Between Marx and Coca-Cola

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola." Axel Schildt is Professor of History at the university of Hamburg and Director of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg. Detlef Siegfried is Associate Professor of Contemporary German History at the University of Copenhagen and Research Fellow at the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg.