Swing Kids
Encyclopedia
The Swing Kids were a group of jazz
and swing
lovers in Germany
in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg
(St. Pauli
) and Berlin
. They were composed of 14- to 18-year-old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students, but some apprentice workers as well. They sought the British and American way of life
, defining themselves in swing music and opposing the National-Socialist ideology
, especially the Hitlerjugend.
This proved to be unsuccessful, because instead of embracing the Hitler Youth pastimes, city girls and boys crowded the swing dance joints. This seemed to be the case particularly in the town of Hamburg
, where the swing scene was at large. These teenage hoppers were known as "Swing–Heinis", a name the authorities called them.
They danced in private quarters, clubs, rented halls, and more notably, Café Heinze. These adolescents dressed a little differently than the others who were opposed to swing. For example, boys added a little British flair to their clothes by homburg
hats, growing their hair long, and attaching a Union Jack pin to their jacket. Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German-style rolls.
For those designated non-Aryan
, it became even more dangerous to be associated with the swing crowd by November 1938, during and after Kristallnacht
. Affiliation with the jazz culture was damaging whenever other incriminating information could be factored into a formula for persecution. For example, many half-Jews (Mischling
s) were sought out and persecuted before others if they were known as Swing Kids.
Jazz
music was offensive to Nazi ideology, because it was often performed by blacks
(Negro
s) and a number of Jewish musicians. They called it Negermusik
("Negro Music") or "degenerate music"—coined in parallel to entartete Kunst ("degenerate art"). Moreover, song texts defied Nazi ideology, going as far as to promote sexual permissiveness or free love
. Despite this, not all jazz was forbidden in Germany at the time.
The Swing Kids were initially basically apolitical, similar to their zoot suit
er counterparts in North America
. A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was Lottern, roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time. Reports by Hitler Youth
observers of swing parties
and jitterbug went into careful detail about the overtly sexual nature of both. One report describes as "moral depravity" the fact that swing youth took pleasure in their sexuality.
The Swing Kids were defining a counter-culture, shown by their clothing and music. Their behavior, described by many Nazis as effete, ran counter to the spartan militarism
that the regime was trying to inculcate in its youth. They organized dance festivals and contests and invited jazz bands. These events were occasions to mock the Nazis, the military and the Hitlerjugend — hence the famous "Swing heil!", mocking the infamous "Sieg Heil!". Swing Kids wore long hair and hats, carried umbrellas and met in cafés and clubs. They developed a jargon
mostly made of Anglicisms.
From a paper of the Youth Guidance office:
From 1941, the violent repression by the Gestapo
and the Hitlerjugend shaped the political spirit of the swing youth. Also, by police order, people under 21 were forbidden to go to dance bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival in clandestinity.
The strict regimentation of youth culture in Nazi Germany
through the Hitler Youth
led to the emergence of several underground protest movements, through which adolescents
were better able to exert their independence. There were street gang
s (Meuten) of working class youths who borrowed elements from socialist
and communist
traditions to forge their own identities, and there were less politically motivated groups, such as the Edelweiss Pirates
(Edelweißpiraten), who acted in defiance of Hitler Youth norms. A third group, consisting mainly of upper middle class youths, based their protest on their musical preferences, rejecting the völkisch music propagated by the party for American
jazz
forms, especially swing
.
("White Rose") developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal cooperation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda
and sabotage
of the armed forces. The consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the end of the war.
, so that extensive collections of phonograph
recordings were essential. Similarly, to understand the lyrics of the predominantly American songs, it was necessary to have at least a rudimentary understanding of English
, which was not taught in the Volksschule
(working-class high school). Relative wealth also fostered a distinctive style among the Swing Kids, which was in some ways comparable to the zoot suit
style popular in the United States at the time. Boys usually wore long jackets, often checkered, shoes with crepe soles (for dancing), and flashy scarves. They almost always carried an umbrella, and added a dress shirt button with a semi-precious stone. Girls generally wore their hair long and loose and added excessive makeup. Their dandyish dress style riled the Nazis by drawing heavily on Hispanic Pachuco
s.
.
This mass arrest
encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism. They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen
.
On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler
wrote to Reinhard Heydrich
calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor. The crackdown soon followed: clubs were raided, and participants were hauled off to camps.
, a film
called Swing Kids
examined this underground culture of rebellion during Nazi Germany in some detail. Directed by Thomas Carter
and starring Robert Sean Leonard
, Christian Bale
, Frank Whaley
, and Kenneth Branagh
(uncredited), the picture was not a commercial success but sustains a large underground following and is nonetheless a moderately accurate history-based film.
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
and swing
Swing (genre)
Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States...
lovers in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
(St. Pauli
St. Pauli
St. Pauli , located in the Hamburg-Mitte borough, is one of the 105 quarters of the city of Hamburg, Germany. Situated on the right bank of the Elbe river, the Landungsbrücken are a northern part of the port of Hamburg. St. Pauli contains a world famous red light district around the street Reeperbahn...
) and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. They were composed of 14- to 18-year-old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students, but some apprentice workers as well. They sought the British and American way of life
American way
The American way of life is an expression that refers to the lifestyle of people living in the United States of America. It is an example of a behavioral modality, developed from the 17th century until today...
, defining themselves in swing music and opposing the National-Socialist ideology
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
, especially the Hitlerjugend.
Name
The name "Swing Kids" (Swing Kinder) is a rough translation of the German Swingjugend ("Swing Youth"), which was a sort of parody of the numerous youth groups that flourished before the National Socialists. They also referred to themselves as Swings or Swingheinis ("Swingity"); the members were called "Swing-Boy", "Swing-Girl" or "Old-Hot-Boy".Counter-culture
During the Nazi regime, many of the youth in Germany (ages 10 to 17) were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth. The leaders of this organization realized they had to offer some attraction in the area of social dancing in order to recruit new members. Instead of adopting the popular swing dance (because it was viewed as degenerate and tied to the "damnable jazz'), they resorted to the new-German community dances.This proved to be unsuccessful, because instead of embracing the Hitler Youth pastimes, city girls and boys crowded the swing dance joints. This seemed to be the case particularly in the town of Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
, where the swing scene was at large. These teenage hoppers were known as "Swing–Heinis", a name the authorities called them.
They danced in private quarters, clubs, rented halls, and more notably, Café Heinze. These adolescents dressed a little differently than the others who were opposed to swing. For example, boys added a little British flair to their clothes by homburg
Homburg (hat)
A homburg is a felt hat, a Tyrolean hat-style fedora, characterized by a single dent running down the center of the crown and a stiff brim shaped in a "kettle curl". The Homburg is a stiff, formal felt hat....
hats, growing their hair long, and attaching a Union Jack pin to their jacket. Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German-style rolls.
For those designated non-Aryan
Aryan
Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
, it became even more dangerous to be associated with the swing crowd by November 1938, during and after Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
. Affiliation with the jazz culture was damaging whenever other incriminating information could be factored into a formula for persecution. For example, many half-Jews (Mischling
Mischling
Mischling was the German term used during the Third Reich to denote persons deemed to have only partial Aryan ancestry. The word has essentially the same origin as mestee in English, mestizo in Spanish and métis in French...
s) were sought out and persecuted before others if they were known as Swing Kids.
Jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
music was offensive to Nazi ideology, because it was often performed by blacks
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
(Negro
Negro
The word Negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not...
s) and a number of Jewish musicians. They called it Negermusik
Negermusik
Negermusik was a pejorative term used by the Nazi's during Third Reich Germany to signify musical styles and performances by African-Americans that were of the Jazz and Swing music genres. They viewed these musical styles in a racist fashion as inferior works belonging to an "inferior race" and...
("Negro Music") or "degenerate music"—coined in parallel to entartete Kunst ("degenerate art"). Moreover, song texts defied Nazi ideology, going as far as to promote sexual permissiveness or free love
Free love
The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery...
. Despite this, not all jazz was forbidden in Germany at the time.
The Swing Kids were initially basically apolitical, similar to their zoot suit
Zoot suit
A zoot suit is a suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing was popularized by African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Italian Americans during the late 1930s and the 1940s...
er counterparts in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
. A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was Lottern, roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time. Reports by Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
observers of swing parties
Swinging
Swinging or partner swapping is a non-monogamous behavior, in which both partners in a committed relationship agree, as a couple, for both partners to engage in sexual activities with other couples as a recreational or social activity...
and jitterbug went into careful detail about the overtly sexual nature of both. One report describes as "moral depravity" the fact that swing youth took pleasure in their sexuality.
The Swing Kids were defining a counter-culture, shown by their clothing and music. Their behavior, described by many Nazis as effete, ran counter to the spartan militarism
Militarism
Militarism is defined as: the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests....
that the regime was trying to inculcate in its youth. They organized dance festivals and contests and invited jazz bands. These events were occasions to mock the Nazis, the military and the Hitlerjugend — hence the famous "Swing heil!", mocking the infamous "Sieg Heil!". Swing Kids wore long hair and hats, carried umbrellas and met in cafés and clubs. They developed a jargon
Jargon
Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...
mostly made of Anglicisms.
Ways of resistance
Though they were not an organized political-opposition organization, the whole culture of the Swing Kids evolved into a non-violent refusal of the civil order and culture of National Socialism.From a paper of the Youth Guidance office:
"The members of the Swing youth oppose today's Germany and its police, the Party and its policy, the Hitlerjugend, work and military service, and are opposed, or at least indifferent, to the ongoing war. They see the mechanisms of National Socialism as a "mass obligation". The greatest adventure of all times leaves them indifferent; much to the contrary, they long for everything that is not German, but English."
From 1941, the violent repression by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
and the Hitlerjugend shaped the political spirit of the swing youth. Also, by police order, people under 21 were forbidden to go to dance bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival in clandestinity.
The strict regimentation of youth culture in Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
through the Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
led to the emergence of several underground protest movements, through which adolescents
Adolescence
Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...
were better able to exert their independence. There were street gang
Gang
A gang is a group of people who, through the organization, formation, and establishment of an assemblage, share a common identity. In current usage it typically denotes a criminal organization or else a criminal affiliation. In early usage, the word gang referred to a group of workmen...
s (Meuten) of working class youths who borrowed elements from socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
traditions to forge their own identities, and there were less politically motivated groups, such as the Edelweiss Pirates
Edelweiss Pirates
The Edelweiss Pirates were a loose group of youth culture in Nazi Germany. They emerged in western Germany out of the German Youth Movement of the late 1930s in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth...
(Edelweißpiraten), who acted in defiance of Hitler Youth norms. A third group, consisting mainly of upper middle class youths, based their protest on their musical preferences, rejecting the völkisch music propagated by the party for American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
forms, especially swing
Swing (genre)
Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States...
.
Connection with the Weiße Rose
The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another famous resistance movement, when three members of the Weiße RoseWhite Rose
The White Rose was a non-violent/intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor...
("White Rose") developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal cooperation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
and sabotage
Sabotage
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is...
of the armed forces. The consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the end of the war.
Swing clubs
When bigger gatherings were banned, the Swing Kids moved to more informal settings, and swing clubs and discotheques emerged in all the major cities of the Reich. Participants were mainly from the upper middle class, as swing culture required the participants to have access to the music, which was not played on German radioRadio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
, so that extensive collections of phonograph
Phonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
recordings were essential. Similarly, to understand the lyrics of the predominantly American songs, it was necessary to have at least a rudimentary understanding of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, which was not taught in the Volksschule
Volksschule
A Volksschule was an 18th century system of state-supported primary schools established in the Habsburg Austrian Empire and Prussia . Attendance was supposedly compulsory, but a 1781 census reveals that only one fourth of school-age children attended. At the time, this was one of the few examples...
(working-class high school). Relative wealth also fostered a distinctive style among the Swing Kids, which was in some ways comparable to the zoot suit
Zoot suit
A zoot suit is a suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing was popularized by African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Italian Americans during the late 1930s and the 1940s...
style popular in the United States at the time. Boys usually wore long jackets, often checkered, shoes with crepe soles (for dancing), and flashy scarves. They almost always carried an umbrella, and added a dress shirt button with a semi-precious stone. Girls generally wore their hair long and loose and added excessive makeup. Their dandyish dress style riled the Nazis by drawing heavily on Hispanic Pachuco
Pachuco
Pachucos are Chicano youths who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothing and spoke their own dialect of Mexican Spanish, called Caló or Pachuco...
s.
Clamping down
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration campsNazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...
.
This mass arrest
Mass arrest
A mass arrest occurs when the police apprehend large numbers of suspects at once. This sometimes occurs at illegal protests. Some mass arrests are also used in an effort combat gang activity. This is sometimes controversial, and lawsuits sometimes result...
encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism. They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen
Moringen
Moringen is a town in the district Northeim, in the southern part of Lower Saxony, Germany. The town consists of the center Moringen and eight surrounding villages.-History:The town and its villages were founded over a thousand years ago....
.
On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
wrote to Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich , also known as The Hangman, was a high-ranking German Nazi official.He was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia...
calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor. The crackdown soon followed: clubs were raided, and participants were hauled off to camps.
My judgment is that the whole evil must be radically exterminated now. I cannot but see that we have taken only half measures. All ringleaders (...) are into a concentration camp to be re-educated (...) detention in concentration camp for these youths must be longer, 2-3 years (...) it is only through the utmost brutality that we will be able to avert the dangerous spread of anglophile tendencies, in these times where Germany fights for its survival.
Film
In 19931993 in film
The year 1993 in film involved many significant films, including the blockbuster hits Jurassic Park, The Fugitive and The Firm. -Events:...
, a film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
called Swing Kids
Swing Kids (film)
Swing Kids is a film produced in 1993, directed by Thomas Carter and starring Christian Bale, Robert Sean Leonard and Kenneth Branagh. The runtime is approximately 112 minutes. The film is considered as being part of the Lindy Hop revival of the 1980s and 1990s...
examined this underground culture of rebellion during Nazi Germany in some detail. Directed by Thomas Carter
Thomas Carter (film director)
Thomas Carter is an American film and television director known for Swing Kids, Save the Last Dance with Julia Stiles, and Coach Carter with Samuel L...
and starring Robert Sean Leonard
Robert Sean Leonard
Robert Sean Leonard is an American actor, who has regularly starred in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Since 2004 he has played the role of Dr. James Wilson on the TV series House...
, Christian Bale
Christian Bale
Christian Charles Philip Bale is an English actor. Best known for his roles in American films, Bale has starred in both big budget Hollywood films and the smaller projects from independent producers and art houses....
, Frank Whaley
Frank Whaley
Frank Joseph Whaley is an American film and television actor known for his roles in independent films.-Personal life:Whaley was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of Josephine and Robert W. Whaley, Sr. He is half-Irish and half-Sicilian and grew up in Syracuse. He has two sisters and an older...
, and Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Charles Branagh is an actor and film director from Northern Ireland. He is best known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays including Henry V , Much Ado About Nothing , Hamlet Kenneth Charles Branagh is an actor and film director from...
(uncredited), the picture was not a commercial success but sustains a large underground following and is nonetheless a moderately accurate history-based film.
See also
- ReichsmusikkammerReichsmusikkammerThe Reichsmusikkammer was a Nazi institution. It promoted "good German music" which was composed by Aryans and seen as consistent with Nazi ideals, while suppressing other, "degenerate" music, which included atonal music, jazz, and music by Jewish composers...
- History of subcultures in the 20th centuryHistory of subcultures in the 20th centuryThe 20th century saw the rise and fall of many subcultures.-1900-World War I:In the early part of the 20th century, subcultures were mostly informal groupings of like-minded individuals. The Bloomsbury group in London was one example, providing a place where the diverse talents of people like...
- Youth culture
- ZazouZazouThe Zazous were a subculture in France during World War II. They were young people expressing their individuality by wearing big or garish clothing and dancing wildly to swing jazz and bebop...
- Edelweiss PiratesEdelweiss PiratesThe Edelweiss Pirates were a loose group of youth culture in Nazi Germany. They emerged in western Germany out of the German Youth Movement of the late 1930s in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth...
External links
- The German Swing Youth detailed overview with extensive bibliography by Swingstyle.de
- Different Drummers Jazz In The Culture Of Nazi Germany