„Days of Future Passed“

Abstract

Historians insist that every historical period and decade has its own perception of time. This temporal notion allows us to distinguish decades from another. Following research on the historicity of time, the article reconstructs patterns of temporality scholars address when writing about the 1960s. The contribution critically asks how contemporary urban youth culture and temporal notions like a future-oriented conciousness corresponded to each other. The paper shows that next to the optimism historians and contemporary witnesses associate with the 1960s, various temporal layers shaped the everyday life of Britons. They allowed to create different relationships between the past, present and future and by so doing could correlate with the addressed optimism that would have annihilated the past. The paper reveals that contemporary discourses on time and temporality influenced the youth question. Modern youth culture turned into an indicator for evaluating the speed of social change. At the same time, youth culture was set in relation to time efficiency and provoked moral panics about the fear of stagnation.