When Rock was Dangerous: The Social History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 1960s Hamburg (Tysk fredag)

Early rock’n’roll brought together young people, sex, and music at a time when that combination was still new and volatile. Hamburg’s early rock’n’roll scene, centered in clubs around the red-light district St. Pauli, was a site of cultural exchange: people across lines of nationality, class, and gender came together to experience the pleasures of difference and experiment with new ways of inhabiting the body. This made it a key incubator of the transnational youth culture so central to our understanding of the 1960s. It reflected the era’s changing social norms, with both liberatory possibilities and lingering prejudices. This modern music scene was also connected to a long history of popular culture and its global flows of people and products. The history of early rock ‘n’ roll in St. Pauli offers an alternative way of thinking about Germany’s 20^th century, interrogating what culture does at specific moments in history by considering where it does it.

Julia Sneeringer is Professor of History at Queens College und The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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