Detlef Siegfried – författare

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe''s "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."

As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.

This edited collection examines how Western European countries have responded and been influenced by the apartheid system in South Africa. The debate surrounding apartheid in South Africa underwent a shift in the second half of the 20th century, with long held positive, racist European opinions of white South Africans slowly declining since decolonisation in the 1960s, and the increase in the importance of human rights in international politics. While previous studies have approached this question in the context of national histories, more or less detached from each other, this edited collection offers a broader insight into the transnational and entangled histories of Western European and South African societies. The contributors use exemplary case studies to trace the change of perception, covering a plurality of reactions in different societies and spheres: from the political and social, to the economic and cultural. At the same time, the collection emphasizes the interconnections of those reactions to what has been called the last ‘overtly racist regime’ (George Frederickson) of the twentieth century.

This book examines the many, varied historical entanglements between pop cultures and ecstatic, euphoric, and intoxicated bodies, focusing on the period between the 1950s and the 1980s. Charting a new course by bringing together pop culture studies, the history of bodies, and the history of emotions, the volume unites new historical perspectives on different forms of corporeal pleasure and offers novel methods for studying the social and cultural politics of ecstasy.