This book contributes to the growing body of literature that challenges the Cold War portrait of the GDR as an uncompromising state, a monolith in which ordinary citizens gained autonomy only by retreating into their private “niche” societies. While the SED regularly clamped down on nonconformist teenagers, from the mid-1950s through the 1980s it could not stop youths in subcultures from challenging its model of the upright Socialist. Labeled by the regime as Rowdys, Bengels, and dozens of other pejorative names, these East German youths embraced jazz, beat music, and rock ‘n’ roll. They wore the T-shirts, jeans, and leather jackets of American teens, and they expressed their sexuality and individuality by gyrating in the solo rock dance imported from the west. Such behaviors were the antithesis of the uniformed Free German Youth (FDJ), who sang the “International,” danced in pairs, and condemned the mass consumer culture of western capitalism. The rock subcultures were in 1955 such a force that the regime resigned to co-opt them. The SED rolled back this liberalization in 1965 but was forced at various times in the next decades to co-opt them again. While scholars have already documented the development of the FDJ and rock ‘n’ roll culture in the GDR, Sex, Thugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll unlike other books makes nonconformist youth in all milieus, including racist right-wing subcultures, the focus of analysis.

The conflict between the party and youth subcultures in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was part of the long-standing division since the nineteenth century between the rough traditions of working-class men and the high-minded respectability of elite Socialists. Like their fathers and grandfathers, male working-class adolescents in the GDR asserted their masculinity through horseplay, cat calls, wisecracks, heavy drinking, bad grades, girl chasing, and other practices that gave them Eigensinn, a sense of manhood apart from the dominant culture of respectability. The GDR at times encouraged this rough masculinity by exalting soldiers, muscled industrial workers, and tough Communist martyrs such as Ernst Thälmann. Yet a component of Eigensinn was always defiance of the regime, and non-elite male youths in the GDR often established their identity by making trouble and heckling the police. They defied bans on western culture by listening to rock music in public on portable radios that were available after 1959 and imitating the dress and manners of American anti-hero movie stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. The SED regularly used its police powers to snuff out the most threatening youth subcultures, claiming that western intelligence agents insidiously planted them to undermine the Socialist project. It also used young offender institutes modeled on Prussian military traditions and, after 1962, conscription to break the wills of recalcitrant male youths.

But policy makers who wanted to distinguish the GDR from the alleged bourgeois prudery in the Federal Republic were sympathetic to the implicit sexual freedom in rock ‘n’ roll. They also believed that liberalizing relations between the generations and between the sexes could buttress flagging support for the regime. In 1955 the SED dismissed Erich Honecker as head of the FDJ and initiated frank discussions about sex and gender in the youth weekly Junge Welt. The Lipsi, a dance step invented in Leipzig analogous to the twist, won the approval of the SED. By 1960 the FDJ held guitar competitions, and independent youth clubs multiplied. All the while, a common language and radio and television beamed from the Federal Republic, as well as a brisk trade in contraband after the building of the Berlin Wall, facilitated the transfer of rock and beat culture from west to east. In 1963 Walter Ulbricht issued the so-called Jugendkommuniqué that called for an end to top-heavy bureaucratic administration, and the SED continued to support more sexual freedom and gender equality in a bid to outdo the west. A lively beat music scene subsequently flourished in cities such as Leipzig. In a great range of venues, the music was, according to one groupie, “freer, more exciting, darker, crazier … beautiful, kitsch, incomprehensible, seductive” (p. 171). The GDR showcased this hip culture to the world in the 1964 Deutschlandtreffen.

Immediately after the Deutschlandtreffen, authorities cracked down on the beat music scene, and although the gains in sexual freedom and gender equality remained, youth policy again became more restrictive. Sex, Thugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll suggests that youths who embraced rock and American culture now had to carve out their Eigensinn by daring and outwitting the police. The book at this point trails off into generalizations about youth subcultures from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It mentions in passing that 1968 and 1973 marked years of liberalization in youth policy but gives few concrete details.

A final substantive chapter on the origins of right-wing youth subcultures is nonetheless a major contribution. Boys became racist skinheads partly because teachers categorically rejected Nazism and the Holocaust in vague and abstract terms, but parents gave concrete details about National Socialism that were sometimes positive. Skinhead culture was also a result of Eigensinn. An embrace of National Socialism and practices such as greeting an FDJ leader with a Heil Hitler broke taboos, asserted machismo, and won over like-minded peers who hated the rigidity of East German organizations.

Sex, Thugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll discredits British Marxist interpretations that linked rock, beat, and punk subcultures to the inequities in postwar capitalism. In detailing how East and West German youth subcultures were more alike than different, it demonstrates how culture can travel autonomously from one economic and political system to another. The books focuses much more on masculinity than femininity, but this imbalance is largely due to the male dominance in youth subcultures and the heightened attention given to males by the regime. Historians of the GDR in general will be impressed by this study of how even disenfranchised youths living under the restrictive regime had the agency to shape their culture and sexuality.