Culture, Class, and Communism: The Politics of Rock in the West German 1968

Abstract

Rock and communism were uneasy bedfellows in 1968. This was true in every country in which they came into contact, but nowhere more than in West Germany, where the student movement and counterculture had a particularly strong Marxist flavour, and where the proximity of the Cold War frontier forced young nonconformists to grapple more forcefully than was typically the case elsewhere with competing conceptions of the nature and proper goals of revolutionary struggle. Occupying a conspicuous position in debates around issues of subcultural authenticity, the dangers of capitalist recuperation, and the validity of, respectively, communist and anarchist approaches to the revolution, rock music was a key site of the political in 1968.