I am no longer sure of anything.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951
A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!
‘Tutti Frutti’, by Little Richard, 1955
Culture offers a window into the soul of a society. It is a window with many panes, and each pane is coloured in different hues. Some panes are opaque – so opaque that nothing can be seen through them. Such is the variegation of cultural expression in any free society that succinct summary is scarcely possible and the search for common clear lines of interpretation extremely difficult. Yet in quite different ways culture casts light on the character of Europe in the early post-war decades. And despite the Iron Curtain and the diversity of cultural development in Eastern and Western Europe – chiefly a reflection of different levels of political control – and despite, too, the unquestionable national influences on culture in an era of nation states, a shared culture was in many respects the European continent’s main defining entity.
During the ‘good times’ of almost uninterrupted economic growth and rising prosperity between 1950 and 1973, European culture mostly looked to the future. This reflected not just the unprecedented rapidity of economic improvement; it also accorded with the early political steps towards overcoming the deep scars of the nationalist past. There was increasing optimism, a sense that mankind could achieve practically anything it wanted. This accompanied an almost religious belief in what science could achieve. Space travel pioneered by the Soviets and Americans seemed to underpin such faith. So did other advances in science, particularly medicine, that held out great promise for a brighter future. More than anything the cult of youth and the generational revolt that came to full expression in the later 1960s embodied a self-conscious break with the past. Pop music was its ubiquitous medium. Across Western Europe and even beyond the Iron Curtain idols such as Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones nearly a decade later, represented a new era, a future that belonged to the young. A popular culture focused on the immediate present, and beyond that living in confident expectation of a better world to come, helped to influence a transformation in social values that started to change at a pace probably more rapid than at any time in history.
But although Europe confidently looked to its future, it could not forget its past. The optimism of scientists was one side of the coin. The other was a prevalent – and understandable – sense of pessimism among the literary intelligentsia in the early post-war years. George Orwell offered a compellingly bleak reason: ‘Since about 1930 the world had given no reason for optimism whatsoever. Nothing in sight except a welter of lies, cruelty, hatred and ignorance.’ Such unremitting despair, which despite Orwell was far less characteristic of British than continental European intellectuals, did gradually decline as economic recovery took hold, yielding to new types of social criticism, much of it levelled not at the depressing past but at the present-day shallowness of a materialistic consumer society. But the horror of what Europe had been through returned time and time again in different ways. It was an inescapable component of cultural expression. ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (who had spent the Nazi era in exile, mainly in the USA) had remarked in 1949. This was not to be taken literally. Indeed, it was belied by Paul Celan’s powerful poem, ‘Die Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), composed by a Romanian-born Jew whose parents had been deported to their deaths and had himself spent time in a labour camp towards the end of the war. It became widely known after its publication in German in 1952, explicitly depicting the gaunt imagery of death in a concentration camp. Celan epitomized the essence of Adorno’s reflection, regarding his poem as ‘an epitaph and a grave’. He never fully recovered from the deportation and death of his parents, suffered repeated bouts of depression, and many years later, in April 1970, his body was found in the Seine outside Paris. Adorno captured a sense of the difficulties for any intellectuals or those engaged in the creative arts who attempted in the post-war years to grapple with the meaning of Europe’s recent calamitous plunge into the abyss of inhumanity.
For most people perspectives were different. Those born during or after the war emerged from post-war austerity and hardship wanting the pleasures and experiences of a brave new world. Many, perhaps most, of those who had lived through and fought in the two world wars, including the millions who had suffered grievous fates, did not want to dwell on the terrible past. They too in untold numbers wanted a brighter future, not to be compelled to revisit past misery. Indeed, interest in the two world wars and the Holocaust was lower in the 1950s and 1960s than it became in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the shadow of the immediate past could not easily be dispelled in the early post-war decades. In culture, intellectual currents and popular mentalities, the recent past was always present; it could not be wished away.
The impact of the Second World War was less obvious in the creative arts than in philosophy or history. It was there just the same. Post-war attitudes towards the music of Richard Wagner offered an obvious example. Wagner’s own ideological antisemitism, Hitler’s close connections with the Wagner family and the expropriation of Bayreuth (home to the annual Wagnerian festival) as a Nazi cultural shrine, posed notable obstacles to the reception of the composer’s works in a world that had witnessed the Holocaust. Wagner polarized feelings like no other composer. Against the admirers of his music-dramas as unparalleled works of genius and grandeur were those who saw in Wagner and his music a crucial cultural underpinning of German nationalism, antisemitism and, ultimately, Nazism, war and genocide. After five years in which Wagner’s Bayreuth theatre, the Festspielhaus, had been used for the performance of concerts and operas by other composers, the Bayreuth Festival was revived in 1951 and was soon flourishing again under the direction of the composer’s grandsons, first Wieland and then Wolfgang. Wieland’s emphatic break in artistic staging marked the clear rupture with pre-war links with Nazism. Even so, the taint of the strong connection between Wagner and Nazism could never be fully eradicated.
The compositions of Dmitri Shostakovich also clearly illustrate how in classical music the past could be overtly bound up with current politics. His epic Seventh Symphony, ‘Leningrad’, first performed in the starving city itself during the terrible German siege between 1941 and 1943, had totemic status in the Soviet Union as a memorial to the immense suffering of the population. It represented beyond that the hope of the Soviet people gained through victory over fascism in the ‘great patriotic war’. But the experimental forms of Shostakovich’s music were sharply criticized by the Soviet regime both before and after the war. The composer had in fact probably been saved only by his celebrity from becoming yet another victim of Stalin’s purges in the later 1930s. He continued to risk the regime’s displeasure. Even under Khrushchev’s ‘cultural thaw’ Shostakovich walked on the edge. His String Quartet No. 8, ‘In Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War’, composed in 1960 to commemorate the bombing of Dresden in 1945, reprised themes from his earlier compositions that had been condemned as ‘bourgeois formalism’. And his Thirteenth Symphony (1962), ‘Babi Yar’, based upon a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that recalled the massacre of 33,771 Jews – the figure is precisely known from the records of the Nazi killers – near Kiev in 1941, courted controversy by singling out the persecution of the Jews and obliquely criticizing the Soviet Union’s own antisemitism.
There were by contrast few reflections of the wartime catastrophe in the post-war classical music scene in Western Europe. The past there had a different meaning. People wanted a return to normality after the disaster, not to be reminded of it. The popularity of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem of 1962, first performed at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral that year – the medieval cathedral had been destroyed in the German bombing of Coventry in November 1940 – was an exception. Nor did audiences by and large warm to avant-garde classical music – such as the experimental works of Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen. They mainly wanted the traditional, not the modern. In general, audiences flocked to hear once more the classical repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, or the operas of Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, even Wagner (despite being tainted by Nazi associations). They welcomed back famous conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm and Tullio Serafin, and rejoiced in newer luminaries like Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti. And they thrilled at the performances of a galaxy of operatic stars such as Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, Jussi Björling, Tito Gobbi and Giuseppe di Stefano – extraordinary singers, though performing a favourite repertoire from an earlier era. By the mid-1960s even the brilliant American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein implied that classical music had lost its appealing inventiveness. ‘Pop music,’ he said, ‘seems to be the only area where there is to be found unabashed vitality, the fun of invention, the feeling of fresh air.’
Other forms of creative art also reflected a tension between the past and the future, between the traditional – or at least the familiar – and the modern avant garde that sought to break with earlier forms of representation. As Europe had sunk into ashes the main innovatory impetus in painting had moved to New York. American influence – epitomized by the work of Jackson Pollock – was prominent in the shift to radical forms of abstract expressionism. This was more welcomed in Britain than in continental Europe. It was an influence even so in the spread of a bewildering diversity of abstract art that became dominant in post-war Europe. New experimental art forms, emerging by the end of the 1950s, often aimed to shock conventional sensibilities. Such forms included the Parisian group Nouveau Réalisme’s creation of images of urban squalor and consumer products, bearing similarities to the independently developing American Pop Art, most closely associated with Andy Warhol.
The innovations themselves drew on pre-war artistic movements. Moreover, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and other luminaries of the pre-war era were still active, and attracting far more visitors to their exhibitions than did the radical younger artists. As always, artistic innovation saw itself as a revolt against traditional forms of expression – which were now seen to include much of what had been considered revolutionary before the war. But the most radical forms of abstract art struggled to appeal to wide audiences who continued to flock instead to see the works of the Old Masters. The war thus marked an artistic shift, though far from a complete break with the past.
In architecture the shadow of the past was all too visible in the ruins and devastation of Europe’s great cities and towns. The war marked an obvious break. Rebuilding was an urgent necessity. But in ravaged economies it had to be inexpensive. The most characteristic style, used especially for housing or shopping complexes, government buildings, and then the campuses of new universities, was brutalism, derived from the French term for raw concrete (béton brut), its material base. It drew on the rationalism and functionalism of the 1930s, though it took the earlier styles to new extremes. It was seen as ‘progressive’ and associated with some eminent architects, including the great Swiss designer and urban planner, Le Corbusier. And it was international, spreading rapidly across the world. Its impact in Western Europe varied. Italian public architecture was better than almost anywhere else. Daring constructions were attempted, as in the extraordinary cantilevered designs of Luigi Moretti, that remained exceptional in the early post-war years.
Brutalism hardly penetrated in Italy. Elsewhere, too, there were major exceptions. One was Le Corbusier’s strikingly modernist pilgrimage chapel, Notre Dame du Haut, at Ronchamp in eastern France, built for the Catholic Church between 1953 and 1955, described by Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘monument of a new irrationalism’. Another was the last work of Mies van der Rohe, the Neue Nationalgalerie in West Berlin, a building completed in 1968 that maximized the aesthetic effect of glass and steel in creating light and space. In Britain, on the other hand, brutalism became inescapable. It was visually stark and forbidding – its facades of bare concrete, glass and steel utterly denuded of any ornamentation. Its style exuded the atmosphere of post-war austerity (though it continued to be deployed when funding became less of a problem). It seemed to represent modern, solid, no-frills collective society. It had its admirers, especially in later decades – usually among those who did not have to live or work in ‘brutalist’ constructions. But for many, the buildings were an aesthetic affront from the outset. And for later generations the dilapidated concrete of prominent buildings in the heart of their cities was for the most part regarded as an eyesore, not an attraction.
East of the Iron Curtain, too, a type of brutalism (without the name) was welcomed as anti-bourgeois ‘socialist’ architecture, which in town planning concentrated on the construction of cheap and simple apartments for the working population. Drab, mass-produced, low-cost, purely functional housing to cope with the drastic shortage of accommodation was one side of socialist architecture. The other was the ‘social classicism’ of monumental representative buildings, intended to display the greatness of the worker state – as in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science (completed in 1955, ‘The Wedding Cake’, as locals called it, among even less flattering names), or Stalinallee (later Karl-Marx-Allee) in East Berlin, an imposing boulevard two kilometres long and almost 90 metres wide.
In the theatre the war marked a hiatus more than an outright break. But the past was an inescapable part of the theatre’s post-war revival. Antifascism and biting critique of bourgeois society ran through the entire oeuvre of the great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who returned from exile to East Berlin (where he lived until his death in August 1956), attracted by the offer of his own theatre company, the Berlin Ensemble. Brecht had been famous long before the war as one of the most luminous stars in the firmament of Weimar Berlin before the Nazis had destroyed it. Much of his most important work had been accomplished during the Weimar era, when his theories of ‘epic theatre’ had been developed. ‘Epic theatre’, though Brecht invented neither the name nor the concept, amounted to a self-conscious break with the past. In his new conceptualization Brecht rejected the ‘theatre of illusion’, which stimulated an audience’s identification with characters and created the illusory sense that it was experiencing reality, and sought to induce rational reflection through the audience’s detachment or ‘alienation’ from action on the stage.
After the war Brecht was more active as a theatrical director than writer. But his plays were enormously popular in West Germany – second only to Shakespeare and ahead of Schiller measured by numbers of performances during the 1960s – and were well known across Europe, east and west (and beyond, especially in the USA). In East Germany, he was acclaimed as a writer of international renown who had chosen to make his home in the German Democratic Republic. But the prized citizen was not without problems. The East German leaders were cautious about granting him too much exposure, aware as they were of his limited enthusiasm for the realities of communist society – despite his public (if somewhat ambiguous) support for the crushing of the 1953 uprising, and although he had the following year received the Stalin Peace Prize (the proceeds of which, around 300,000 Swiss francs, he deposited in the Swiss bank account that he retained).
The most innovatory strand of Western theatre in the 1950s and 1960s was the ‘theatre of the absurd’, which became synonymous with the names of the Irishman Samuel Beckett and the Romanian Eugène Ionesco, both of whom lived and wrote in Paris. The underlying philosophy of their work was that life had neither meaning nor purpose; it was absurd. The dialogue of plays such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) consisted of seemingly meaningless conversation by figures who parodied human existence in performances explicitly devoid of action. It was little wonder that the theatre of the absurd aroused great hostility. But the plays were also widely performed and attracted much praise, as well as inevitable, if paradoxical, discussion of what meaning was contained in meaninglessness. The theatre of the absurd drew on an artistic lineage reaching back to dadaism and surrealism after the First World War. Much of it was a theatrical representation of long-standing developments in the visual arts. But the thinking behind the theatre of the absurd also had a relevance that emanated from the more immediate past.
It was close to that of the great French writer Albert Camus, a towering figure of post-war literature, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. During the German occupation Camus had written leading articles for the underground Résistance newspaper, Combat, and continued to write for the newspaper until it closed in 1948. After the war he published some of his most important novels – La Peste (The Plague) in 1947 and La Chute (The Fall) in 1956 – with oblique reference to Nazism and the Holocaust. Through Camus’s writing the theatre of the absurd had a link with the immediate, terrible past. La Peste (in which the citizens of Oran in the French province of Algeria respond partly with fatalism, partly by opportunistic exploitation of the situation, but partly through active attempts to combat the onset of a plague epidemic) is usually interpreted as an allegory of the French experience under Nazi occupation. The arbitrary impact of the plague and random exposure to death highlight life’s absurdity. But Camus, who resisted being labelled an ‘existentialist’, struggles to retain the belief in meaningless existence when he emphasizes through his most sympathetic characters the need not to simply accept the arrival from outside of suffering and death, but to struggle against them – and not alone, but in solidarity with other citizens for the good of the community.
Literature, more than painting or the theatre, reflected the need to search for meaning in the catastrophic events of the recent past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was particularly pronounced in West Germany. (In the German Democratic Republic, official doctrine determined a fairly tight straitjacket for literature as a vehicle for the all-pervasive doctrine of antifascism.) At a time when most ordinary German citizens sought to shut out painful memories, influential writers tried to wrestle with them. One of the first was Wolfgang Koeppen. His novel Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass, 1951), written in the style of a ‘stream of consciousness’, described a single day in a city where anxiety about an east–west conflict intermingle with hopes for the future and the attempt to find meaning in the ruins. Continuities with the Nazi past are not hidden, but they exist alongside paths towards a more open, pluralist society. And with his Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome, 1954), Koeppen, who had been at least outwardly conformist during the Third Reich, was again among the first writers to explore questions of German guilt related to the Holocaust.
A number of younger West German writers soon to establish themselves as prominent literary figures dealt directly or allusively with the recent German past as part of their exploration of the necessary cultural and aesthetic break with that past in the self-consciously uncertain new democracy. In their work, and that of others, new beginnings and the recent past were closely interwoven. Alfred Andersch (born in 1914), who had served in the Wehrmacht, touched in his best-known work, Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (1957, later translated into English as Flight to Afar), upon themes of communist resistance, desertion from the army, persecution of the Jews and ‘degenerate art’ (as the Nazis had labelled avant-garde art forms). He suggested at the same time a double-edged moral duty – to help the persecuted to flee, but also to return from free choice to Germany, the land of the persecutors. Heinrich Böll, three years younger than Andersch, had viewed his war service through the eyes of his fervent Catholic belief, writing in December 1940 that ‘a new spirit’ had to exist in Europe and that ‘it is certainly our task “to propagate Christianity”’. But he vehemently opposed Nazi inhumanity and militarism. Billard um halb zehn (1959, Billiards at Half-Past Nine) focuses squarely upon Nazi persecution and destructiveness, while his still earlier novel Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953, And Never Said a Word) is critically pessimistic about the values of civilization in a newly developing society shaped only by economic priorities. His internationally acclaimed (though in conservative circles in West Germany heavily criticized) Ansichten eines Clowns (1963, The Clown) develops these themes, focusing on post-war morality in Adenauer’s Germany, the inheritance from the Nazi past, hypocritical conservative values and, most especially, the illiberal role of the Catholic Church.
Beyond West German borders the best-known post-war author – especially after his novel Die Blechtrommel (1959, The Tin Drum) had been turned in 1979 into a film that won him international renown – was Günter Grass. The originality of the novel, his first, lay in its double perspective. The Nazi era in Danzig (where Grass had spent his early years) was portrayed both through the clear-sighted eyes of the three-year-old Oskar Matzerath and those of the thirty-year-old adult Oskar, by now confined in a mental hospital. Oskar, the child whose psychological development had been arrested, giving him clairvoyant powers, uses his prize possession, his tin drum, to intervene in adult events, such as when he joins a Nazi procession that ends up marching to the beat that he sets. Through this complex construction Grass portrays the descent of his home town into inhumanity and destruction. The device of the double perspective permits a child’s revealingly naive perception of a world whose pernicious reality he is only as an adult fully able to grasp. The tin drum itself is a way of drawing attention to the individual who watches, is averse to the regimentation of mass rallies and dogmatic ideology, but is not involved in anything that could be regarded as political opposition. The work, highly controversial as its reception was in a society that was for the most part stuffily conservative and heavily religious in its dominant values, symbolized for a younger generation a critical approach to the recent past that was part of a questioning of the present.
Over his long life – he died in April 2015 – and celebrated literary career, Grass embodied in his works, and in his political engagement (as a prominent supporter of the Social Democrats), German soul-searching about the Nazi past. How complicated the relationship to that past was for those, especially, who had lived through the Nazi era was laid bare in Grass’s autobiography when, only as late as 2006, he revealed that as a sixteen-year-old in 1944 he had joined the Waffen-SS and served for six months as a tank gunner.
West Germany was exceptional in the extent and depth of its literary soul-searching. Nowhere else matched it. Significant works in Italy nevertheless reflected the legacy of Fascist rule and war. Carlo Levi’s poignant Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945, Christ Stopped at Eboli) – later made into a film – was a memoir of the political exile under Mussolini’s dictatorship that he spent in a remote, backward malaria-infested and ‘god-forsaken’ region of southern Italy. Curzio Malaparte, a one-time fascist who was later persecuted for his criticism of Mussolini’s regime, used literary form to depict his experiences as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front in Kaputt (1944), while in La pelle (1949, The Skin) he focused on the moral as well as physical destruction in Naples as the Allies fought their way northwards after 1943. Some of the poetry of Salvatore Quasimodo (awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959) related to the injustice in the Fascist era and suffering in the war. Elio Vittorini, a communist intellectual who had at one time shown some support for Mussolini’s politics, highlighted resistance in his novel Uomini e no (1945, Men and not Men). And Giorgio Bassani, in his Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, later turned into a successful film) wrote about the experiences of the Jewish community in Ferrara as it faced discrimination and persecution under Fascism. But after the war most Italians did not want reminding of the Fascist past. Primo Levi struggled to find a publisher for the book that was later to make him world-famous, Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man), about his survival in Auschwitz. When he finally did so, publication in 1947 was in a tiny print run of only 2,000 copies, not all of which were sold. It was only after more than a decade had elapsed that it was taken over by a major Italian publisher, Einaudi, and, greatly helped by translation into English, started on its path to becoming a major classic among Holocaust memoirs.
The sense of despair or fatalistic nihilism encountered in the literature of continental Europe was almost completely absent in Britain. The war had after all been won, even if the country was reduced to the verge of penury. A sense of moral victory over the evil of Nazism, combined with the expectation that the wartime sacrifices would lead to the creation of a better society, accompanied a pronounced insularity in cultural as in political and economic life. The war had produced little or no poetry to match the poignancy of that of the First World War, except perhaps the poems of Keith Douglas, and especially ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ (‘Forget-Me-Not’). Nor did it lead to much introspection. Few were given to abstract philosophizing about the ruin of civilization. People, including intellectuals, wanted to look forwards, not back to the wartime years. Almost the only major literary work that focused squarely on wartime experience was Evelyn Waugh’s semi-humorous trilogy, Sword of Honour, published between 1952 and 1961 – a culturally pessimistic satirical depiction of the decay of traditional institutional and social values in a world of mediocrity and emptiness. The war, for Waugh, was the triumph of dishonour, the betrayal of idealism. The war as an assault on humanity lay beyond his vista.
In terms of the international resonance of his political and social writing in the immediate post-war era, Britain’s most important writer was George Orwell – the British voice of ethical socialism. Orwell castigated the values and failings of the British conservative establishment. But he retained a strong English patriotism that he rooted in long-standing traditions of equality, justice and liberty. He looked to the wartime experience as paving the way for vast and radical social change. But ultimately he was deeply pessimistic about the future, from what he had seen of the recent past. Fascism had been defeated. But what would replace it? Orwell utterly rejected visions of a communist utopia. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War had opened his eyes to the intrinsic oppression and ruthlessness of Soviet communism. The dystopian novels that made him world-famous, his satire Animal Farm (1945) and especially Nineteen Eighty-Four (whose title simply transposed the date of completion, 1948, it was published the following year), portrayed future totalitarian society in which the individual was completely subjugated to political and social domination by omnipotent and omniscient rulers. ‘Big Brother is Watching You’, representing the total power of the supreme leader, was a slogan that entered everyday parlance. It was a world in which language itself turned untruth into truth, where the negative became the positive, where unfreedom was converted into what was permitted to be known as freedom. Totalitarianism would become the ideological theorem par excellence in Western analysis of the Cold War. As a literary device, it was perfectly depicted by Orwell’s brilliance as a writer.
In a continent split between rival political systems and rival ideologies it was inevitable that literary and intellectual endeavour would become so often overlaid with the dogmas of the Cold War. The Soviets poured money and expended much energy into subsidizing efforts to bolster anti-American sentiment among intellectuals (and others) in Western Europe. Given the levels of anti-Americanism prevalent within parts of the European left, most notably in France, the efforts were not without success.
The United States countered with its own propaganda initiatives. In terms of intellectual influence, the most important was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, set up in June 1950 and soon disseminating anti-communist views throughout Western Europe. The Congress, secretly funded by the CIA, was backed by a number of leading anti-communist intellectuals. They included the philosophers Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers and A. J. Ayer, Arthur Koestler (famous for his brilliant anti-Soviet novel Darkness at Noon, published in 1940), the distinguished French political writer Raymond Aron and the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Koestler, a one-time communist now fired with the zeal of the convert, was the leading speaker at the founding conference in Berlin. But the launch did not go altogether smoothly. Trevor-Roper and Ayer, both of whom had worked during the war for British intelligence, were alienated by the shrill tone of Koestler’s obsessive hatred of communism. Nevertheless, initial British misgivings about the Congress soon dissipated and in the cultural cold war anti-communism established itself as the paramount ideology among intellectuals (and others), beyond, that is, the minority still wedded to the Soviet Union.
For some leading intellectuals, as had been the case before the Second World War, Marxism nevertheless offered the only sure route to a better society – notwithstanding the revelations that emerged from Khrushchev’s attack on the crimes of Stalinism in February 1956 and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising later that year. With the glories of Weimar Berlin a distant memory and the cultural riches of Central Europe destroyed through the Holocaust, dispersed through emigration, or suppressed by Soviet domination, Paris reasserted its dominance in European intellectual and cultural life. And it was not just by chance in this post-war atmosphere that the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre – extensively elucidated in his major wartime work L’Être et le néant (1943, Being and Nothingness), and briefly in his short tract written after the war L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946, Existentialism and Humanism) – was eagerly swallowed.
Sartre, already before the war much influenced in his thinking – though not in his political leanings – by the German existentialist (and admirer of Hitler) Martin Heidegger, argued that mankind’s only distinguishing feature was ‘to be conscious of the nothingness of its being’. Existence was absurd, without meaning. Only the individual could choose a meaning for his or her own life. Choice was crucial, the redeeming feature of the philosophy. The apparent despairing bleakness could be combated by freedom and choice through which the individual created his or her own values. The war had, however, in some ways refashioned Sartre’s existentialist thought. What had begun as an individualist (and non-political) philosophy was reshaped into an activist force in which individual freedom meant a responsibility to work for the liberty of all. This implied nothing less than endeavouring to bring about the radical transformation of society. His thinking now led him towards Marxism, the political philosophy of social transformation and struggle against bourgeois society. He lent his strong support to the French Communist Party (though did not join it), and to the Soviet Union. And he justified communist political violence in the interests of the goal of the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society, seen as the ultimate guarantee of freedom (though he attacked Soviet abuses of human rights and condemned the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956).
Sartre recognized the tensions within his own thinking. To state the absurdity and ‘nothingness’ of existence yet aim to fight for a new and better society (did society even exist?), to be created (and imposed?) by a mass party directed by a political philosophy that claimed to rest on reason and the immutable laws of history, was an obvious contradiction. Yet Sartre seemed to many to capture the post-war mood of oscillating despair and optimism about the nature and fate of humankind. By the later 1950s existentialism was starting to lose its appeal. But Sartre, the French public intellectual par excellence, continued to magnetize the young, most especially, and to influence their anti-establishment and revolutionary views. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Paris at his funeral in April 1980.
In the early post-war years, and not just in France, Marxism linked the triumphant fight against fascism with hope for the future. For its devotees it provided a belief-system as all-encompassing as Tridentine Catholicism was for its own followers. But the readiness to overlook or explain away the crimes of Stalinism and the oppressive character of Soviet rule was severely dented by the invasion of Hungary. Many leading Marxist intellectuals left the Communist Party as a result. And when Marxism began in the 1960s to exert renewed intellectual influence, and to excite students as it was disseminated in universities, the Soviet Union was generally no longer the main model (see Chapter 6).
Beyond the Iron Curtain antifascism was the ideological glue that bound the past with the future. Fascism, which for citizens of Central and Eastern Europe was largely synonymous with Nazism, under which they had suffered so much and for so long, had been defeated by Soviet armed might in ‘the Great Patriotic War’. Victory had been underpinned by the indomitable belief that the power behind the Nazi thirst for brutal conquest had to be crushed if socialist society were to be created. This belief rested in turn upon a definition of fascism, devised in 1933 and refined two years later by Georgi Dimitrov (before the war head of the Soviet-run international organization, the Comintern, and after it Bulgaria’s leader between December 1946 and his death in July 1949). This defined fascism as ‘the open terroristic dictatorship of the . . . most imperialist elements of finance capital’. The implication was obvious: the struggle against Hitler’s barbarism had been won; but what had produced fascism remained immanent in the imperialist capitalism of the West. The vision of the future – a communist utopia – could only be turned into reality by the continuation of the struggle against Western capitalism. Past and future were therefore bonded by the vision.
Some notable German writers, forced into emigration during the Third Reich, chose to return not to capitalist West Germany but to the German Democratic Republic. Bertolt Brecht, as mentioned, and his wife, Helene Weigel, were among them. Brecht’s works, including his Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1938, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) and his biting satire on Hitler’s rise to power, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), brilliantly encapsulated antifascism and the emancipatory ideas of Marxism, popularizing them in the West at the same time as helping to legitimate the communist alternative state in East Germany. Stefan Heym was another writer who chose to live in what he called ‘the better Germany’ after serving in the American army and writing on resistance and persecution during the war. He was another great propaganda success for the early GDR regime, though he increasingly became disillusioned with the rigid controls and repression of the state. An even bigger catch for the early GDR was the return from exile of Anna Seghers, a committed communist whose novel about a concentration camp, Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross), written in 1939 and turned into a Hollywood film in 1944, had made her internationally famous.
Whatever their initial enthusiasm, few intellectuals worthy of the name could tolerate for long shackling themselves to an ideology that in political practice produced only censorship, restriction and narrow conformity. In the Soviet Union Ilya Ehrenburg’s short novel, The Thaw (one of whose leading characters was a ‘little Stalin’ type), seemed the harbinger of new intellectual freedom when it was published in 1954. But the break with the ‘frozen’ past of Stalinism and the suffocating constraints imposed by Stalin’s post-war cultural controller Andrei Zhdanov could not be pushed too far. Vassily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate (1960), which in its chronicle of a Soviet family during the Second World War was highly critical of Stalinism, was confiscated by the KGB in 1961. Grossman did not live to see its later publication, to great acclaim, in the West, dying of stomach cancer three years later. The ‘arrest’ (as Grossman put it) of his book was an indication that literary expression in the Soviet Union retained narrow limits. The central trope of antifascism continued to frame all thinking on the past and on the future.
Outside the Soviet Union, even so, intellectual nonconformity started to show its face in the 1950s. The Polish writer Adam Ważyk, once a supporter of Stalin, registered his disillusionment with Stalinist Poland in 1955 in his Poem for Adults, a searing critique and lament for a Poland that had disappeared, and left the Communist Party two years later. Jan Kott, a Polish writer and theatre critic who in 1951 had been fulsome in his praise of Stalin and advocated the subordination of the theatre to the party’s ideology, also reversed his stance in the mid-1950s and joined Ważyk in ending his party membership in 1957. Conformity still generally prevailed, nevertheless, and however severe the criticism of actual conditions, most intellectuals did not reject Marxist ideology. Deviation from Marxism, not Marxism itself, had, it was claimed, produced the distortions and the oppression that had resulted.
The cultural cold war was fought out more than anywhere else on the battlefields of historical myth, memory and interpretation. In this domain the shadow of the past lay at its most starkly visible. It was only in part a clash between opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. In greater measure, it reflected contrasting stances within Western Europe – in themselves mirroring national experience and mythology about the war.
The Dimitrov definition of fascism meant that Eastern European understanding of the recent past remained relatively inflexible and monolithic. It offered an unchanging and straightforward interpretation of the disastrous course of recent history – diametrically altered through the triumph of Soviet communism – alongside a clear political message. Fascism had served capitalist interests; its leaders were the tools of big business. And since capitalism still flourished in the West, the political message – the way in which the past served the present and future – was plain to read. The past was a warning. It provided the guideline to the future struggle.
The message embellished the imagery of heroic communist resistance to Nazi rule, to the exclusion of practically all other forms of resistance. Naturally, the glorious feat of the Red Army and the Soviet people in repelling, then destroying, the fascist invaders was emblazoned in all historical writing, with little attention paid to the war effort of the Western Allies. Inconvenient facts such as the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939 and the subsequent Soviet annexation of the Baltic states and eastern Poland were simply ignored or at most explained away as strategic necessity because of the failings of the appeasement of Hitler by the Western powers. Not least, racism – and most especially antisemitism – was not seen as the ideological centre of the Nazi creed, as later generations would come to recognize it, but as an inexorable consequence of rapacious capitalist imperialism. Jews had of course been grievously persecuted; but so had countless others, mainly Slavs, under the Nazi jackboot. The distortions were manifold (and have subsequently been laid bare by historical research). But incorporated in an ideology that brooked no alternatives and backed by a monopoly party and the power of the state, this interpretation was unchallengeable in Eastern Europe. It was represented in countless history books. But, at its most uncompromising, it was widely displayed for the ‘enlightenment’ of the general public in the Museum of German History (Museum für Deutsche Geschichte), established in East Berlin in 1952.
Western Europe, however, had its own myths about the immediate past. Its own distortions were more nuanced and varied than the Soviet version, but they were there nonetheless. France, for instance, used wartime resistance as the foundation of post-war political legitimacy. The heroism and martyrdom of the resistance were underlined at every point, its limited effectiveness, internal rivalries and ideological conflicts played down. Resistance was portrayed as the representation of national identity, Vichy as the betrayal of all that was truly French. De Gaulle himself was regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of resistance. This version was embellished through the publication in the 1950s of de Gaulle’s wartime memoirs – an important contribution both to the cult of the resistance and, especially, to his own image as France’s saviour. As late as 1970 he was still seen in France to a far greater extent as the symbol of the continued fight after the defeat of 1940 and of the Liberation four years later than as the founder of the Fifth Republic.
A veil of silence was drawn, in contrast, over the extent of collaboration with fascist regimes. It would take decades before ‘the Vichy syndrome’ would be squarely addressed in France. A serious beginning was not made before Marcel Ophül’s film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) in 1969. This lengthy two-part documentary, focusing on the town of Clermont-Ferrand in central France, opened the window for the first time on everyday collaboration during the German occupation. The sensitivity of the topic was such that, in this the final year of de Gaulle’s presidency, national television was not allowed to show the film – the ‘embargo’ on the television showing lasted until 1981 – though this did not prevent the film from becoming a sensation in France. And it was not a French but an American historian, Robert Paxton, who as late as 1972, in Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, first explored the Vichy regime’s own initiatives in deporting Jews to their deaths.
In Italy antifascism was one part of the essential basis of the post-war Italian state and its republican constitution. It formed a common bond that crossed the otherwise sharp political divides. The courage of resistance against fascist terror, during the last two years of the war after Mussolini had been reinstated in power by the German occupiers of northern Italy, was a cornerstone of early post-war attempts to shape national identity in the new Italian republic. Resistance, stated the widely read historian, Roberto Battaglia, in his 1953 book Storia della resistenza italiana (History of the Italian Resistance), represented the ‘real people’ of Italy, the heart of the nation, and in a ‘national uprising’ in 1945 had ‘redeemed the honour of Italy which had been so vilely besmirched by the Fascists’.
The crucial part played by the communists in resistance was, however, played down. For the main ideological prop of the new Italy was anti-communism. After the Cold War had set in, Italy had received Marshall Aid, joined NATO, and been extensively funded by the United States, with the more divisive anti-communism largely displacing the unifying antifascism as the dominant ideology in a state largely controlled by the Christian Democrats (and backed by the strong influence of the Catholic Church). The Fascist past was by now largely blotted out. State television, which began transmitting in 1954, scarcely touched upon contemporary history.
Works on fascism by historians, in so far as they penetrated wider public consciousness at all, concentrated largely on the causes of its takeover of power in 1922, its repressive character, and its preparations for war. The history of Italian society under Fascist rule and the extent of support for Mussolini’s regime remained unexplored themes. This was largely to remain the case until the mid-1970s, when in the third volume of his immense four-volume biography of Mussolini (published 1965–96), subtitled ‘The Years of Consent’, Renzo de Felice claimed that the majority of Italians had backed the aims and policies of the Fascist regime. This opened up, amid huge controversy, the whole issue of support for fascism in Italy. Whatever the merits of the arguments, it broke the convenient myth of a national identity built around antifascism.
In West Germany, as in Italy, the history of resistance helped to legitimate the new democracy. Whereas in the German Democratic Republic resistance to Hitler’s regime was almost entirely accredited to the communists, in the Federal Republic – in an almost exact mirror image – the patriotism of conservative resistance, in particular of the army, was highlighted, whereas that of communists was played down. Pride of place was accorded to ‘the men of 20 July 1944’ – chiefly army officers spearheaded by Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg – who had conspired to assassinate Hitler and paid a terrible price for their narrow failure. Led by individual conscience, ethical integrity and moral duty to overthrow tyranny, they had put their lives at stake in order to destroy a criminal regime and restore the legal order, freedom and democracy to Germany. Resistance to Nazism in this view represented ‘the other Germany’ – the ‘true’ Germany before Hitler’s repressive regime had subjugated the country to totalitarian unfreedom. Nazism, in this message, was an evil interruption to what had been a positive course of German history.
Some publications did stand outside the conservative intellectual mainstream. But few beyond specialists read Karl Dietrich Bracher’s exposure of the structural weaknesses of Weimar democracy, while the historical profession was itself dismissive of his work as that of a political scientist. Some outstanding pioneer research on the Nazi era was undertaken in the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) set up specially for that purpose and astonishingly already at work by 1949, a mere four years after Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker. But again little of this penetrated public consciousness, or even university curricula (where the most recent past scarcely figured). Moreover, even here emphasis on continuities with the pre-Nazi past could run into difficulties. Kurt Sontheimer, a researcher at the Institut in the late 1950s, revealed a panoply of anti-democratic views in the Weimar Republic stretching far beyond the Nazis and encompassing conservative mentalities. Uneasy with his findings, the Institut turned down his book for publication within its own series of monographs. It was later published separately and, in a more favourable climate, became a standard text.
Conservative dominance of the West German historical profession marked not just continuities in personnel and thought that had survived the Third Reich, but also matched the atmosphere of the Adenauer era. There was little appetite for exploring the past, revisiting uncomfortable memories, airing topics best forgotten. The Nazi past was simply too recent, the wounds still raw, the suffering in the last phase of the war – which left Germans with a sense that they had been the main victims of a criminal regime – too grievous, the complicity and collaboration in the workings of party and state too extensive to encourage the public to do any other than engage in what amounted to a conspiracy of silence, a desire to blot out the past.
Where there was not outright silence there was implicit, or even explicit, apologia. The German people had been seduced by propaganda and taken to ruin by Hitler and a clique of Nazi gangsters; most of the population had opposed the regime but had been powerless to act in a totalitarian police-state; no one other than the Nazi leaders had wanted war; the German army had fought honourably and carried out its patriotic duty to the end (a view decisively revised only decades later); the barbarous actions in Eastern Europe were those of SS criminals; ordinary Germans were not involved and knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews. The Holocaust (as it came to be known) was almost completely excluded from public debate and formed little part of historical inquiry. Only in the 1980s would it come to assume a central role in popular and scholarly interpretations of the era. Whereas in the German Democratic Republic the genocide against the Jews was simply subsumed in the wider exterminatory barbarism of fascist imperialism, in West Germany – in so far as it was discussed at all – it was attributed solely to the evil designs of Hitler and the SS leadership. The psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich later summed up the collective response in their book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn). The book signified the beginnings of a new era in the analysis of the Nazi past when it was first published in 1967, and went on to become a best-seller.
Although most West Germans wanted to enjoy the benefits of the ‘economic miracle’ and not to dwell upon the past, they could not altogether shut it out. In 1961 an unlikely book at first sight, an analysis several hundred pages long of German diplomatic records before the First World War – Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War) – provoked enormously bitter controversy. Fischer turned conventional historical interpretation on its head. Until then he had been little known outside professional circles – a conservative himself, who had even for a time been a member of the Nazi Party. But his book rocked the conservative establishment. For he claimed on the basis of his research into the plans, beliefs and actions of the German elites in the immediate prelude to the First World War that they had aimed at nothing less than conquest to establish Germany as a world power. In other words, Fischer purported to show that Hitler was the product of continuities in German history reaching back into the nineteenth century. His research advanced an interpretation that was difficult for many Germans to accept. While they had meanwhile come to acknowledge that their country was responsible for the Second World War, they were now told that it had also been responsible for the First – something which the Allies had alleged at Versailles, and which had been so ferociously denied by Germany then and ever since. Germany, it seemed in the light of Fischer’s work, had long before 1914 trod a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) among European nations. The path had led to Hitler, war, genocide and national disaster.
It was an interpretation that, once the immediate controversy had subsided, coloured German views about their own past for decades. In some ways, it inaugurated the process that from the 1960s onwards led to ever greater readiness to explore the darkest corners of the German past. The failings of an earlier generation to confront the past fed into the sense of alienation and rejection expressed in the student protests of 1968. But it would be a decade after those disturbances before serious research started to be undertaken on the myriad forms of everyday complicity in Nazi rule by large sections of the population, and even longer before the Holocaust itself took centre stage in the reassessment of the German past. Even so, in the early 1960s it became impossible for Germans to shut their eyes completely to the attempt to kill Europe’s Jews. The capture in Argentina in May 1960 by Israeli agents of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of what the Nazis had called ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, his trial in Jerusalem the following year and subsequent execution by hanging in June 1962, and then the trial in Frankfurt am Main between 1963 and 1965 of personnel who had served at Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi extermination centre, drew public attention for a time to the genocide that was an inextricable part of Germany’s war. ‘Death is a master from Germany,’ Paul Celan had written. It was becoming ever more difficult to exclude this thought from public consciousness.
The place of the recent past in British public consciousness differed from that anywhere else in continental Europe. Britain had been unconquered, had not been occupied, and had emerged victorious. Its wartime history encouraged the creation of a national self-image built on wartime heroism. This embellished the sense – already derived from its historical traditions and institutions – that Britain was both exceptional and stood apart from mainland Europe. History, memory and myth were all brought into service to unfold a glorious episode in ‘our island story’, one of heroism and triumph, of good vanquishing evil. Britain had already had to fight, and win, one world war against Germany. Reluctantly, it had been forced to do it all over again. Victory over Nazi evil attained by fighting ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with its Western ally, the United States, embellished, furthermore, the notion of a ‘special relationship’ with its transatlantic cousins. Conversely, most people showed little interest in developments across the English Channel. The well-worn cliché, ‘Fog over the channel, continent cut off from England’, was meant as a joke; it contained a grain of truth, even so, in its self-parody of British isolationism.
Britain in the post-war era was brought up on the version of the war associated with its greatest hero, Winston Churchill. Churchill’s six-volume history of the conflict, The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1953, established the line of interpretation. Appeasement had taken the country to the verge of disaster. In 1940, its ‘finest hour’, Britain had stood alone in the fight against Nazi tyranny. German invasion had been warded off by the bravery of young fighter pilots who, against the odds, had won the ‘Battle of Britain’ in the summer of 1940. The British people had then held out night after night as their homes were relentlessly bombed during the German ‘blitz’. After the darkest night, dawned slowly the light. Through the great victories in the Desert War, by winning the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ at enormous cost, and by the courage of bombing crews who nightly ran the gauntlet of German fighters to pummel enemy instalments, the corner was eventually turned. D-Day on 6 June 1944 was the culmination of bravery and triumph – the moment when, alongside our staunch American allies, victory was sealed and the path laid to the ultimate crushing of Nazism.
The heroic story was reinforced and embedded in the general consciousness through countless tales of ‘derring-do’ by British servicemen both in fictional accounts and in wartime recollections, and by popular films such as The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dambusters (1955) or Sink the Bismarck (1960), while comic strips indoctrinated countless youngsters with imagery of British heroism and German ‘baddies’.
Until the 1960s, however, there was little serious interest in the history of the Second World War. The history syllabus in schools and universities still ended, as a rule, in 1914. And relatively little ‘foreign history’ (as it was labelled in the Oxford syllabus) was studied. With a handful of significant exceptions – prominent among them Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler (1947) and Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) – few major works on the Nazi era were undertaken. This was only just starting to change in the early 1960s. Even then, anti-German stereotypes were upheld in the controversial book by Britain’s most popular historian, A. J. P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War. Taylor’s book, couched with his usual penchant for sharp epigrammatic sentences and cynical aperçus, was self-consciously revisionist. It came close to blaming British appeasers, not Nazi aggressors, for the war. It appeared in 1961, the same year as Fritz Fischer’s striking revision of interpretations of German aims in the First World War. Taylor used Fischer’s findings to underpin his own anti-German interpretation – he had already in 1944 published a short, strongly anti-German work, The Course of German History – that ‘in international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German’. (Born in Austria, Hitler had acquired German citizenship only in 1932.)
The past, therefore, continued to cast its deep shadow over the European continent – though in strikingly different ways. From the 1960s onwards, encouraged by the expansion of higher education more or less everywhere, research started to gather pace on the ideologies and political movements that had taken Europe into a calamitous war and genocide. Strikingly, though, it would be only from the 1980s, as they were receding chronologically ever more into the distance, that the Second World War and the Holocaust would become a central part of European public consciousness.
The past, consciously or not, shaped the post-war present. But between 1955 and 1965 changes in popular culture took place that amounted to a major break with the past. Before then popular culture had followed patterns recognizable from the pre-war era. After the decade of 1955–65 it felt as if a revolution had taken place.
Most people did not care about the past. They wanted to enjoy better times. The younger generation especially, born towards the end of the war or just after it was over, lived for the present and looked to the future. ‘Seize the day’ was their implicit slogan. During the 1960s – though the process had begun already in the preceding decade – they stamped their indelible imprint on a transformative shift in popular culture. Generation as well as social class became a more significant social cleavage than probably in any earlier era. Gradually, but permanently, the changes altered social values and life patterns. Gradually, too, the gap between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture lessened. It was not that teenagers were turned into opera fans, or that pensioners worshipped hard rock; but the chances of tastes overlapping were greater than earlier in the century. Middle-class parents, infected by (or anxious not to be excluded from) the tastes of their offspring, might enjoy pop as well as classical music, or university professors attend football matches – earlier mainly the preserve of the industrial working class. It would be as well not to exaggerate the scale or speed of the change. Nor was it uniform across the continent. The Berlin Wall, it has been said with little exaggeration, was the plain illustration of the contrast between a technicolour west and a grey east, where state controls in every country beyond the Iron Curtain tried, with a fair degree of success, to restrict the availability of ‘decadent’ Western culture. Within Western Europe the cultural transformation was slowest where the influence of the Catholic Church was strongest. The process of change, once begun, would nevertheless continue inexorably, developing and spreading almost by osmosis for the remainder of the century and beyond. But its crucial start was in the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s.
The universal language of youth is music – popular music, that is. And here there is little difficulty in locating the seismic break with the past. In 1954 the top of the hit parade in Britain was Vera Lynn’s ‘My Son, My Son’, a ballad by the singer who had during the war been known as ‘the forces’ sweetheart’. Within a year the top spot was occupied by ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets. It marked the arrival of rock and roll – a new sensational style of music that had crossed the Atlantic from the United States with an immediate mass appeal to teenagers. Instantly, dance halls, once the preserve of the sedate quickstep and foxtrot, were given over to frenetic jiving. When Haley’s spin-off film appeared in 1956, the reaction was remarkable. His fans screamed in the cinemas and rocked and rolled in the aisles. Catching the spirit of youthful rebellion, the banal story of a dance-band manager who became a success after seeing the appeal of rock and roll, sparked teenage disturbances and vandalism in towns and cities across Western Europe. The film was banned by eighty town councils in the United Kingdom. Haley was soon gone from the scene. His Comets passed across the sky and disappeared. But then came Elvis Presley.
From the mid-1950s onwards Elvis became practically a deity for much of the younger generation in the United States, but increasingly in Europe too (helped by the presence of US troops and the American Forces Network, AFN, music programmes). A string of massive hit records – among them ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘One Night’ – made him rock and roll’s first megastar. Good-looking, with slicked-back hair, a sultry expression, and a performance style that included suggestively gyrating hips, he became a sex symbol for millions of teenagers – and a threat to morality in the eyes of many of their elders. While many older Europeans saw the phenomenon as a further dangerous debasement of genuine culture, teenagers worshipped at the shrine, not just of Elvis, but of other major American rock and roll artists. An array of them – including outstanding figures such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly – enjoyed massive popularity in Europe as well as in the USA. The impact of rock and roll on the younger generation was explosive. For Charles White, experiencing a sheltered if not smothering education at a Catholic monastic school in the west of Ireland, ‘hearing Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”’ – released in 1956 – ‘was like getting out of the Bastille after 40 years. FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM!’ For White, and for many others, rock and roll amounted to nothing less than a cultural revolution.
In 1962 the centre of this musical cultural revolution moved to England. Their first recording success, ‘Love Me Do’, announced the arrival of The Beatles – four fresh-faced, mop-haired Liverpool boys (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) who by the following spring were already a phenomenon. ‘Beatlemania’ swept through Britain. In 1964 rapturous crowds followed them throughout their American tour. Their music developed from the early emphasis on rock to more sophisticated sounds, reaching perhaps a high point of creativity during their ‘psychedelic’ phase with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in May 1967. Their own experiments with drugs chimed with the increased use of recreational drugs among young people. That same year their song ‘All You Need is Love’ was performed via satellite to a global television audience estimated at 350–400 million people and became a theme of the ‘flower power’ peace movement and international protest against the Vietnam War. The Beatles were by now embodying the rejection of conventional values and the anti-establishment protest among young people.
Other British bands followed the trail blazed by the Beatles, reversing the earlier American dominance of popular music. Among them were The Animals, The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five, though by far the most important (and enduring) were The Rolling Stones, their popularity not far behind that of the Beatles by the mid-1960s. Their cultivated ‘bad boy’ image, the earthy style of their blend of rock and blues, and their appearance – long hair and casual clothes (in contrast to the initially uniformed appearance of the Beatles and most other bands at the time) – gave them an anti-authoritarian appeal that fitted well into the youth culture of the 1960s.
This culture was international, sweeping across America and Europe, penetrating even beyond the Iron Curtain as well – despite the disapproval of state authorities. Young people started to look alike. They wore similar types of clothes. During the rock craze of the late 1950s Britain’s youthful rebels – sometimes modelling themselves on Marlon Brando (a motorcycle gang leader in the 1953 film The Wild One), or James Dean, a young American actor who gained iconic status among teenagers as the star of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause and who died in a car accident the same year at the age of only twenty-four – had worn leather jackets and ‘drainpipe’ trousers to set themselves apart. There were variants in West Germany, France and elsewhere. The ‘Teddy Boys’, ‘Halbstarken’ or ‘blousons noir’ consciously aimed to look different from the rest of society. They were, however, a rebellious (sometimes violent) minority. Early in the 1960s the styles of young people were still generally conservative, much like those of their parents. But by the end of the decade they looked different from their elders. They often wore their hair long. Their clothing was usually casual. Through inspired marketing, jeans, originally American working attire, became a uniform of youth, and in a reversal of what had happened earlier were now even worn by some of their more trendy parents. ‘Hippie’ appearance, starting in America and catching hold in Europe, indicated adherence to a ‘counter-culture’, often involving drugs and sexual liberation.
Not all young people wanted to be taken for ‘hippies’. Fashion design, specifically targeting the young (men as well as women), who had more to spend on buying clothes than their parents had ever been able to afford, advertised attractive and distinctive styles. ‘Youth’ became big business. Carnaby Street was soon the emblem of ‘swinging Britain’ with an array of boutique fashion shops offering the latest ‘gear’ for both sexes. The British fashion designer Mary Quant was hailed in fashion-conscious Italy as ‘the creator of the most with-it fashion in the world . . . She invented the miniskirt’. Jean Shrimpton and the waif-like Lesley Hornby, better known as Twiggy (described in an Italian magazine as ‘the doll with the freckles’), became ‘super-models’, international trend-setters in female clothing. One fashion oddity was the disappearance of men’s hats, even long after the war still worn by most adult males. Perhaps the greater attention that young men in the 1950s started to pay to their elaborate hairstyles, quiffed back and greased in the style of Elvis Presley, is part of the answer to this minor sartorial mystery.
The greatest single influence on the changing popular culture of the 1960s was without doubt television. This had a major impact on the culture of young people – the first television generation. But it affected all sectors of society, in all countries. Television actually began life back in the 1920s. But the onset of its triumphant march to complete supremacy as the medium of popular culture began in Europe three decades later. Britain was at the forefront of the advance. The initial major boost to television ownership came in preparation of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 in Westminster Abbey. Millions of families clustered around the new and exciting addition to their furniture – a capacious polished cabinet with a tiny screen – to watch grainy black-and-white pictures of the great events in London.*
The coronation was the first big televised event not just in Britain, but across Europe and further afield. Sixteen European broadcasting organizations took part. Even in Republican France the coronation was said to have been watched by a million people. But television in Europe was still in its infancy. In 1953 Dutch television transmitted three hours of programmes a week to only 10,000 receivers. Although two-thirds of American households possessed a television set by 1955, in Italy television still had fewer than 100,000 subscribers. Expansion was, however, rapid from then onwards. By 1963 there were 12.5 million television sets in Britain, 8 million in Germany, 3 million in France and around a million in Italy (though only 1 per cent of Spaniards owned a television in 1960 while in Greece television only began in 1969). Still, the spread of television could not be halted, even by the rigorously controlling communist states. The gap in 1964 between television ownership in East and West Germany, for example, was fairly small: 42 per cent to 50 per cent of households. By 1970 Sweden had the greatest number of television sets proportionate to its population (312 sets for every 1,000 inhabitants) of any country in Europe, but Hungary (171 sets) was not far behind Ireland, Italy and Austria.
On 20 July 1969 the landing on the moon by the Apollo 11 spacecraft and the first steps taken by mankind on its surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were watched across the globe as extraordinary pictures were relayed by satellite to the largest television audience ever recorded up to that time – an estimated 530 million viewers worldwide. Televised sport was by this time becoming an integral part of popular culture. Through satellite links the Olympic Games could now be watched across the world. In Europe, where football was the prime sport, the European Cup, established in 1955, the European Championship and the World Cup drew increasingly vast viewer audiences across the continent and, as air travel became easier and cheaper, introduced travelling fans to other countries, helping to break down – or sometimes reinforce – national stereotypes.
Unlike commercial television in America, state television networks, funded by a broadcasting fee (sometimes supplemented by advertising), were the norm in the early years. Italy, France and West Germany, for instance, had such systems by the end of the 1950s. The BBC in Britain was funded solely by a licence fee. Everywhere, television (like radio) was seen as a public service. Commercial television, wholly sponsored by advertising, had begun in Britain in 1955 when ITV (Independent Television) broke the state monopoly. It seldom, however, posed any serious challenge to the state sector in continental Europe before the 1980s. East of the Iron Curtain, television was of course rigidly controlled by the state, whose authorities took over from the Churches as the guardians of public morality and at the same time sought to block any Western influence. State television, in the West too, sought to balance entertainment with documentary and other ‘educational’ programmes. Audiences, at first with only a single channel and down to the 1980s only a few additional channels, were given little choice. But it was plain from the start that entertainment programmes were what viewers wanted to watch.
Television was by now supplanting radio as the dominant form of entertainment for the family. Comedies, adventures and light dramas, quizzes and sport were what people in their millions wanted above all to watch. Viewing had an impact on family life and on leisure pursuits. Families often gathered around the television set in the evening. Certain programmes were priorities, not to be missed. Mealtimes were adjusted accordingly. Going to the cinema, to a café, a pub, a restaurant, or simply to visit friends or relatives, had to be fitted into viewing patterns. Leisure, even more than in the age of radio, had come into the home. Television was the new god.
Visits to the cinema became less frequent as television spread. By the end of the 1950s cinema attendances were already declining. By the mid-1970s they had fallen in France, Italy and the Netherlands to approximately a third of their 1955 level, almost as steeply in Norway and most drastically, to little over a twelfth of that level, in Britain. A third of British cinemas closed between 1957 and 1963. Many were turned into bowling allies or bingo halls, others left as fading dream-palaces of yesteryear. East of the Iron Curtain the pattern was somewhat different and in any case not uniform – a halving in Poland of cinema attendance, but a slight rise in the Soviet Union and a substantial rise in Bulgaria. The relative absence of television was the most likely reason. As late as 1960 there were only 4.8 million television sets in the USSR. The cinema (alongside reading and drinking) was still one of the few widely available diversions from the drabness of daily life.
Given the shortage of capital, American dominance of the European cinema in the early post-war years had been inevitable. Even in the early 1960s imported American films still formed a major part of what was available in Europe’s cinemas, though France and Italy were relatively resistant to the common trend. The French especially preferred their own films, and the market share of French cinema started to climb – enhanced by international successes such as Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (And God Created Woman), which in 1956 launched the career of the new sex-goddess, Brigitte Bardot. West Germany, unsurprisingly given the American military presence, was more open to imports from the United States. Some of the most popular films in the 1950s, such as Die Halbstarken (1956, Teenage Wolfpack in its English-language version), about teenage gangs, or Sissi (1955), starring Romy Schneider, depicting the tragic life of the wife of the Habsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph, had nevertheless been German productions.
Britain, given the shared language with America, had always been peculiarly exposed to the dominance of Hollywood. But British film production had continued to flourish in the early post-war period. Its outstanding film at that time was Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), with its wonderfully evocative images of war-torn Vienna and a memorable performance by the American star Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the anti-hero at the centre of the penicillin drugs racket. Britain was exceptional in relishing war films (along with war novels, war memoirs and war comic books). Glorying in past heroics masked the sense of national decline. More than a hundred war films were produced between 1945 and 1960. Some 8.5 million people saw The Dam Busters, released in 1955, over 12 million saw The Bridge on the River Kwai (depicting Japanese cruelty towards British prisoners of war) two years later. No other European country could glorify the war in film. Where war films were made at all in continental Europe, they tended to concentrate on themes of resistance or the suffering of innocent victims. But in countries with complex, ambivalent wartime histories such films could not expect to be hugely popular. People mainly wanted escapism from the war, not being reminded of its horrors.
Just after the war Italian cinema had been totally dominated by American productions. In 1957 five of the ten top-earning films in Italy were still American. By the late 1960s, however, this had changed. Only three American productions – two Westerns and a Disney comedy – figured in the ten most popular films, though film tastes had largely migrated to Italian Westerns and comedies. It was, however, far from one-way traffic. Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, like the French sex-symbol Brigitte Bardot, became household names throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. And a number of Italian film directors made high-quality productions that were highly popular both in Italy and abroad. Prominent among them was Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita of 1960. The film depicted a ‘good life’ that was empty, meaningless and sordid. It was a critique of contemporary morality, and of a powerful and decadent Italian upper class. Featuring (a major part of its success) the Swedish star Anita Ekberg, it included some risqué scenes that Italian television, still heavily influenced by the morality of the Catholic Church, avoided. Controversy about the film only helped its popular appeal, in Italy and even more so abroad. The film’s huge international success helped to turn post-fascist Rome into a fashionable tourist attraction. And, derived from the name of one of the characters in the film, Paparazzo, it bestowed a word, paparazzi (intrusive, nuisance photographers), on English and other languages.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s prize-winning films L’Avventura (1960, The Adventure), La Notte (1961, The Night) and L’Eclisse (1962, Eclipse), which explored emotional insecurity in modern society, won international acclaim, while his English-language film Blow-Up (1966), about a day in the life of a fashion photographer in ‘swinging London’, became a huge popular as well as artistic success, not least because of its – for the time – explicit sex scenes. Other Italian directors who gained major international recognition included Luchino Visconti. His The Damned (1969), about the relations of an industrialist’s family with Hitler’s regime, won international acclaim, while Franco Zeffirelli gained great popularity through his filming of Shakespeare’s plays The Taming of the Shrew (1967), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and Romeo and Juliet (1968).
Italian cinema was nevertheless exceptional in some ways. Italy had the highest number of cinemas in Europe and television was late to establish itself. Italians still in the mid-1960s spent far more on the cinema than on the theatre or sporting events. Even high-brow avant-garde films could find a large audience there. In most other parts of Europe that was not the case. Occasionally, however, an art film, such as The Seventh Seal (original: Det sjunde inseglet, 1956), by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, in which a knight returning from the Crusades plays chess for life or death with a black-clad grim reaper, could break the usual bounds to become both a classic and an international success.
As post-war recovery took hold and prosperity grew, film, theatre and literature had throughout Western Europe increasingly turned to social criticism. In the eyes of many artists prosperity and stability had become synonymous with materialism, hypocrisy and stuffy conservative values. The conventional lifestyle and values of middle-class society, or class-based unfairness and lack of opportunity, were frequent targets. The social criticism looked to the past in order to revolt against it. Britain and West Germany, as so often, produced contrasting responses to social and cultural change.
A ‘New Wave’ of literature, theatre and film in late 1950s Britain focused on the poverty, aggression, resentment and sexual values of the English industrial working class. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), a huge hit on the London stage, then on television, and three years later a successful film, practically inaugurated the genre and gave rise to the generic appellation of ‘angry young men’ (without anyone being certain what they were angry about, let alone how they intended to make things better). ‘Kitchen-sink drama’, as it was soon dubbed, produced a rapid succession of novels and plays that reached mass audiences when turned into hugely popular films – not least because their earthy sexual content was daring for its time – such as Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963). They conveyed a nostalgia for ‘genuine’ northern English working-class life in the process of being lost. This had been the thrust of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), which, for a work of scholarship, had attracted a surprisingly wide readership. Hoggart had criticized the hedonism and cult of youth in a society where ‘liberty equals licence to provide what will best increase sales’. He had argued that ‘we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture’ which, in its modern consumerism and commercialized, sensationalist entertainment, he saw as ‘less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing’. It amounted in his view to the destruction of the ‘urban culture “of the people”’.
By the 1960s satire was increasingly deployed to parody the political establishment and the entrenched class system, in theatre, the press and television. Political satire was, of course, nothing new in journalism or theatrical productions. But the far bigger television audiences now exposed greater numbers than ever before to the often biting wit directed at established figures and institutions, as in the widely viewed weekly television programme, That Was the Week That Was, shown in 1962–3. Deference was plainly in decline.
In West Germany cultural creativity was still often connected to consciousness of the Nazi past. Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (1963, The Deputy) provoked a storm of controversy by attacking the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. Literary criticism was usually more subtle. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, criticized the German mentalities of the 1960s while alluding to the recent past in his poem, published in 1964, ‘Middle-Class Blues’ (choosing a form that recalled American, not German, musical tradition): ‘We can’t complain./We’re not out of work./We don’t go hungry./We eat.’ Then comes the oblique reference to the past: ‘The grass grows,/The social product,/ . . . We eat the past.’
An ‘unmastered past’ – a catastrophe built on the complicity of so many citizens that had been largely blocked out of consciousness and supplanted by the materialist values of a prosperous consumer society – produced an exceptional level of cultural disorientation and at the same time frenetic experimentation with the ‘new’, the avant-garde, in all art forms. The sense of alienation of West German intellectuals, from what they often castigated as a smug, shallow society that was trying to erase the past, was more acute than anywhere else in Europe. The ‘new cinema’ of Alexander Kluge or Edgar Reitz (and later Wim Wenders) paralleled the ‘New Wave’ (la nouvelle vague) cinema of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and others in France, which turned its back completely on conventional narrative forms and created something more like reflective essays in film. In deliberately provocative experimental theatre and painting, existing values of culture, and of politics and society, were challenged.
It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the influence of the cultural avant-garde. International influences in popular culture from ‘Coca-colonization’ (as the all-pervasive impact of American commercial products was dubbed) to the music of the Beatles and other major bands were almost certainly more important in the silent transformation of social values. Nevertheless, the cultural avant-garde had a disproportionate effect on the highly educated sector of the younger generation. Notions of an ‘alternative culture’ spread – a culture that was more democratic, more communal, less reverential of traditional forms, more self-consciously revolutionary.
Culture in its manifold forms of art, literature and other creative expression reflects, challenges and shapes the values and mentalities of a society. In the 1960s these values and mentalities, especially among the younger generation, were in the early stages of an enduring and intensifying transformation. The role of crucial influences on social attitudes and behaviour – prominent among them the military, work, education, religion and the family – was altering, often diminishing.
By the 1960s European societies had become largely demilitarized. The army had lost its influence as a central feature of society. Militaristic values were no longer so dominant. States spent less on defence, more on welfare. Schools and the Christian Churches were less able to indoctrinate the young with militaristic and nationalistic values than they had once done. The belief, inculcated into young men down to the end of the Second World War, that it was their sacred duty to fight and die for their country, was waning strongly. Most young men, it is true, still had to undertake compulsory military service for two years or so. But they seldom did so enthusiastically, often in fact resentfully. Military service was a lingering remnant of the time when mass-conscripted armies were necessary to fight major wars. In the era of nuclear weapons they were increasingly an anachronism – though it took most states a long time to bow to this reality. Large conscript armies composed of reluctant military novices were also largely redundant in the increasingly unpopular wars against liberation movements in soon-to-be former colonies. Most governments, acknowledging public opposition to conscription, started by the end of the 1960s to offer alternatives to military service – civilian work in hospitals or schools, for example. Whether undertaking such work, or enduring two years of pointless military drilling and parading, most of the young men forced to undertake their ‘national service’ could not wait to return to civilian life. The civilian world, not the army, now shaped their value-system.
The world of work, too, was altering greatly. In an era of practically full employment, unions had strong bargaining power to improve conditions for their increased membership. Assembly-line production in big factories was still ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s, though starting to give way to a more flexible organization of working patterns that allowed for labour to be less monotonous, more humane, and yet increasing efficiency through greater use of worker initiative. Even the demarcation lines between workers and managers were no longer as firm as they had once been. Swedish car factories were in the vanguard of experiments to reduce the divide and make production a more corporate enterprise. These changes had not gone very far by the end of the 1960s. But in the workplace, too, the old iron discipline of classic capitalist production was weakening.
Class divisions were generally becoming less rigid. By the late 1960s a third of the West German middle class had working-class origins. Another fifth had dropped down from the upper middle class. Working-class solidarity was eroded as squalid slums in city centres were cleared, long-standing communities broken up, and socially less cohesive tenement blocks or areas of social housing constructed in new areas, sometimes in suburbs at a distance from the place of work. ‘On these new big clean stairways there was no fellow feeling . . . These fine new glossy doors were always shut,’ an English woman recalled (though implicitly romanticizing earlier days, when most working-class housing had actually been appalling, to be replaced by new estates that were far cleaner and healthier). Better-paid skilled workers, at one time drawn to political radicalism, were, as the German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf put it, on the way to ‘embourgeoisement’, exploiting their bargaining power in ‘the individual search for happiness’. The trend towards ‘a levelled-middle-class society’ can easily be exaggerated. It was in any case stronger in prosperous West Germany (where the term was coined) than in most parts of Europe, and did not apply at all beyond the Iron Curtain. But it hinted at what was happening more widely. As the ‘service-sector’ drew people who at one time would have headed for industrial work towards administrative and clerical jobs, the gap in mentalities between the upper echelons of the working class and the white-collar lower middle class narrowed.
As the working week was shortened, there was more time for leisure pursuits. These were becoming a dominant interest. More than two-thirds of those asked in a West German survey of 1973 rated leisure and the family as more important than work. More people were able to enjoy holidays – often now abroad – than ever before. At home, too, the options increased for spending time away from work with the family, in the garden (as more people had home gardens or allotments), or in other myriad diversions from the dreary demands of employment. Many of the leisure pursuits were individual, not collective – part of a general trend that was still in its early stages and would progress further in later decades. But, as we have been noting, important spheres of popular entertainment – music, film and television – offered forms of leisure that crossed national borders, united large segments of youth, and shaped common interests and mentalities across Europe’s frontiers, penetrating even countries beyond the Iron Curtain.
After the war secondary education rapidly expanded in most European countries, offering opportunities for advancement that had earlier been restricted to a social elite. On average in Western Europe two and a half times more pupils aged between ten and nineteen years of age attended school in 1970 than had done so in 1950. National (and sometimes regional) differences persisted, but there was a general recognition of the need to prepare a greater proportion of the population for entry into more complex forms of work, or to go on to higher education. In Eastern Europe post-war education was radically different both from that before the war and from developments in Western Europe. Private and religious schools were abolished, greater attention was paid to Russian language, literature and history, more emphasis placed upon science and technology, and all overlaid by the elucidation of the history of the labour movement and Marxist-Leninist interpretation of social and political development.
The opportunities for a university education also started to widen in the 1960s. New universities and polytechnics were founded. Where in 1950 only around 3 to 5 per cent of those aged between twenty and twenty-four attended university, by 1970 the figure was generally between 12 and 18 per cent, with Sweden and the Netherlands over 20 per cent. The trend was similar beyond the Iron Curtain, though at a somewhat lower level, ranging from 8 per cent in Albania to 14 per cent in the GDR and a high point of 16 per cent in Yugoslavia. Higher education was still largely a male preserve – more so in Western than in Eastern Europe. Only a quarter of graduates at the University of Manchester in 1965, for instance, were women (a tiny number of whom graduated in science and medicine). But more young people than ever before were exposed through university education to new or different ways of thinking. A highly intelligent sector of society was as a result able to challenge existing social conventions and political decisions precisely at a time when these were more fluid and open to serious criticism than at any time since the Second World War.
European culture had in great measure been a product of nearly two millennia of Christian teaching and since the eighteenth century the values of the Enlightenment. The spread of scientific and medical knowledge, however, together with the greater optimism in the possibilities of finding rational answers to society’s problems, undermined faith in the supernatural. Church adherence had, moreover, traditionally been stronger in more closely knit communities in the countryside than in the sprawling urban conglomerates and among the industrial working class. The continued drain from the countryside to a more amorphous urban society further helped to weaken, therefore, the direct social impact of the Churches. In the cities, too, the counter-attractions to religion provided by an ever-increasing array of leisure pursuits were plain. Even during the most solemn days of the Christian calendar at Easter, young people often preferred the funfair, the cinema or a sporting event to going to church. Declining religious observance was the effect, not the cause, of the wider social changes that were affecting the Churches, as all other institutions. Yet it meant a diminished impact not just of religious teaching but also of moral values that had been the traditional domain of the Churches.
In the communist states beyond the Iron Curtain the steep fall in religious observance and professed belief was to a great extent politically driven. It could be a severe disadvantage to be a practising Christian (or Jew or Muslim). The Churches themselves had to endure political repression. The number of Orthodox priests in the Soviet Union dropped by almost a half within six years, between 1959 and 1965. Large numbers of churches, mosques and synagogues were closed, and all religious bodies closely monitored by state authorities. Privately held belief persisted beneath the surface, though just what proportion of the population continued to hold a religious faith cannot be known. In Central and Eastern Europe the trend was generally similar, though not uniform. Albania was the state most hostile to religion. When asked what the difference was between the major religions in their country, Albanians had a ready answer: ‘Christians don’t go to church on Sundays, Jews don’t go to the synagogue on Saturdays, and Muslims don’t go to the mosque on Fridays.’ Poland stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. The Catholic Church increasingly came to stand for Polish national identity and posed an alternative belief system to the official state ideology. Religious observance as well as popular piety, far from declining, increased as a result. There was 70 per cent attendance at Mass each Sunday in the 1960s. By the 1980s the number of regular churchgoers would rise, especially in working-class parishes, to a quite remarkable 90–95 per cent of the population. For the communist authorities this was by any measure a disaster.
In Western Europe the long-term decline in religious observance – more marked in the various forms of Protestantism than in the Catholic Church – had been temporarily halted during the traumatic war years and their immediate aftermath. But during the 1960s ties with the Churches loosened markedly, a trend that would continue and accelerate for the remainder of the century and beyond.
Dilution of religious commitment proceeded fastest in north-western Europe, where economic modernization was most advanced, the population was relatively well educated, liberal political systems were most developed, and cultural norms subject to the greatest change. Decline was slower in the Catholic south of the continent where religion retained a stronger hold over the population than in the northern predominantly Protestant regions of Europe. The Republic of Ireland, economically a relatively backward country, where the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church had been enshrined in the constitution of 1937 and Catholicism was embedded in national identity, posed an exception in north-western Europe. More than 90 per cent of the population still went regularly to Mass as late as 1960. Few if any parts of Europe could compete with that. But even in wealthier and more modernized regions such as Bavaria, allegiance to the Church remained relatively strong. And the millions who still journeyed to Catholic shrines like Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Knock in Ireland or Częstochowa in Poland (where the icon of the ‘Black Madonna’, symbol of the nation, resided), testified to the continued vitality of Catholic belief.
In general, throughout Europe more Catholics than Protestants were still regular attendees of church services, though the numbers were falling. Surveys showed that most people still professed a belief in God. Most of the population also continued to declare a nominal religious adherence. And the offices of the Churches were still usually called upon for baptism, marriage and funerals. The indicators are, nonetheless, that fewer people were continuing to do so, and that religious belief itself was contracting. Surveys showed, for instance, that the numbers of Europeans who believed in an afterlife were falling. The Churches – the Catholic Church especially – continued to play a major role in upholding public morality. But it was an uphill struggle.
The Churches tried to adapt to the rapid social changes. Ecumenism – the opening to other faiths in the quest for Christian unity – started to make headway. The meeting in 1960 between the Archbishop of Canterbury, primate of the Anglican Church, and the Pope was the first since long before the Reformation. And, a sign of things to come, the first women pastors in Europe were ordained by Lutheran churches in Denmark (already in 1948), then Sweden (1960) and Norway (1961). Some Protestant theologians sought to define belief in novel ways. Paul Tillich argued that faith did not stand in opposition to reason, but transcended it. The Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, rejected notions of an objective God outside human imagination. The complex writings of these theologians were important in provoking debate within the Protestant Church. But few normal churchgoers were interested in questions of ontological theology, most were not attracted by the idea of a God whose existence was purely subjective, and those drifting away from the Church were unlikely anyway to reverse their steps on account of elevated theological debate.
The Catholic Church, too, was on the threshold of epochal change. The election in 1958 of Pope John XXIII inaugurated a significant break with the aloof papal monarchy of his predecessor, Pius XII, and began possibly the most transformative papacy of modern times. His crucial decision – not welcomed by the ultra-conservative Vatican Curia (the papal-governing apparatus) – was to call a general Council of the Church, the first since 1870, only the second since the sixteenth century. The Pope was responding to a strong feeling among a new generation of bishops, and below them from the grassroots of clergy and laity, that the Church needed to reform and modernize in order to prevent serious erosion of its following. Already in the late 1950s West German bishops were keenly aware of the ‘habitual neglect of Sunday Mass’ as a ‘pastoral problem’ and the ‘serious concerns’ of many priests about the decline in the numbers of practising Catholics. Debate on pastoral reform and renewal from below was most advanced in France, spreading to Holland, Belgium, West Germany and Italy, though the ideas had made little headway in Ireland, Britain and on the Iberian peninsula, where the highly conservative Church was the most resistant to change.
Vatican II (as it was usually called) accorded increased ‘collegial’ authority to the bishops, alongside the Pope (the Bishop of Rome), though any diminution of papal primacy was countered by the reaffirmation of the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Council went a good way in opening the Church to ecumenism, advocating reconciliation with other Churches. There was an apology to Jews for their suffering at the hands of Christians (and the offensive attribution to Jews of blame for the killing of Christ in the Good Friday service was removed), a call to enter into dialogue with Jews, and a denunciation of antisemitism. In 1965 healing of the centuries-old schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church began. For ordinary churchgoing Catholics the most overt – and for traditionalists highly objectionable – change emanating from the Council was the replacement of Latin, the language of the Church in Western Europe since ancient times, by the vernacular language when celebrating Mass, a move designed to make the Church less remote from the people.
The changes were major, and lasting. They reinvigorated debate within the Church, among the laity as well as clergy, stirred enthusiasm among the faithful for new forms of participation in pastoral work, and widened horizons to greater awareness of social deprivation outside Europe, notably in Latin America. But the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch rightly described the outcome of the Council as only ‘half a revolution’. Pandora’s box had been opened, but the bishops were soon trying to push down the lid again. Moves to link the Church to political radicalism and to Latin American ‘liberation theology’ were blocked. Lay participation was welcomed, as long as the clergy retained firm control. The ‘college’ of bishops amounted to little more than verbiage as papal primacy was reaffirmed. And the Swiss theologian, Hans Küng (who had participated as an advisor in the Vatican Council), was eventually barred from teaching Catholic theology – he was a professor in Tübingen in West Germany – after publicly rejecting the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Where the reforms flowing from Vatican II most signally failed to adjust to crucial currents of social change was in the sphere of sexual behaviour. Many attending the Council had hoped that there would be at least a relaxation in the rules prohibiting priests from marrying. But celibacy for the clergy was reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI, the more conservative successor to John XXIII, who died in 1963, long before the Council he had summoned had finished its work. This almost certainly contributed to the decline in the numbers of those willing to enter the priesthood – and an increase in those leaving it to get married. A far wider problem was the continued ban on contraception pronounced by Pope Paul in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘Of Human Life’) in 1968. This not only led to heated protests among the Catholic clergy as well as laity; the papal ban was in practice widely ignored. Quite apart from the damage this did to papal authority, it marked the limits of Vatican II’s ability to change Catholicism in ways that could significantly redress the advance of secularization and the decline in Catholic observance. With the ban on birth control, the papacy was plainly in conflict with changes in sexuality and in the family that the Church was powerless to halt.
Attitudes towards marriage, divorce, cohabitation and extramarital births were changing. The post-war ‘baby boom’ was over. Young people were no longer following the Churches in seeing reproduction as the prime purpose of marriage. And they were marrying later than had been usual after the war. Greater employment opportunities encouraged individuals to organize the rearing of children primarily in accordance with their own lives, desires and material circumstances, rather than the other way round. More women now sought paid employment, and wanted to control their own lives. They increasingly contested the traditional view that their place was to bear children and run the family home. In Western Europe their progress was greatest in Scandinavia, slowest in Catholic countries, where social teaching directly emphasized the duty of the wife and mother at home. Ireland even enshrined in its constitution ‘that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’. The pattern of later marriage and fewer children was also developed in Eastern Europe, though in part for different reasons. Systems of maternity support permitting full-time employment for women were far more extensive than in the West. But lack of prosperity and the wait for a suitable apartment imposed their own limitations on the readiness to marry early and have children.
Above all, better methods of contraception and changing laws on abortion meant that women were more able than ever before to determine when, or if, they were going to have children, inside or outside marriage. The crucial invention in the United States in 1960 of the contraceptive pill – soon just generally known as ‘the Pill’ – fundamentally changed women’s lives. Women could themselves now for the first time reliably control reproduction. The Pill transformed sexual behaviour. It opened the path to the sexual freedom enjoyed by both men and women from the later 1960s onwards.
Sexual liberation began an erosion of marriage that would accelerate in the last decades of the century. Divorce rates started to rise noticeably, if nowhere near as fast as later in the century. Already by 1970 over a quarter of marriages in Sweden and Denmark were ending in divorce. By then almost a third of Swedish and Danish couples in their early twenties were choosing to live together without entering marriage, and nearly a fifth of births in Sweden were outside marriage. These were well in advance of the ratios in other Western European countries. The trend pointed nevertheless in the same direction, as it did in Eastern Europe, though Catholic countries lagged far behind. Divorce in Italy, for instance, was not legal until December 1970, in Portugal 1975, in post-Franco Spain only in 1982, in Ireland as late as 1997, and in Malta not even until the twenty-first century, in 2011.
Behind the trends lay a sexual revolution that was challenging practically all conventions on sexuality and by the later 1960s was a central part of the youth counter-culture. The Feminist Liberation Movement – Simone de Beauvoir, the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, had been an early pioneer and her book Le deuxième Sexe (1949, The Second Sex) a vital ideological influence – played a significant part in promoting women’s sexual independence. The increasing acceptance – at least in theory – of women’s equality, a major and lasting achievement of the feminist movement, amounted to one of the most important social changes of subsequent decades and was in good measure made possible by the invention of the Pill. Its availability enabled both men and women to enjoy casual sex without the risk of pregnancy. ‘Free love’ – sexual freedom to interchange multiple partners – crossed the Atlantic from the hippie culture in San Francisco. Homosexuality, too, still generally in the 1950s part of a furtive and criminalized demi-monde, started on the path towards wider acceptance in society – though the path would be a long and stony one as the detritus of deeply embedded prejudice was only slowly trodden down.
The rapidly expanding mass media contributed hugely to the increasing social acceptability of new attitudes towards sex. Books and films were soon challenging, and breaking, traditional taboos. In 1960 the publication of the unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (which contained explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse in vivid, demotic language) came before a London court, charged under the Obscene Publications Act. When the counsel for the prosecution, Mervyn Griffith Jones, a pillar of establishment rectitude, asked the jury whether it was a book ‘you would wish your wife or your servants to read’, he seemed to be speaking from a bygone age. Expert literary witnesses lined up to defend the book. Somewhat eccentrically, the controversial Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, suggested that the sexual intercourse luridly described by Lawrence was ‘an act of holy communion’. The publisher, Penguin Books, was eventually acquitted of all charges. The furore predictably contributed to an explosion in sales of the book. This British case was an early example of the impossibility of sustaining previously rigorous censorship of sexual expression as social values were changing so rapidly. In literature, film, newspapers and magazines – television in its early years was still protective of public morality – it was obvious that sex was big business.
Governments were compelled to adjust to the changing climate. Sweden and Denmark again took the lead in the accessibility of contraceptive methods. Britain made the Pill freely available to married couples on a doctor’s prescription from 1961, and from 1968 to all women, married or not. Following pressure from feminists, France removed its ban on birth control in 1965. Catholic countries, in accordance with the Church’s official stance, resisted relaxation of restrictions on contraception, which were only lifted in Italy in 1970, in Ireland more than a decade later still. Abortion had been legal in the Soviet Union and among its allies since the 1950s. But laws permitting abortion – usually still with strictly applied conditions – spread within Western Europe only from the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards. Although the passage of legislation usually followed heated debate and was opposed particularly by the Catholic Church, predominantly Catholic countries too gradually moved to legalize abortion, though some countries, such as Malta, continued to hold out against the trend and would still impose a ban on abortion into the next century.
Changing social attitudes were also reflected in legislation on homosexual practice. The stance of European governments towards homosexuality had historically been varied. Official bans existed in most (though not all) communist states. Most Western democracies had criminalized homosexuality. It had been legal in France since the Revolution, however (though the Vichy regime, in common with other fascist regimes, had banned it), and in Denmark, Sweden and Iceland (though not Norway or Finland) for two or three decades. But from the late 1960s onwards, responding to growing objections to current law, governments across Europe began to liberalize legislation on homosexuality. The ‘Gay Rights Movement’, beginning in the United States, exerted further pressure. Gradually, though the process would extend into the 1990s, the criminalization of homosexual acts among consenting adults was brought to an end throughout Western and post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Widespread discrimination against homosexuals nevertheless continued, most plainly in Russia.
Social values had changed immeasurably in Europe since the war. Society in Western Europe had by the late 1960s in general become more liberal, more tolerant than it had been in 1950. Of course, there were counter-currents to this generalization. Racist attitudes still persisted widely, if often just below the surface. Sexist attitudes were commonplace. Women often had to contend with unwelcome sexual overtures from men who enjoyed exploiting their position of power in numerous walks of life. Feminism faced an uphill struggle to change male prejudices towards women and alter long-standing discrimination against them in education, job opportunities and in the workplace.
For some among the younger generation the liberalization was in any case too slow, and far from radical enough. They sought much faster and far more sweeping change. By the later 1960s they were posing a challenge to the social and political order, east as well as west of the Iron Curtain.