"European youth-mass-media-ensemble" - Transnationality and entanglement of popular youth culture in Western Germany, France and Great Britain, 1964-1974

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In contrast to the vast number of historiographical studies on juvenile subcultures and troublemakers, this project is the first to try to reveal the existence of a so called popular youth culture in the sense of a mainstream phenomenon reflecting the taste of a majority of young people. This popularised, highly commercialised, politically eased and intergenerationally consensual youth culture, this special kind of hybrid culture, is not just represented and dispersed but rather actively created especially by mass media for young people. Against this background, the so called popular youth culture has always been open to influences from the outside and must therefore be analysed in a transnational and entangled-theoretical setting. The project is based on three main hypotheses: Concerning the idea of a Europeanisation of the popular youth culture of the long sixties, it is likely that there emerged a common space of mass media for young people, an (audio-)visual youth mass media ensemble - not just in Western but partly also in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it can be assumed that within this virtual common space of mass media for young people national specificities of the popular youth culture were satirised and stereotyped on one hand and levelled and relativized on the other hand. Apart from that, the project focuses on systemic, format-specific convergences as well as on cultural, media-specific divergences concerning mass media for young people and their popular youth culture. Finally, the project promises various innovations for contemporary history, the history of media as well as the history of youth and popular cultural history. First, it seeks to achieve a fundamental historicization of mass media for young people - both print and audiovisual media - especially by questioning and developing different methodological tools of historiography and its neighboring disciplines. Furthermore, concepts of Jugend/youth/jeunes as spaces of collectivisation on the one hand and mediated, normative patterns of juvenile identity on the other hand have to be rethought. Finally the project analyses mutual flows of popular youth culture and the connections between mass media for young people on the basis of three countries (Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain and France), in order to successfully challenge the widely criticised idea of Beck´s national container.