Jon Savage
TEENAGE
The creation of youth 1875-1945
576pp. Chatto and Windus. £20.
978 0 701 16361 7
US: Viking. $29.95. 978 0 6700 3837 4
"Be a proper spokesman . . . won’t you? Make sure you’re really casual, singing or whistling English hits all the time, absolutely smashed and always surrounded by really amazing women.” One can imagine such instructions addressed to teddy boys travelling to Boulogne, skinheads off to Torremolinos, even punks heading for LA, but German youth setting out from Kiel, the Kaiser’s old port, in the middle of the Second World War?
Hardly. But there it is: advice to a departing friend, in the midst of yet another war against perfidious Albion, from a member of the Plutocrats, a Kiel swing club. Here is evidence that modern youth, regardless of nationality, race, gender or class, has promoted sensation and rebellion, vitality and life, instead of rules and regulations. Antithesis has commonly been its social and cultural role in the modern age. “If individuality means anything”, wrote H. G. Wells in his scandalous novel of 1909, Ann Veronica, “it means breaking bounds – adventure. Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself? We’ve decided to be immoral.” But this exaltation of personal experience with its likely impropriety was also the impulse behind modernism as cultural urge from roughly the 1870s on. Modernism was an adversarial outcry against predictability, convention, and stifling notions of duty and responsibility. Modernism, with its countercultural essence, embraced spontaneity and surprise. It pointed to the rot within the time-honoured and it in fact fêted that rot.
Indeed, modernism and the culture of youth have gone hand in hand. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was the mantra of the 1960s flower children, but this caveat has been the inspiration of both youth and moderns for well over a century. Thus a history of modernism is bound to be a history of youth, and a history of modern youth must perforce be in large part a history of modernism.
Jon Savage, in this immensely readable but not always reliable book, has written the one with little of the other. Teenage assembles a myriad of entertaining vignettes in what purports to be a history of the emergence of youth consciousness. But apart from positing a rather weakly formulated thesis about the connection between consumerism and generational awareness, it does not investigate the broader historical and social-psychological subsoil that led to the self-assertion and, for that matter, the veneration of youth.
Savage is aware that the celebration of youth as life force must be seen against the backdrop of mass death – literal and, with the steady encroachment of machine civilization, figurative as well – and he spends considerable time probing the meanings of Rupert Brooke, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Al Capone, Anne Frank, Hans and Inge Scholl, but he shies away from developing any real connections between the wider cultural context and the activist youth culture it spawned. Of Leopold and Loeb, well-to-do offspring of Chicago’s elite turned brutal murderers, he writes that “they internalized the dehumanizing industrial drive that lay behind the mass society of the 1920s”, but that’s about as deep as we get.
Childhood and adolescence have always been associated with innocence, promise, and a new beginning. That an age of unimagined and unimaginable horror, of calamity beyond compare, of experience beyond representation, should produce an enchantment, even an obsession, with the unadulterated is hardly surprising. But the broader scheme of things – cities and massification, machines and mechanization, wars and annihilation – is all important.
“Francie had a nickel, Francie had power!” Betty Smith wrote of her eleven-year-old heroine Francie Nolan in her evocative novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Early in his account, Jon Savage mentions this tale of American life before the Great War and reminds us of how Francie strolled up and down the aisles of the Broadway five-and-dime store, feeling privileged by her nickel and hence examining any item she fancied. Thus, already before the 1914–18 war, money in the hands of youth amounted to opportunity and identity. Having then reached 1945, Savage ends his story in America as well with a vision of, in his words, “the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power”. Teenagers had been acknowledged as a grouping, he claims, largely because of their spending potential. Since commodification and consumption would define the postwar world, “the future”, Savage concludes with a grand flourish, “would be Teenage”. Leaving aside the problems of logic in this final paragraph, one might ask what the difference is between Francie Nolan at the turn of the century and the young reader of the newly established Seventeen magazine in 1945 who bubbled about “how grown up it feels to get Seventeen for Christmas when one is only thirteen”? The difference is of course the size of the respective peer group and its attitude toward its elders.
And here issues of demographics, urbanization, and the reach of the media deserve to be treated as more than statistics or casual side issues. Similarly, reactions to parents, and authority in general, require not merely documentation but analysis. It’s not that Savage does not broach these topics; he simply does not stress or develop them with any consistency or finesse.
His structural framework is lightly dialectical, with chapter titles like “Heaven and Hell”, for an opening section devoted to the spiritualist Marie Bashkirtseff and the boy sadist Jesse Pomeroy; and then on to “Nationalists and Decadents”, “Hooligans and Apaches”, “Peter Pan and the Boy Scouts”, and such, through to “Jitterbugs and Ickies”, until we reach 1945, “Year Zero”, known usually for its revelation of Nazi atrocity and images of mushroom clouds but here also, most enticingly, as “The Teenager Triumphant”. On opening the book and scanning the table of contents, I was struck by the embryonic brilliance of this last chapter’s two-part title, with its enormously suggestive duality, and was eager to see how this argument would unfold. Entertaining as the subsequent read was, the initial excitement was never matched.
But perhaps the avoidance of theory and connectivity is all to the good. Causality as historical enterprise seems dead anyway. History as explanation is passé. History today is all about feeling the past. And on this level Jon Savage’s book has an immediacy appropriate to his subject.
Like a precocious teenager himself, intent on writing a book that will be noticed, he romps through the better part of a century of incredible conflict and upheaval with enviable energy and narrative skill. He pulls together the most disparate materials, British, American, German, and French, in an engaging fashion. Some of the detail is delicious: Rupert Brooke as “dead poster boy”, the crush of inconsolable humanity at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral, Frank Sinatra pelted by panties at the Paramount Theater in New York, and then the fourteen-year-old Sussex girl who described how she loved to dance the “A-Train” with the Yanks stationed nearby, and the seventeen-year-old to whom all GIs looked, in comparison to her own compatriots, “like film stars”. We laugh, we cry, we protest, and we read on.
Protest? Yes, it would have been nice if Jon Savage and his editors had paid more attention to accuracy. Errors of fact and spelling abound. On one page we have references to the Jungdeutschlandbund and, seven lines later, to the Jugendeutchlandbund. The Battle of the Somme is moved considerably north and placed in Flanders. The war play by R. C. Sherriff (Journey’s End), and novels by Richard Aldington (Death of a Hero) and Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) are all wrongly called memoirs. The July 1932 elections in Germany are delayed until August. And so on. Some of the sections on Germany are simply weak. Savage uses specific figures and their fate to underpin his comments about a particular period, which is fine – that’s how most historians work. But the choice of historical figure is critical. For the Weimar period Savage has used Sebastian Haffner, the outstanding journalist and television commentator who was eleven years old in 1918. Haffner may have come of age during the fourteen years of Weimar, but he was never really at the centre of any action, and to base an account of the Weimar years – often described as the crucible of modernism – on the memories of a man who came to prominence much later, after his escape to England in 1938 and then his return to Berlin in 1954, is to miss the target by a mile. With his own bent for music, cinema and pop culture, Savage might have turned to Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, or Valeska Gert to provide the necessary connective thread.
Gert, famous for her “grotesque dances” and author, by the time she died in 1978, of four different versions of memoirs, would have provided compelling fodder, as would the peripatetic and insecure Erich Maria Remarque or any one of the young artists studying at the Bauhaus. While with some of his formulations – in 1945 “Coca-Cola replaced the swastika” – he hits the nail squarely on its head, with others – Berlin’s moral “brazenness” in the 1920s “was a symptom not of collapse but of stability” – Savage hammers his thumb. Full of clichés, the sections on Germany lack credibility. Despite having read a great deal, in this area he has not read enough.
And credibility is, of course, the name of the game. In an earlier book, England’s Dreaming, his gripping account of the short and unhappy life of the Sex Pistols, Jon Savage was in his element and produced a convincing statement about the painful ambiguities of youth in the 1970s. Savage clearly got to know the world of punk from inside; he interviewed many of its leading protagonists at length. That book, released recently in a second edition, has power because it rings true. This volume, while full of tasty morsels, offers no similar satisfaction, although the sections on music and cinema are again probably the best.
“Youth was not an age but a state of mind”, Savage says at one point. How true. But that state of mind did not exist in a vacuum. Had the old farts not stunk up the joint so abysmally between 1875 and 1945, that state of mind, as self-aware counterpoint, would not have flourished in the same way. The stink needs more attention.
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Modris Ecksteins is the author of Rites of Spring: The Great War and the birth of the modern age, revised edition 2000, and, most recently, the co-author of Diaghilev Was Here, 2004.
