‘With power and aggression, and a great sadness’: Emotional Clashes between Punk Culture and GDR Youth Policy in the 1980s

Twentieth Century Communism - ISSN 1758-6437
Volume 2012 Number 4

‘With power and aggression, and a great sadness’: Emotional Clashes between Punk Culture and GDR Youth Policy in the 1980s
JULIANE BRAUER pages 76-101

Abstract

Youth policy in the GDR was based on an ‘educational dictatorship’. The aim of this was to discipline, control and steer people’s emotions, conduct and behaviour in line with a hegemonic emotional style enforced by the state and transferred to its youth through education. By the end of the 1970s, however, the difference between the state’s ideal of youth behaviour and the reality of young people’s everyday lives led to tensions. The formation of punk groups marked the climax of this, with a sound and look that offered an emotional style antithetical to that proffered by the state. The state reacted harshly: punks were classified as ‘people prone to criminal behaviour’, thereby justifying arbitrary police actions and monitoring in order to both intimidate and signal the developing intolerance towards punk. Taking the example of the first punks in the GDR (circa 1980), the article describes the emerging punk movement and the conflicts with society and government through the lens of the history of emotions. It argues that an emotional regime such as the GDR never tolerated doubts regarding its elaborately defined and institutionally implemented moral rules, beliefs and identities

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To cite this article
JULIANE BRAUER (2012) ‘With power and aggression, and a great sadness’: Emotional Clashes between Punk Culture and GDR Youth Policy in the 1980s, Twentieth Century Communism, 2012(4), 76-101

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