As we have seen, the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s that constituted the green-alternative counterculture were both influenced by and at the same time opposed to the student movement. Hermann Glaser has convincingly summed up the discrepancy between the generation of 1968 and the following generations of the counterculture: “The student movement talked a lot about the liberation of sensuality, but did not develop a sensuous relationship to objects or even nature.”1 The later student movement’s ossified Marxism had nothing to say about these two aspects of human existence—nature and aesthetic-sensual experience. The Sponti movement, most visible and influential at the universities from the mid-1970s, represented the first direct response and challenge to the student movement. It challenged the authoritarianism of both the hegemonic culture and the orthodox Marxist groups that dominated the late student movement. Often without being aware of it, the green-alternative culture instead revitalized aspects of the early student movement, namely, its antiauthoritarian concepts and practices.
The use of aesthetic practices for individual emancipation and as a means for expressing dissent had become popular again. These symbolic forms of protest included the extensive use of folk tunes, particularly within the ecology movement, the use of face paints among those countercultural groups that called themselves Urban Indians (Stadtindianer) or Mescaleros, the use of witch costumes by the women’s movement in events like “Taking Back the Night,” or the various die-ins staged by the peace movement. These aesthetic and at the same time political practices are strongly indebted to the antiauthoritarian tradition of 1960s protest, from Fritz Teufel’s satirical response to the establishment’s court authorities to teachins, sit-ins, and go-ins, which the student movement introduced into the political culture of postwar West Germany.
The student movement had also left its mark on subsequent countercultural developments on the theoretical level. Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of the culture industry remained a crucial element for the green-alternative culture’s criticism of the hegemonic culture, but with a different bent. The students used this theory to explain the failure of the West German working class to become a revolutionary subject, blaming first and foremost the universal system of deception that capitalism creates by means of the culture industry. The students saw themselves, however, as outside this system of deception and, since their conceptualization of society worked with a hierarchical model of base and superstructure, the students understood themselves to be in an avant-garde position for the working class and the revolution.
In contrast, the alternative culture did not operate with a class model of society but in terms of the paradigm of center versus margins. It applied this paradigm to its own situation in contemporary West Germany, seeing itself as socially marginalized and as such endangered by the integrative power of the culture industry. This is most visible in the models of identification that the green-alternative culture chose: the fool and marginalized ethnic groups like Indians, as the name Urban Indians indicates. The heated debates about whether alternative projects should accept state subsidies or not also articulates this problem in terms of cultural politics. Yet the student movement and the green-alternative culture agreed in their criticism of another aspect of the culture industry. They attacked the passivity and consumer attitude that the culture industry cultivates in its audience.
While the early antiauthoritarian student movement believed in the emancipatory function of aesthetic culture for the oppressed individual, a class-based conceptualization of art became the dominant paradigm as the student movement turned toward a reductive application of Marxist theory. Two consequences of this turn thereby distinguish the student movement from the green-alternative culture. First, the students replaced the privileging of the individual within bourgeois society with the privileging of a collective class subject. Second, the students’ interest in aesthetic culture focused mainly on the political application of art, that is, art’s function as a means of agitation and propaganda for the class struggle. It is therefore not surprising that the student movement modeled its own aesthetic practices on the agitprop techniques of the left during the Weimar Republic, for instance, in their street theater performances.
As we have seen, the alternative culture had a quite different position. Analogous to the new social movements’ idea of a participatory politics in opposition to the hegemonic culture’s representative politics, the green-alternative culture developed the idea of a participatory culture in contrast to a mere representative one. Its model of a participatory culture adhered to the principle “Participation is everything!” Although many of the green-alternative culture’s aesthetic practices were collective ones or designed to constitute community, its focus was on individual participation.
Aesthetic practices, therefore, had a different meaning for the green-alternative culture than for the later student movement. Since bourgeois aesthetics had always privileged the individual subject, the students promoted an aesthetics that gave voice to the collective, documented “objective reality,” and took an overt political stance, as in the many forms of documentary literature and the street theater. At the center of the green-alternative culture’s interest in aesthetic practices was the desire for self-expression and self-actualization, for the rediscovery and expression of individual subjectivity in accordance with the concept of the politics of the self.
The generation of the student movement watched the alternative culture’s turn away from conceptualizing the subject solely in terms of class and toward matters of individual subjectivity and the notion of the politics of the self with much suspicion and often a clear lack of understanding. For many in the generation of 1968, the new cultural paradigms of the self and subjectivity amounted to treason, to a sellout to the hegemonic culture, especially in light of the ideological reappropriation of the alternative culture’s interest in subjectivity.
By the mid-1980s the argument that the alternative culture had sold out the countercultural project seemed to be substantiated by the changes a visitor might observe in the small university towns of West Germany, which had been bastions of countercultural life. Tubingen, for example, had been one of the first strongholds of an alternative lifestyle and for the Greens in the late 1970s and early 1980s.2 During that time, the alternative culture’s “uniform” — purple overalls and Indian clothing—and the improvised chaos and secondhand interior design of numerous bookstores, Third World shops, and health food cafes dominated the city’s landscape. Returning to Tubingen in the mid-1980s, the same visitor could suffer quite a culture shock; the display of overalls and Indian dresses had been replaced by the national and international chain-store couture from Benetton to Marco Polo; the seedy comfort of the alternative culture’s health food cafes had given way to the slick facades of hightech and neon-lit bistros, preferably with a touch of Italy: gentrification the German way.
Matthias Horx’s observation regarding the changing eating culture of the West Germans can be cited in support of this “yuppification” of the alternative culture by the mid-1980s. Horx maintains that the student movement was far removed from any gourmet pleasures; the revolutionary student simply wolfed down any kind of food indiscriminately as long as it kept him or her going for the next protest march. Eating was just a means to sustain life for the revolution. The alternative movement’s concern with the body and indulgence in health food from whole grains to tofu replaced the student movement’s obliviousness to dietary issues. According to Horx, when the alternative movement slowly dissolved in the mid-1980s, it discovered the sensuous pleasures of gourmet cooking.3
The question remains whether we can legitimately conclude from these changes in diet and clothing that the post-1968 counterculture had sold out to the hegemonic culture. Perhaps this one-way description of the cultural transformations within the alternative culture is rather reductive and based on a misunderstanding of the function and development of countercultures. The complex history of continuations and breaks between different generations of the counterculture and of the struggle between resistance and reintegration of the counterculture into the mainstream can be illustrated with two slogans popular during the student movement and the alternative culture. Slogans and graffiti played, after all, an important role for the counterculture as an alternative means of communication and self-expression. They could be found everywhere; on public buildings, the pavement, and on clothing, particularly within the punk/squatters’ movement.4
The slogan “All Power to the Imagination!,” which adorned many walls and other public spaces during the late 1960s, captures the students’ adaptation of Marcuse’s reinterpretation of Freudian theory. It expressed not only the students’ belief in imagination’s potential for self-actualization but also their belief in the necessity of transforming the desires and demands articulated in imagination into revolutionary energy. The slogan itself, a demand on or maybe even a threat to the hegemonic culture, calls for the realization of the desires repressed in contemporary society. It thereby addressed the question of power and power relationships and furthermore, if stated as an imperative —Fantasy, take power! —a willingness to be in power. It articulates the intention to transform the material and political conditions of life in order to make dreams come true.
The post-1968 counterculture’s slogan picked up on the student movement’s call for imagination and demonstrates the continuation of ideas from the student movement to the alternative culture. The emancipation of the repressed imaginative and creative faculties of the human being were still an issue for the alternative culture. However, the slogan now reads differently: “Meer Fantasie—und Muscheln,” perhaps best translated as “The Ocean/More Imagination—and Mussels/Shells.”5 The linguistic play with phonetic similarity and written difference—“Meer/Mehr” —was typical of the alternative culture’s sense of irony and use of puns. Whereas the students’ slogan referred only to an intangible and immaterial power— imagination—which it wanted to see take power, the alternative culture’s slogan embeds imagination in the material world; the ocean and mussels or shells. But why the ocean and mussels/shells in particular? we might ask.
The ocean, or rather the beach, has for a long time functioned as an idyllic place, a locus amoenus in Western culture. Both the alternative and mainstream culture make use of this old, positive imagery to articulate their repressed desires and hopes. The alternative culture employed it in the Tunix flier, as we have seen, and also in the name of one of its main publications Pflasterstrand (Pavement beach), thus reappropriating as well as popularizing the slogan “Underneath the pavement lies the beach,” which dates back to the student movement. However, the beach and the ocean signify for most Germans the best time of the year, namely, their vacation. The beach in mainstream culture symbolizes not only the economic achievements of West Germany but also pleasure, spontaneity, authenticity, or in other words, the breaking free from the boredom of day-to-day lives.
Does this mean that the desires of the hegemonic and the counterculture have converged into one idyllic image of vacation and leisure time by the mid-1980s? This understanding of the slogan is only one of its possible readings. If one resolves the pun Mee/hr (the ocean/more) differently, the alternative culture seemed to call foi more imagination, expressing discontent with the results of the first call for fantasy in the 1960s. Still, even this reading does not dispel the most significant alteration of the original: More imagination anc mussels. Mussels are considered gourmet food in Germany and the epitome of elitist culture. This complicates an interpretation of the slogan even further and raises many questions. For instance, doe; the alternative culture want to have it all: the status of a counterculture as well as the blessings of yuppie consumer culture — mussel; for supper? Has the establishment once again successfully reintegrated the counterculture by means of the culture industry’s repressive desublimation? Or can the slogan perhaps be understood in a different manner?
Let us begin unraveling this ambiguous statement and the de velopment of the counterculture that it describes with a referenci to the worst-case scenario —the reintegration hypothesis. Applyinj Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation, one can read the slo gan as an expression of the alternative culture’s reintegration by thi hegemonic culture. Such an argument would claim that the slogai no longer calls for imagination to take power but simply asks fo a few more crumbs from the table of the hegemonic culture. Lati capitalist society’s repressive tolerance allows only for an immediati gratification of desires on the surface without changing the materia conditions of life and thus precludes true gratification.
In this context, the double meaning of the German word Muschei namely, “mussel” and “shell,” gains significance. The shell does no necessarily have a content; it can very well be empty. This is exactly the nature of repressive desublimation; it offers only the illusion of gratification in order to reconcile the individual with his or her unsatisfying conditions of life. The strategy of repressive desublimation helps to contain the counterculture’s subversive potential, expressed in its desire for the rule of imagination in opposition to instrumental rationality. In short, the alternative culture has become more interested in the superficial bliss that the hegemonic culture happily grants—the German’s annual travelmania to the Mediterranean shores, as well as the preoccupation with gourmet cooking since the 1980s—in order to prevent imagination from being turned into revolutionary energies and structural change, as the student movement desired. Thus one could indeed read the slogan simply as “The Ocean, Imagination —and Mussels,” that is, as signifying the seduction of the alternative culture by the hegemonic culture’s material offerings.
This interpretation of the slogan, or rather the development of the post-1968 counterculture, is characteristic of a social theory that considers change in today’s world to be impossible. Horx, who has written extensively on the alternative culture, does not buy into the argument that the alternative movement has been successfully contained by the hegemonic culture. He maintains that the alternative movement had a tremendous impact on postwar West German society even though it also seemed to have come to an end in the mid-1980s. He argues that the diversity of the alternative culture allowed for a dissemination of alternative values and ideas into society on a broad scale. The multitude of cultures—ecological, feminist, gay/lesbian, and many more—enriched each other while dissolving the sharp dogmatic outline characteristic of the innumerable orthodox left-wing groups in the wake of the student movement. They were less threatening than the students’ rigid class analysis and privileging of the collective. “As a result, the new desires made inroads into the old world. Alternative movement: this is for quite some time now no longer a label for a small, brave, radical social stratum. There is hardly anyone in this society who hasn’t been confronted with these alternative impulses, whether directly or indirectly, even if it was only in doubting the old certainties or in desires that were buried behind career goals and utility, old habits and discouragement.”6
Horx’s argument rests on a theory of cultural hegemony that argues that this hegemony is always contested. As a result, the hegemonic culture’s strategy of co-opting through repressive desublimation does not inevitably succeed—an idea that the scholars of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies have put forth with respect to the 1960s counterculture. They argue that “ ‘repressive desublimation’ is a dangerous, two-sided phenomenon. When the codes of traditional culture are broken, and new social impulses are set free, they are impossible fully to contain.”7
This perception of society opens up a different way of conceptualizing what happened to the West German counterculture from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. Horx suggests that the alternative culture dissolved into three groups: at one extreme, a totally reintegrated minority that returns to the maw of the hegemonic culture, and at the other end, a marginalization of those parts of post-1968 counterculture that did not manage to leave their alternative ghetto situation behind. Between these two groups, an alternative middle class emerged, which he describes as follows: “Their income is by now close to that of the bourgeois middle class; their consciousness is no longer strictly alternative, but rather green. They do not feud with the old ideals, they do not reject them, but neither do they return to the old values. This countercultural middle class no longer desires alternative purity. It leaves the rigid value system of the totally different behind, but still insists on alternative values. Treason is carried to extremes: one wants to have both money and meaning, stable relationships and a reliable circle of friends, collective spheres and radical slogans—also and particularly in parliament.”8
Based on Horx’s description of the alternative culture, the slogan “The Ocean/More Imagination—and Mussels/Shells,” gains yet another meaning. By the mid-1980s the alternative culture wants to have it all and, for the alternative middle class, can also afford it: enjoying the ocean and beach, more imagination, and mussels for supper. The alternative middle class did not necessarily commit treason. It was certainly willing to compromise, but without completely renouncing its former radical ideas, as Horx points out. Instead of continuously striking an oppositional pose based on rigidly defined principles, which easily leads into ghettoization, the alternative middle class aimed at developing strategies for affecting the hegemonic culture. The counterculture indeed fell back on more traditional means, but this was a strategic retreat similar to the student movement’s long march through the institutions in order to obtain influence and affect change. A reappropriation of sensuous pleasures associated with a more affluent bourgeois lifestyle can be one result and should not be mistaken for a sellout to the hegemonic culture. It is part of the process of negotiation characteristic of the ongoing cultural struggle, which in turn accounts for the counterculture’s continued influence on German society.
If the counterculture was or is successful in implementing some of its values and ideas into mainstream culture, it also has lost some of its oppositional profile. Defining itself once and for all as a counterculture is simply impossible. The clear distinction between hegemonic culture and counterculture will always be in flux. Thus the counterculture will also be always challenged to define itself anew when facing the fact that it has successfully influenced the dominant culture, that is, its ideas and values have been reintegrated into the mainstream. For instance, only after the ecology movement had “gone mainstream” by founding a party to enter parliament did it achieve its goal of making ongoing environmental destruction a top issue of the political discourse. Today all parties have —more or less convincingly—responded in their platforms to this new political challenge. The transformation of the taz represents another example of this process of cultural negotiation. The taz developed a more moderate profile by distancing itself from the utterly radical fringes of the alternative culture at the same time that we can locate the dissolution of this culture into dropouts and an alternative middle class.9
The history of the West German counterculture should therefore not be mistaken as a cyclical one, that is, the eternal return of the same. It is perhaps better described with the image of an upward spiral. The post-1968 counterculture revisited the ideas of its predecessors in dissent, taking up those that proved to be still valid, such as antiauthoritarian concepts, but at the same time introducing new ideas to respond to the redefined terrain of discontent and social conflict. These demands remained contentious until they were addressed by mainstream culture, often by means of an appropriation of countercultural ideas. Environmentalism was just one idea that the counterculture successfully launched into public consciousness. Others were and are less visible.
“Meer Fantasie—und Muscheln” indeed articulates the broader horizon of the post-1968 counterculture, namely, that opposition to the hegemonic culture can take various and different forms. No one said that the road to the beach of Tunix would be a short one — and given the chaotic and turbulent history of West Germany’s counter-cultural movements, how could anyone expect it to be straight?