Meeting The Beatles: what Beatlemania can tell us about West Germany in the 1960s

Abstract

This article explores the reception of The Beatles in the West German press, from Beatlemania’s first rumblings in 1963 through 1966 when the band returned for its first concerts since playing Hamburg nightclubs. When West Germany “met” The Beatles, that encounter both resembled Beatlemania elsewhere and was inflected by specifically German contexts such as the Cold War division into East and West, the Nazi past, and the Economic Miracle. The Beatles became a screen onto which competing notions of the Federal Republic could be projected, from the relationship between high culture and commerce, ideas about tolerance and liberalism, to changing relations of gender, generation, nation, and class.