The Swing Youth (German: Swingjugend) were a youth counterculture of jazz and swing lovers in Germany formed in Hamburg in 1939. Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14- to 21-year-old Germans, mostly middle or upper-class students, but also including some in the working class. They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth (German: Hitlerjugend).
They loosely structured themselves into “clubs” with names such as the Harlem Club, the OK Gang, and the Hot Club. This underground subculture, distinctly nonconformist with a focus on African-American music, was active in the German youth scene. Despite being largely apolitical and unstructured, the Swing Youth were targeted and, in some cases, repressed by the Nazi government.
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Name
The name Swingjugend was a parody of the numerous youth groups that were organised by the Nazis, such as the Hitlerjugend. The youth also referred to themselves as Swings or Swingheinis ("Swingity"); members were called "Swing-Boy", "Swing-Girl" or "Old-Hot-Boy".
Counter-culture
During the Nazi regime, all those aged 9 to 17 in Germany who were considered to be Aryan were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. The leaders of these organisations realised they had to offer some attraction in the area of social dancing to recruit 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, and 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 city of Hamburg, where the swing scene was huge. These teenage hoppers were known as Swing-Heinis, a name the authorities called them. The Swing Youth disparagingly, in the context of a predominantly homophobic culture, called the Hitler Youth the "Homo Youth". The League of German Maidens was called the "League of Soldiers' Mattresses", implying the group existed to have sex with German soldiers. This was seen as derogatory in a society praising chaste behaviour before marriage for girls, as the League of German Maidens promoted. The Swing Youth used their love of swing and jazz music to create their sub-culture, with one former Swing Kid Frederich Ritzel saying in a 1985 interview: "Everything for us was a world of great longing, Western life, democracy – everything was connected – and connected through jazz".
The Swing Kids danced in private quarters, clubs, and rented halls. These adolescents dressed differently from the others who were opposed to swing. For example, boys added a little British flair to their clothes by wearing homburg hats, growing their hair long, and attaching a Union Jack pin to their jacket. As a reflection of their Anglophilia, the "Swing boys" liked to carry around umbrellas whatever the weather and to smoke pipes.
Girls wore short skirts, applied lipstick and fingernail polish, and wore their hair long and down instead of applying braids or German-style rolls. The fondness of the "Swing girls" to wear their hair curled and to apply much make-up was a rejection of the Nazi regime's fashion tastes as in the Third Reich, the "natural look" with no make-up and braided hair was the preferred style for women as it was felt to be more "Germanic". A police report from 1940 described the Swing Youth as follows:
Ways of resistance
Though they were not an organised political-opposition organisation, 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 National Youth Leader:
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 and the Hitlerjugend shaped the political spirit of the swing youth. Also, by police order, people under 18 were forbidden to go to dance bars, which encouraged the movement to seek its survival in clandestine measures.
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 gangs (Meuten) of working class youths who borrowed elements from socialist and communist traditions to forge their own identities. There were less politically motivated groups, such as the Edelweiss Pirates (German: 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.
Connection with the White Rose
The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal co-operation 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 ending 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 radio, 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 pachucos.
Arrests and operations
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 camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In modern culture
The 1993 film Swing Kids examined this underground culture of rebellion during Nazi Germany. Directed by Thomas Carter (Holly Harold, assistant Mr. 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 described by film critic Janet Maslin as having a historical background.
German filmmaker Margit Czenki's made-for-television movie Swingpfennig/Deutschmark (1994) featured the original Swingboys Günter Discher and Otto Bender. Set in the St. Pauli of the early 1990s, the protagonists of the film – musicians around the band Die Goldenen Zitronen – uncover and stumble upon the history of the Swing Kids.
Famous people with a Swingjugend past
Ludwig W. Adamec, Austrian scholar on the Middle East and Afghanistan
Ralph Giordano, Jewish-German writer
Walter Kempowski, German writer
Heinz Lord, German-American physician
Emil Mangelsdorff, German jazz musician
Giwi Margwelaschwili, German-Georgian writer and philosopher
Hans Massaquoi, German-American journalist, grandson of Momulu Massaquoi