Changing Cultural Tastes

Anthony Waine teaches German and European Studies at Lancaster University, specialising in courses on the cultural history of the twentieth century. His previous publications include Martin Walser: The Development as Dramatist 1950 – 1970; Martin Walser (Autorenbuch); Brecht in Perspective and Culture and Society in the GDR (both co-edited with Graham Bartram). He has also taught at Hamburg University and Wadham College, Oxford, and was awarded the Pilkington Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2000.

• ForewordAcknowledgementsChapter 1. Between ‘Volk’, ‘Kitsch’ and ‘Pop’: A Question of VocabularyThe Fatal Ambivalence of ‘Volk’Defining TastesLooking Down on the StreetExpressing ‘Free Time’Filling Cultural and Linguistic VacuumsConclusionChapter 2. Changing Values: The Intelligentsia, ‘Kultur’ and The PeopleChurch RootsTill Eulenspiegel – An Early Modern BestsellerNew Channels of Public InformationThe Origins of a New ScienceA Science of the NationDecontaminating the Science of a PeopleConclusionChapter 3. The Weimar Republic and the Revolt against Good Taste and the Great TraditionTurning against TraditionThe Opera of the Street – Die DreigroschenoperOptical Words – Piscator’s Global TheatreThe Fatal Attractions of Low Culture – Der Blaue EngelPopular Culture as a Panacea – Der SteppenwolfConclusionChapter 4. Democratic Compassion for ‘Der kleine Mann’A Culture about Ordinary PeopleThe Challenge to the German Novelist between 1919 and 1979Petit Bourgeois Powerlessness and its ConsequencesGender and StrengthPower to the Popular Structures of FeelingConclusionChapter 5. The Erotic and the Pornographic between High and LowThe Coming of PopPost-War Roads to FreedomThe Transatlantic Battle against TaboosRolf Dieter Brinkmann’s New CredoA Marxist Meditation on the Mass Media – Elfriede Jelinek’s Die LiebhaberinnenAn Ethnology of Subterranean Gay Hamburg – Hubert Fichte’s Die PaletteConclusionChapter 6. The Metropolitan MuseThe Anglo-German ConnectionThe Rolling Stones, and London’s West EndBetwixt Pop and BeatPiccadilly Circus – The Symbolic Site of Big City LifeConclusionChapter 7. ‘Wicked, Addicted, Free’: The Lure and Lore of the USAThe Cool WarOld World versus New WorldThe Beat Generation and its Early ReceptionThe American-German IdentityThe Americanised ImaginationConclusionChapter 8. Moods and Morals in the Age of Popular CultureBeckett and AfterPost-Brechtian TheatreBauer’s Cultural AnalysisAnatomical Cycles and Bad TastesConclusion: New Ethical PerspectivesChapter 9. Conclusion: The Democratisation and Pluralisation of TasteGermany’s Political and Cultural ShiftsThe Dialectic between Difficult and Simple ArtPopular Culture and Alltagskultur : A Difference of Language?GlossaryBibliographyIndex

“…[an] enlightening and eminently readable study…a valuable addition to scholarship on German popular culture as well as German cultural history.”  ·  German Studies Review“This is a very good book…well, clearly, and forcefully written, in an attractive style with a touch of personal directness though with no sacrifice of academic rigour. The author’s enjoyment of popular culture in various forms is clear and infectious.”  ·  Ritchie Robertson, Oxford University