Swingjugend - WikiHQ

The Swing Youth () were a youth counterculture of jazz and swing lovers in Germany formed in Hamburg in 1939. Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14- to 21-year-old Germans, mostly middle or upper-class students, but also including some in the working class. They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth ().

They loosely structured themselves into “clubs” with names such as the Harlem Club, the OK Gang, and the Hot Club. This underground subculture, distinctly nonconformist with a focus on African-American music, was active in the German youth scene. Despite being largely apolitical and unstructured, the Swing Youth were targeted and, in some cases, repressed by the Nazi government.

Name

The name ' was a parody of the numerous youth groups that were organised by the Nazis, such as the '. The youth also referred to themselves as Swings or ' ("Swingity"); members were called "Swing-Boy", "Swing-Girl" or "Old-Hot-Boy".

Counter-culture

During the Nazi regime, all those aged 10 to 17 in Germany who were considered to be Aryan were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. The leaders of these organisations realised they had to offer some attraction in the area of social dancing to recruit members. Instead of adopting the popular swing dance, because it was viewed as degenerate and tied to the "damnable jazz", they resorted to the new German community dances. The Swing Youth used their love of swing and jazz music to create their sub-culture, with one former Swing Kid Frederich Ritzel saying in a 1985 interview: "Everything for us was a world of great longing, Western life, democracy – everything was connected – and connected through jazz".

The Swing Kids danced in private quarters, clubs, and rented halls.

Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German-style rolls.</blockquote>

One of their German idols was Johannes Heesters, an actor specialised in operettas. The Swingboys admired his pale face and combed long black hair and tried to copy his attire.

This group consisted mostly of teens and young adults from the upper-class homes of Hamburg. Their objectives were originally more self-indulgent in nature, being privileged with wealth and German heritage, they spent their money on expensive clothing and liquor. The British musicologist Ralph Willett wrote that the Swing Youth wanted to emulate "the cool, languid demeanour" of British and American film stars.

When the restrictions on jazz became law, their pastime became a political statement, setting them in clear opposition to the Nazi Party. German musicologist Guido Fackler described the Swingjugend embrace of American music and the "English style" in clothing as reflecting the fact that: <blockquote>The Swingjugend rejected the Nazi state, above all because of its ideology and uniformity, its militarism, the 'Führer principle' and the leveling Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). They experienced a massive restriction of their personal freedom. They rebelled against all this with jazz and swing, which stood for a love of life, self-determination, non-conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism.</blockquote>

Reflecting their Anglophilia, the Swing Youth preferred to speak to each other in English rather than German, as English was felt to be more "cool", a choice of language that vexed the authorities greatly. English and French were languages widely taught in Gymnasium (high schools intended as preparation for university) since the early 20th century in the case of English and since the 18th century in the case of French, so any German teenager who attended a Gymnasium could speak at least some French and English. German art policy was very similar to the Soviet Union at this time, with espousal of Heroic Realism, which was very similar to Socialist realism in that it saw art as an instrument of the party.

The Swing Kids were initially basically apolitical, similar to their zoot suiter counterparts in North America. A closer parallel to the Swing Youth were the Zazou movement in France at the same time, for the Zazous also enjoyed American music, liked to dress in the "English style", and had a preference for speaking English over French as the former was felt to be more "cool". A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was ', roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time. Swing Kids wore long hair and hats, carried umbrellas and met in cafés and clubs. They developed a jargon mostly made of anglicisms.

The Swing Youth were intense Anglophiles who preferred to listen to "English music" (i.e. American swing and jazz music) and liked to dress in the "English style". A secret report from the Reich Ministry of Justice in January 1944 described the Swing Youth as follows:

Ways of resistance

Though they were not an organised political-opposition organisation, the whole culture of the Swing Kids evolved into a non-violent refusal of the civil order and culture of National Socialism.

From a paper of the National Youth Leader:

The members of the Swing youth oppose today's Germany and its police, the Party and its policy, the ', work and military service, and are opposed, or at least indifferent, to the ongoing war. They see the mechanisms of National Socialism as a "mass obligation". The greatest adventure of all times leaves them indifferent; much to the contrary, they long for everything that is not German, but English.

</blockquote>

From 1941, the violent repression by the ' and the ' shaped the political spirit of the swing youth. Also, by police order, people under 18 were forbidden to go to dance bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival in clandestine measures.

The strict regimentation of youth culture in Nazi Germany through the Hitler Youth led to the emergence of several underground protest movements, through which adolescents were better able to exert their independence. There were street gangs (') of working class youths who borrowed elements from socialist and communist traditions to forge their own identities. There were less politically motivated groups, such as the Edelweiss Pirates (), who acted in defiance of Hitler Youth norms. A third group, consisting mainly of upper middle class youths, based their protest on their musical preferences, rejecting the ' music propagated by the party for American jazz forms, especially swing.

Connection with the White Rose

thumb|upright=1.2|A monument to the "Weiße Rose" in front of [[LMU Munich]]

The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose () developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal co-operation arose, though these contacts were later used by the ' ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces. The consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the ending of the war.

Swing clubs

When bigger gatherings were banned, the Swing Kids moved to more informal settings, and swing clubs and discotheques emerged in all the major cities of the Reich. Participants were mainly from the upper middle class, as swing culture required the participants to have access to the music, which was not played on German radio, so that extensive collections of phonograph recordings were essential.

Similarly, to understand the lyrics of the predominantly American songs, it was necessary to have at least a rudimentary understanding of English, which was not taught in the ' working-class high school. Relative wealth also fostered a distinctive style among the Swing Kids, which was in some ways comparable to the zoot suit style popular in the United States at the time.

Boys usually wore long jackets, often checkered, shoes with crepe soles for dancing, and flashy scarves. They almost always carried an umbrella, and added a dress shirt button with a semi-precious stone. Girls generally wore their hair long and loose and added excessive makeup. Their dandyish dress style riled the Nazis by drawing heavily on Hispanic pachucos.

Arrests and Operations

thumb|right|Prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp

On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 ' were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. and is described by film critic Janet Maslin as having a historical background.

German filmmaker Margit Czenki's made-for-television movie ' (1994) featured the original Swingboys Günter Discher and Otto Bender. Set in the St. Pauli of the early 1990s, the protagonists of the film – musicians around the band ' – uncover and stumble upon the history of the Swing Kids.

In the DC Comics Bombshells comic series, the character of Huntress is a guitar-playing swing kid and secret resistance leader.

Famous people with a Swingjugend past

Ludwig W. Adamec, Austrian scholar on the Middle East and Afghanistan
Ralph Giordano, Jewish-German writer
Walter Kempowski, German writer
Heinz Lord, German-American physician
Emil Mangelsdorff, German jazz musician
Giwi Margwelaschwili, German-Georgian writer and philosopher
Hans Massaquoi, German-American journalist, grandson of Momulu Massaquoi

References

External links

The German Swing Youth detailed overview with extensive bibliography by Swingstyle.de
"", JazzScript.co.uk.