, or some other long-gone era.
I pick up the narrow, rectangular magazine Provo, compiled by the anarchistic student Roel van Duijn, the working-class boy Rob Stolk from Zaandam and a group of writers and theatrical artists; a golden combination in hindsight. ‘Provo is aware that it will, in the long run, be the loser,’ they wrote at the start, and they bravely pasted one little red exploding cap into every copy of the first edition.
They also produced Hitweek, the ‘Professional journal for teenagers, 38 cents.'The circulation was, for those days, enormous: somewhere between 30–50,000. The scantily-clad girls on the cover are seen nowadays in every underwear advertisement, but created a huge uproar at the time. One reader, Arthur de Groot, reported on 30 December, 1966 that he had been kicked off an Amsterdam bus, number 19, simply for reading his favourite magazine: ‘The whole bus got involved: “scandalous”, “every-where you look” and “young people these days”’. The editor, André van der Louw, later mayor of Rotterdam and minister of culture, recreation and social work: ‘The greasers are out of the picture. Their place has been taken by a new youth.’ I find only one ad in the whole publication: ‘Clearasil dries up acne.’
The initial phase of the young people's rebellion of the 1960s, the cultural upheaval, was at first a largely British affair. The Beatles made their breakthrough in 1963, followed by the Rolling Stones a year later, and in 1965 the skinny London model Twiggy was gracing covers all over Europe. In that same year, the Italian Epoca described the youth of Britain as ‘five million young people under the age of twenty-one who have undermined all the customs and conventions of British society; they have broken through the borders of language and class; they pay a great deal of attention to what they wear, they make noise and rebel against the prescribed restraint and modesty concerning sex. What do they want? Nothing, save to live in this fashion.’
Two years later, the pivotal point had shifted to Amsterdam. In the Summer of Love in 1967, the city filled with exotically dressed young tourists who slept in the Vondelpark and spent hours lounging around the National Monument on the Dam. Music that summer centred around the new Beatles album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 2.5 million copies of which were sold within three months. Hitweek wrote: ‘Playing in parks and on squares, just because we're all beautiful and need each other.’
The mid-1960s was an exceptionally romantic period, perhaps the most romantic since the start of the nineteenth century. But just as there had been worlds of difference between the countless splinter groups of the right and ultra-right in the 1930s, thirty years later the progressive revival also split off into many movements which ultimately had little to do with each other. In Holland, the groups surrounding Hitweek and Provo, for example, lived in different worlds. Hitweek was concerned with music, parties and lifestyle. Provo was a typical urban movement which brashly addressed social issues: pollution, traffic jams, the housing shortage, the decay of the old neighbourhoods.
The students in Paris, in their turn, primarily sought contact with workers and trade unions; their movement was bigger and much more political. German activists, on the other hand, adopted slogans that the French and Dutch students would never have used: ‘Be high, be free! A little terror is the place to be!’ The hippies foraged wherever they could: they mostly shut themselves off from the political and urban world, they chose emphatically for a rather drugged, relaxed and sometimes even sluggish way of life – a clear reaction to the hustle and bustle of the 1950s – and they were often enamoured above all with each other and themselves.
Were the young people the only ones who, in the words of the Dutch 1960s specialist Hans Righart, granted themselves the luxury of ‘placing the creation of the earthly paradise on the agenda’? Was the ‘teen boom’ the only cause of all this unrest?
That would be too simple. The 1960s constituted a mentality crisis for both the older and younger generations. Starting from their own pasts and backgrounds, everyone suddenly had to respond to an overwhelming series of changes. And this time the crisis was caused not by an economic depression, as it had been in the 1930s, but by its opposite: unparalleled economic growth throughout Western Europe; a striking increase in leisure time and mobility; an endless series of technological innovations; the mass availability – for the first time – of cars, motorbikes and other luxury articles; a contraceptive pill that ‘liberated’ sexuality from the burden of reproduction after 1962; a decline in the ideal image of America as a result of the war in Vietnam, and the enormous rise of the television and the transistor radio, making young people from San Francisco to Amsterdam feel united in the same rhythm of life.
Provo Rob Stolk told me how the new era started for him: it was on the day a white car entered his street, full of young girls who passed out a new kind of soup to everyone there: Royco soup from a package. ‘That was unheard of. People were simply given soup to try out, something they'd had to stand in line for only a few years before. Suddenly they were being taken seriously as consumers. A new era started for me that day.’
It was not only Rob Stolk and my little group of friends who had to find a way to deal with that, it was our parents as well. We, young Western people, had never known anything but prosperity, a prosperity that also kept growing. Older people, on the other hand, were being confronted with a society that was changing so quickly it took their breath away. They still attached great value to a materialist value system, which had proven its worth in times of poverty and war. Their children, who had grown up in safety and luxury, dared to go a step further. For them, bare existence was no longer the issue.
In this way, the young people's rebellion around the 1960s formed, after the Second World War, a new dividing line in Western European history. One can hardly speak of ‘the’ movement of ‘the 1960s’: in actual fa
ct, the period covered more than a decade and a half, between the release of the movie Rock around the Clock in 1956 and the start of the international oil crisis in 1973, with the years 1966–8 as its zenith. What our little group of friends was experiencing – we were, in fact, hardly aware of it – was a high-speed change in mentality, a pounding surf full of currents and counter-currents, a revolt with a character all its own. It was, as meteorologists say, a ‘perfect storm’, a temporary conflux of four or five elements that unleashed hitherto unknown forces.
First there was the factor of youth. The letters to the editors of Hitweek remarked upon it time and again: everyone older than thirty was suspect, everyone older than forty was the enemy. The editors wrote:‘In November 1966, fifty-two per cent of the Dutch population was under thirty. High time to start running things for ourselves.’ The feeling of ‘us against the rest’ was continually underlined in music, clothing, hairstyles, symbols and rituals.
This generation gap was widened, however, by the cultivation of the phenomenon of ‘youth’ itself: ‘youth’ was no longer seen as a preparatory phase for adulthood, but as the ‘definitive and most perfect stage of human development’. In comparison with our parents and grandparents, we children of the middle class in the 1960s were able to leave home earlier. But, at the same time, all manner of new facilities – student grants, social benefits – shielded us for much longer from a tough, adult life. Many young people, in other words, were able to remain for years suspended in a state of perpetually postponed adulthood. In this way, the universities in particular developed into ‘islands of young people’.
The second impetus behind this ‘perfect storm’ was the exceptionally international, even intercontinental, nature of the revolt. In every student town from Barcelona to Berlin, one saw the same books in shop windows: Herbert Marcuse (the individual is merely a means of production, divorced from all joy and pleasure), Marshall McLuhan (‘the medium is the message’ and the omnipotence of the modern media) and the new proclamation as gospel of the works of Karl Marx. The London fashion – boots, brightly coloured stockings, jeans and miniskirts – designed by the youthful Mary Quant in her boutique in Chelsea, was to determine the look of young people all over Europe and North America. The same went, from 1962, for the long hair and the music of the Beatles.
This sense of particular identity was further boosted by a newly won sexual freedom. The very first issue of Provo magazine contained a plea for a ‘completely amoral promiscuity’. On 30 June, 1967, Hitweek published an extensive dissertation on the question: ‘Where can you make love peacefully, uninterruptedly and with full concentration?'The author advocated the organisation of festive ‘sex-ins’ and the creation of public ‘copulation zones’ to be used by all those who felt the urge. The Pill became the ultimate free ticket, abortion could be no crime, jealousy was an anachronism. At the same time, also thanks to the Pill, baby boomers could keep postponing marriage and parenthood and thereby extend their adolescence even further.
The ‘sexual revolution’ took some countries by storm: in 1965 almost half the Dutch population still felt that a woman should remain a virgin until her wedding day; by 1970 that had become only one in six. In the 1950s, fewer than one per cent of all British brides had lived with their future spouse before marriage; by 1980 that had become almost twenty-five per cent. In Belgium, France and the Netherlands in 1985, the number of divorces was approximately three times what it had been in 1970.
Crucial to the storm of the 1960s was the fourth ingredient: the unique growth – and, above all, the mass character – of Western prosperity. In summer 1967, French sociologist Edgar Morin began work on a portrait of the little Breton village of Plodémet. In it, he described the two new means of communication that allowed young people to feel independent from the adult world: motorised transport in the form of the moped, or even a small second-hand car, and telecommunication in the form of their own transistor radio, which was never turned off.‘These days, therefore, the young people of Plodémet have the same facilities, the same passwords (vachement, fantastic, terrible, horrible), the same antenna, the same culture as the young people of the city. They feel the same wind of change.’
At the same time, the young rebels also felt a great ambivalence towards the wave of prosperity. The real hippies were those who chose to drop out of society altogether. They attached great importance to the naturalness of clothing, food and lifestyle: unbleached cotton, bare feet, macro-biotic diets, meditation, rest. Cities were artificial, and therefore wrong. The ideal was a peaceful, communal existence in the countryside – where, by the way, most of these urban children lasted no more than six months. ‘In Holland as well, more and more right-thinking young people are getting out,’ Hitweek wrote in 1969. ‘They're starting a new, radiant life that the world they come from doesn't understand at all.’
There was also a fifth force, deeply hidden, which propelled this storm to great heights: fear. Much of the thinking of that day exudes an intense nineteenth-century optimism, the conviction that one could make one's own ‘radiant’ life. Yet it is also impossible to understand the 1960s without understanding the existential fear that held many Europeans in its grip. The whole generation of the 1960s had been raised under the permanent threat of a new war, many saw the atom bomb as an immediate threat, many young people wanted to ban war and oppression from the world at any cost.
Early in October 1967, newspapers all over the world ran the famous melancholy portrait of rebel leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. He had been killed in the jungles of Bolivia, and that was the moment his myth came to life. His image was carried in demonstrations, it hung everywhere in cafés and students’ rooms, it symbolised a new solidarity with the Third World. With increasing frequency, publications like Provo, Salut les Copains, ABC, Konkret, the British Oz and the Italian Mondo Beat dealt with the burning questions of the day: the relations between rich and poor, the ethical aspects of technology, the exploitation of the planet, the limits to growth.
Just as the Spanish Civil War had set the tone in the 1930s, the American intervention in Vietnam was the touchstone for the 1960s. In early 1968, more than half a million American soldiers were involved in that dirty and unwinnable conflict, a war which could also be seen on TV every day. One demonstration after another rolled through the capitals of Western Europe and America. Tens of thousands of young American men refused the draft.
Within the ‘islands of young people’, Marxism and Maoism often served as anti-ideologies, radical ways to distance oneself from the charged past of older generations. Both constituted attractive methods to press modern society into a mould that was easy to grasp, and also the ideal weapon to provoke and oppose the anti-communist establishment. ‘Real’ workers – as long as they fitted within that theoretical framework – were cherished by the young rebels. Parisian students embraced the Renault workers from Flins. My acquaintances in Amsterdam adopted working-class accents. Joschka Fischer, who would become Germany's foreign minister, went to work on the production line at Opel in 1970 in order to ‘live alongside the workers’. No one wanted anything more to do with the bourgeoisie.
In hindsight, the statistics show where the real rebellion took place: in 1965, more than half of all Dutch people felt that children should not call their parents by their first name, and more than eighty per cent felt that mothers should not work outside the home. In less than five years, these percentages had been halved. The real revolution of the 1960s took place indoors, at hundreds of thousands of kitchen tables.
Chapter FIFTY-THREE
Berlin
THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN FLOWER POWER AND THE SOBERING 1970s lay somewhere around 1968. With increasing frequency, the troubadours interspersed their cheerful songs with grim, bitter lyrics. The Rolling Stones sang the praises of the ‘Street Fighting Man’, Jefferson Airplane openly summoned ‘Volunteers’ to join the revolution: ‘One generation got old,/One generation got soul,/This generation got no destination to hold,
/Pick up the cry!’ Both songs were banned by numerous radio stations.
The cultural movements may have been international, but the concrete and often inevitable conflicts that resulted from them were – with the exception of the opposition to the war in Vietnam – largely national by nature. Provo was typically Dutch, Mary Quant was English, Rudi Dutschke was German to a tee, and May 1968 was eminently French.
The British, who had not been occupied by a hostile army and had experienced less of a crisis and fewer jolts to their prosperity than other Europeans, were those least affected by the generation gap. Young people particularly had a bone to pick with the ‘British’ way of life, which had ground to a halt somewhere in the 1920s: the fashion, the music, the censorship and the laws governing morality.
In Poland – for there too a small student rebellion was underway in 1968 – the major issue was freedom: when the staging of a nineteenth-century drama at Warsaw's national theatre was banned, a group of angry students marched into the censor's office. Fifty of them were arrested, and their leaders, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlaifer, were expelled from university. In the disturbances which followed, some 50,000 students took part. A number of sympathisers on the faculty were sacked, including Zygmunt Bauman, who was later to achieve fame across Europe. The official reason for his dismissal was that he had been ‘influenced by American sociology’.
In France, the oppression exercised by the old bourgeois society was felt most keenly in regard to the educational system and police violence. ‘We are fighting because we do not want to make a career as scientists whose research work will serve only a profit-based economy,’ read a student brochure handed out at Nanterre. ‘We decline the examinations and the honorary titles used to reward those [few] who are willing to accept the system.’
