Jazz, Rock, and Rebels by Poiger Uta G.;

Author:Poiger, Uta G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

5 Presley, Yes—Ulbricht, No?

Rock ‘n’ Roll and Female Sexuality in the German Cold War

When rock ‘n’ roll crossed the Atlantic to Germany in the second half of the 1950s, it brought not only rioting young men, but also young women into the public eye. In late 1956, a cartoon in the East Berlin daily, Berliner Zeitung, showed a small, emaciated Elvis Presley performing under larger-than-life female legs in front of a crowd of girls much bigger than he was. The girls were throwing off garter belts and bras and licking their thick lips in obvious sexual excitement. The accompanying article identified girls as the main consumers of American “nonculture” and commented that rock ‘n’ roll appealed to primitive humans. West Germans had similar worries: according to one commentator, female rock ‘n’ roll fans illustrated the dangerous “sexualization of the fifteen-year-olds.”1

In a more feverish pitch, such statements employed a rhetoric that East and West German critics had earlier leveled against dances like the boogie and against jazz music. Both East and West German authorities, albeit in increasingly different ways, politicized the actions of female and male rock ‘n’ roll fans. Three interconnected concerns shaped East and West German reactions to rock ‘n’ roll: worries about uncontrolled female sexuality and male aggression and perceptions of racial difference. The public behavior of female rock ‘n’ roll fans at dances and concerts and in the streets challenged the traditional norms of female respectability that authorities in East and West Germany had made central to their respective reconstruction efforts.2 Commentators worried that such women had a negative impact on young men, making them at once weak and overly aggressive. Thus worries about the actions of female rock ‘n’ roll fans were intimately linked to concerns about male rebelliousness. At the same time the uproar about rock ‘n’ roll was in marked contrast to the images of restrained and respectable jazz musicians and fans that East and West German jazz promoters and clubs drew with increasing success by the mid-1950s.

With the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, girl rebels attracted widespread attention as sexual beings. To be sure, some girls had been taking active part in the Halbstarken subcultures that had formed in many working-class neighborhoods in the mid-1950s and that caused much anxiety for East and West Germans. A few girls had joined street gangs in these neighborhoods. While girls undoubtedly had subordinate roles in gangs and riots, they were watched with some admiration by many female contemporaries. The East and West German press, however, had mostly ignored them, and officials had only on occasion referred to their alleged sexual allure, claiming that it encouraged male deviance. Perhaps because of their small numbers, girl members of youth subcultures found it more difficult than their male counterparts to gain public acknowledgment for their actions. This changed with rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock ‘n’ roll challenged East and West German constructions of national identity because Germans saw it as a black or black-influenced music that undermined gender norms. In their

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