Tony Judt - Postwar

In the admiring commentary of one Parisian critic the thousands of identical apartments squeezed into the new grands ensembles were ‘veritable tiny houses incorporated into a vertical structure, like so many different bottles in the same wine rack.’ See Pierre Agard, ‘L’Unité de résidence’ in Esprit , October-November 1953. I am grateful to Dr Nicole Rudolph for the reference.

But contrast Rotterdam: gutted by German bombs and rebuilt in stages through the following decades, the Dutch port was a consciously and genuinely ‘designed’ city.

Obviously this did not apply to small, élite academies like France’s École Polytechnique , or École Normale Supérieure , which admitted their few students by a rigorous selective exam and then taught them very well indeed. But these were unusual and highly atypical.

In the mid-1960s only 44 percent of Italian university students graduated; these figures were to deteriorate still further in the course of the 1970s.

In the Communist bloc ‘the Sixties’ as pop culture were of necessity experienced at second-hand. But this difference should not be exaggerated. To apply the Ur-reference of the age: everyone in Eastern Europe knew who the Beatles were and many people had heard their music. And not just the Beatles: when the French rock star Johnny Hallyday performed in the small town of Košice in Slovakia, in 1966, 24,000 people turned out to hear him.

The Beatles came from the Liverpool working class—or, in the case of Paul McCartney, from a notch or two above. The other iconic rock band of the Sixties, the Rolling Stones, was more conventionally bohemian in its subject matter, as befitted its members’ middle-class London background. This handicap was overcome by a calculated roughness of style and by the Stones’ well-publicized and ostentatiously raunchy private lives.

Note, though, that for most of the Sixties it was still forbidden in many parts of Western and Eastern Europe alike to dispense information about contraception. Britain was exceptional in approving the contraceptive pill for use in 1961—across the Channel the singer Antoine sold a million records in 1966 plaintively imagining a France where the Pill would one day ‘be sold in Monoprix stores’.

There was a time lag in the farther-flung provinces, however, where black berets, cloth caps and even women’s bonnets were still in daily use. For a little while longer, headgear remained a reliable traditional indicator of regional origin and social class.

It was also to evolve with little difficulty into the skinhead attire of the following decade.

By 1960 ‘existentialism’ (like ‘structuralism’ a few years later) had become a general-purpose catchword, roughly approximating to ‘bohemian’ in earlier decades: the unemployed art students who came to hear the Beatles on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg all called themselves ‘Exis’.

In which case it might seem odd that the fashionable psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan should have been popularly assimilated to the category. But Lacan was a special case. Even by the lax standards of Sixties-era Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in medicine, biology and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or reputation.

The SPGB continues to the time of writing. Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely.

Like Gramsci’s near-contemporary the German Marxist Karl Korsch, or the Austro-Marxist writers Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding.

Althusser’s claim rested on a bizarre structuralist account of Marx, whose contemporary appeal to youthful seekers after Theory was directly proportional to its Jesuitical opacity (older scholars were unimpressed). But the assertion of authority was clear enough: there is only one proper way to think about Marx, he insisted, and it is mine. In France, Althusser’s star waned with the fall of the Party whose cause he espoused; today his obscurantist appeal is confined to the outer fringes of Anglo-Saxon academia.

They had a point. Thus Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian Situationist, writing in 1967: ‘With a world of ecstatic pleasures to gain, we have nothing to lose but our boredom.’ It is hard to be sure, in retrospect, whether such slogans were witty, innocent or merely cynical. In any event, they did little to imperil the status quo.

This was a longstanding source of friction. In January 1966, after months of dispute at a student dormitory complex in Antony, in southern Paris, a newly appointed director had introduced what was then a radical regime. Girls and boys over twenty one could henceforth entertain members of the opposite sex in their dormitory rooms. Those under twenty one could do so with written permission from their parents. No such liberalizations were introduced anywhere else.

The Minister for Youth, one François Missoffe, had come to Nanterre to open a new sports facility. Cohn-Bendit, a local student enragé , asked why the Education Ministry was doing nothing to address the dormitory disputes (or ‘sexual problems’, as he put it). The Minister, rising to the provocation, suggested that if Cohn-Bendit had sexual problems he should jump in the splendid new swimming pool. ‘That’, replied the part-German Cohn-Bendit, ‘is what the Hitler Youth used to say.’

To visit the French Army in Germany, as it transpired, and assure himself of its loyalty and availability were it to be called upon. But this was not known at the time.

This was palpably untrue. The French Communist Party had no coherent strategy in 1968, beyond pouring scorn on the student radicals and trying to preserve its influence in the labor movement. Seizing political power was quite beyond its ability or imagination.

There were no women among the student leaders. In contemporary photographs and newsreels girls can be seen prominently perched on the shoulders of their boyfriends, but they were at best the auxiliary foot soldiers of the student army. The youth revolt of 1968 talked a lot about sex, but was quite unconcerned with inequalities of gender.

Quoted in Robert Lumley, States of Emergency. Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London, 1990), p. 96.

West Berlin itself had taken on something of a counter-cultural tone in these years. Fossilized by its peculiar isolation at the heart of international political tensions, dependant on handouts from Bonn and Washington, its future lastingly impermanent, the city was suspended in time and space. This made it rather appealing to dissidents, radicals and others who sought out the political and cultural fringe. The irony of West Berlin’s situation—that its survival as a bohemian outpost of the West depended entirely on the presence of American soldiers—was lost on many of its youthful residents.

Echoes of this inversion were to be heard again at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, when its German opponents did not hesitate to cast America as the twentieth century’s leading war criminal… and Germany as its first victim.