Nikolaos Papadogiannis

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.

‘The personal is political’: sexuality, gender and the Left in Europe during the 1970s

To call female comrades ‘chicks’ was unacceptable, a young left-wing Greek cadre proclaimed during a speech at a youth congress of his party in 1978. At a time when Feminist movements had gained momentum across Europe, such statements by male leftwing activists had become commonplace. The politics of sexuality nonetheless remained a contested field within the European Left. The articles in this special issue intend to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of gender transformations in 1970s Europe. The concentration on shifting representations of gender, sexuality and lifestyles within left-wing subcultures helps to reconsider two central issues which are prominently discussed in the scholarship on 1970s gender politics: the articles critically rethink the notion of ‘gradual progress’ in ‘sexual openness’ throughout Europe in the 1970s. Moreover, they demonstrate that the 1970s witnessed mass-mobilisation experiments, which were indelibly linked with reflections on gender relations, rather than merely marking an era of intense left-wing militancy or a ‘retreat into the private’.

Red and Purple? Feminism and young Greek Eurocommunists in the 1970s

This article analyses the impact of Feminism on one of the most popular left-wing youth groups in Greece, the Eurocommunist Rigas Feraios (RF), in the mid-to-late 1970s. It indicates that, rather than a shift to (depoliticised) individualisation, which scholars claim that emerged elsewhere in Western Europe during the 1970s, post-dictatorship Greece witnessed intense politicisation and experimentations in mass-mobilisation models, a facet of which was the reconfiguration of the relationship between Eurocommunist organisations and Feminism. It demonstrates that the spread of Feminist ideas in RF led to the sexualisation of feminine representations in its language. Still, it argues that Feminist activity within RF had broader repercussions: it stirred reflection on masculinities and contributed to the reshaping of the collective memory of left-wing activity in Greece endorsed by this organisation. Finally, the article shows that the Feminist members of RF formed womens committees, which functioned as a test-bed for novel conceptualisations of collective action that RF tried to develop in the mid-to-late 1970s.

The social history of modern Greece: a roundtable

How is social history written and practiced in differing political and geographical contexts? As a journal, Social History has encouraged reflection on trajectories in different parts of the world though special issues on, most recently, Spain, the Caribbean, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics.1 This round-table discussion builds on this series of conversations by examining the social history and historiography of modern Greece – as written both within and outside of the country – and its contribution to wider European and global histories. Five social historians, at different career stages with contrasting biographies, participated in the roundtable through an exchange of views during the spring of 2017. The aims were to reflect on academic influences and trajectories; to identify future directions for the social history of modern Greece, including ways to better link it with the study of wider regions; and to analyse the very real effects of political change and financial crisis for the types of history that are produced and the choices that social historians of Greece make.

An Eastern Bloc Cultural Figure? Brecht’s Reception by Young Left-wingers in Greece in the 1970s

The following article explores the interaction between intensifying youth politicisation and the growing dissemination of Brecht’s plays in Greece during the 1970s. It stresses that ideas that were circulating transnationally shaped the diverse approaches that young left-wingers developed towards the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Such cultural transfers cannot be subsumed under the heading of Americanisation, the dominant story in the forging of youth identities in postwar Europe. In this vein, the article situates these transfers in the context of the Cold War and demonstrates that a significant number of young Communists lauded Brecht as a cultural figure of the Eastern bloc on the basis of arguments put forth by Soviet scholars. Thus, it critically addresses the hitherto perfunctory attention that scholars have paid to transnational flows from the Eastern bloc to the West and their impact on young people residing in the latter.

‘Keeping with Contemporary Times’: Social Tourism and West German Youth Hostel Organizations, 1950s–80s

This article examines the organizations that ran youth hostels in West Germany from the 1950s to 1989. It analyses whether they reconfigured their aims and practices against the backdrop of the cultural, social and political transformations that West Germany underwent throughout its existence, especially concerning the establishment of strong ties with ‘Western’ countries and the spread of mass consumption. It argues that while the maintenance of discipline among guests by youth hostel personnel remained important in the operation of West German youth hostels throughout the period in question, the norms around which discipline revolved and the ways in which it was enforced increasingly became negotiated between the officials of these associations and the guests at youth hostels. This process does not fall into the category of the ‘cultural revolution’ that occurred in the ‘Long Sixties’, according to Arthur Marwick, but amounted to a protracted and cautious experimentation that lasted several decades. While the historiography of tourism has hitherto analysed either the explosion of commercial tourism or the spread of anti-commercial travel from the 1960s onwards, shifting youth hostel policies help illuminate a popular type of tourism, which growingly developed synergies with both those travel patterns, but yet remained distinct from them.

A (trans)national emotional community? Greek political songs and the politicisation of Greek migrants in West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s

This article examines the emotional standards and experiences connected with the entehno laiko music composed by Mikis Theodorakis that was immensely popular among left-wing Greek migrants, workers and students, living in West Germany in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Expanding on a body of literature that explores the transnational dimensions of protest movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, the article demonstrates that these transnational dimensions were not mutually exclusive with the fact that at least some of those protestors felt that they belonged to a particular nation. Drawing on the conceptual framework put forth by Barbara Rosenwein, it argues that the performance of those songs was conducive to the making of a (trans)national emotional community. On the one hand, initially for Greek left-wingers and, after 1967, also for Greek centrists, who resided in West Germany, collective singing of music composed by Theodorakis served as a means of ‘overcoming fear’ and forging committed militants who struggled for the social and political transformation of their country