Between the Shoah and the Sexual Revolution: Jewish Youth and Their Search for a Suitable Emotional Style in 1960s West Germany

At first glance, it may appear that Jewish adolescents in the Federal Republic were living under a unique emotional regime during the 1960s. This was an era of apparent hedonism for other West German youths. Student leaders and pop musicians urged their contemporaries to get in tune with their feelings and seek pleasure over profit, rather than follow the disciplined and carefully materialistic lifestyles of their morally compromised parents. By contrast, (especially female) Jewish youths reported having to restrain themselves whenever they felt tempted to pursue romantic relationships with those outside of their religious enclaves. Rather than welcome the generational rupture experienced and celebrated by student radicals, they felt obligated to parents and relatives (both dead and alive) who might regard intimacy with non-Jewish Germans as a form of betrayal. Yet, as my reading of German-Jewish youth magazines from the 1960s suggests, this is not the whole story. When one pays attention to the emotional styles of Jewish and other German adolescents during this era, certain parallels become apparent. In both cases, their new romantic utopia was a collectivist one. Jewish youth group leaders looked forward to falling in love with fellow Jews and building more assertive and self-consciously Jewish families and communities than their parents had been able to, although they usually envisaged doing this outside of Germany. They thereby hoped to bring up a new generation of Jewish children who would be unburdened by the weight of their community’s past. The similarities between these ideals and those of 68er student leaders who built the alternative kindergarten movement are striking. Nevertheless, the many young Jews in Germany who diverged from this path and ended up finding non-Jewish partners were left feeling stranded and unable to take part in the generational romance of the era.