Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ their food was abysmal and their pay was low and regularly falling lower. In fact, the man said, he was earning less than he had before the Nazis came to power, and was no longer even allowed to carry out his own trade.

      The young woman was silent for a while. Finally she spoke, protesting that Germany had regained its strength, that Hitler had achieved miracles, and that the people now had hope. ‘You must have faith in the Führer!’ she said.

      We have already noted the quasi-religious quality of the Dunkirk evacuation, but this pales beside the secular sanctity of the Third Reich, where Hitler and the Fatherland stood for God and Heaven. The young woman was invoking Hitler just as a Christian invokes Jesus or a Muslim invokes Allah. And two years later, shortly before Kristallnacht, Melita Maschmann was having another of her euphoric, quasi-religious experiences, this time at a meeting of leaders of the League of German Girls. The sense of being young, of belonging, of loving each other, of sharing a common task – making Germany great again – filled her with overwhelming joy.

      But Melita’s greatest joy and intoxication were to come once the war had begun on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Depicted in Germany as a legitimate action to liberate Germans living in occupied territories, the invasion saw Melita being sent in an official capacity to a town on the Polish border. Arriving by train, she was seized by a feeling of invulnerability. All sense of fear dropped away as she felt an identification with something greater than herself. Fulfilling Robert Ley’s ideal, she was no longer an individual. She had become Germany.

      But it was not just fear that Melita lost when the war began. She was sent, in 1940, to Wartheland, an annexed area containing a large number of Jews and Poles and only a small minority of Germans. Together with a Hitler Youth leader, she was driving across the Warta river when they became stuck. Stranded, with the waters rising, their car was eventually towed to safety by a team of gaunt, bearded men who lived locally. These, it turned out, were Jews forced to live together in ghetto fashion. Once ashore, the Jews worked busily to clean the car of mud and slime. And just as Melita was about to climb in again, one of the men stopped her; he had found one more tiny piece of dirt that he wanted to remove.

      When the man had finished, Melita and the Hitler Youth leader drove away without saying a word to the Jews who had gone out of their way to help them. She had not even looked them in the face. She despised them for being Jews and for wanting to help those who despised them. But she was also ashamed of her attitude. She knew she should have thanked these people.

      But how could she acknowledge their humanity? They were not individuals. And nor was she. She had become Germany.

      The United States

      The Germans, of course, were not the only western people to suffer economic difficulties between the wars. The United States had undergone a great stock market crash in 1929, and suffered a grinding depression for years afterwards. Nearly all levels of society were affected. But as wages dropped and work became harder to come by, it was the poorest who experienced the greatest suffering.

      With Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘new deal for the American people’, and specifically the introduction of the National Youth Administration, members of the struggling generation were finally offered hope. They were provided with grants in return for part-time work, allowing them to remain in high school and college. And they were placed in job training programmes or full-time work by local Youth Administration offices.

      This was a large-scale federal programme which, to some, seemed un-American in its focus on collective welfare. Indeed, with his youth organisations and work camps for young people, his conservation projects stressing the importance of physical fitness and the outdoor life, and his myriad new agencies and regulations, Roosevelt’s initiatives could seem remarkably similar to Adolf Hitler’s.

      Certainly, both leaders inherited ravaged economies. They were both trying to restore their nations’ self-respect as well as their finances. And they were both placing huge importance on their young people. The young were the bearers of national resurgence, and they were set aside for special treatment.

      But that is where the similarities end. In Hitler’s Germany, the state set about stripping away the individuality of its young people. A young German faced a future of service and obedience to the Fatherland, its needs eclipsing his or her own. Roosevelt’s initiatives may have been collective, but he had no desire to brainwash America’s youth. His New Deal offered individual growth alongside the nation’s. And how could it have offered anything else in America – a country built on self-reliance and self-expression?

      We are very used, nowadays, to youth culture coming out of America before spreading around the world. And it was in the late 1930s, as Roosevelt’s measures had their impact and the depression started to ease, that genuine youth culture was first seen. While jazz music had been popular for some time, this was the period when it exploded into Swing and spread among all levels of society. And while the word ‘teen-ager’ would not be used for a few more years, and rock and roll was still a decade and a half away, the right music, the right clothes and the right attitudes took on a new importance among American ‘teens’ (a word that was in use).

      In large part this was thanks to the New Deal. Three-quarters of those aged between fourteen and eighteen were now staying in high school, a far higher proportion than ever before. No longer so influenced by their parents, or at all by their senior workmates, they began to create a distinct identity inside their teen bubble. When sociologist August Hollingshead conducted a study of the young people in a midwestern town (called Elmtown to disguise its identity) he was able to look inside the bubble. One girl, a misunderstood teenager years before the breed was identified, said about her parents, ‘Sometimes they just don’t understand what kids want to do, and they think we ought to act like they acted twenty years ago.’

      Other subjects referred to clothes and style. ‘Janet’s a big girl,’ said one, ‘and she doesn’t dress right; so she just isn’t accepted.’ Peer pressure was intense, and dressing right was possible because high school students had a disposable income. They lived at home, usually received money from their parents, and often had part-time jobs. Without rent or bills to pay, there was no excuse for not dressing ‘slick’, as one Elmtown girl put it. And even young people without money, living on the small amounts paid by the National Youth Administration, were keen to spend what they had to look good. American materialism, after all, has a proud history.

      The Elmtown study is interesting in relation to sex and marriage, revealing that it was a badge of honour among many boys to be sexually active. ‘A boy who is known or believed to be a virgin is not respected,’ writes Hollingshead, and he describes a clique of lower-class boys calling themselves ‘The Five Fs’. This near-acronym stood for ‘Find ’em, feed ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em’.

      A girl, on the other hand, had to tread a dangerously thin line between ‘having some fun’ and becoming ‘free and easy’. ‘Mary’ told Hollingshead about going to a dance with a young man. At the dance, she decided that the boy ‘could have it’ but she would have to get drunk to go through with it. So the couple drove to a bar where Mary drank a double bourbon and three double whiskies, before driving to an isolated spot. ‘Oh, it was wonderful!’ said Mary. Over the next few months, she had affairs with five other men, going on at least four dates with each before ‘becoming intimate’. She was adamant that none of the boys had known in advance that ‘she knew what it was all about’. And then, at the age of eighteen, she married a twenty-year-old mill worker. Mary’s brief but intense adventures were over.

      Yet for any social changes, it was the music that really marked out the new youth culture. Swing music had a terrifically fast tempo, and sounded terrifying to older white listeners. It encouraged wild, out of control dancing, even solo dancing without a partner. Numbers like Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing СКАЧАТЬ