Chapter 1 - Wholeness and Exuberance

Summary

The chapter places the alternative left of the 1970s into a longer tradition of searching for alternative ways of living within and beyond Germany. The chapter takes its starting point with an imaginative leftist bookshelf to ask on what ideas and traditions leftists could draw. In that sense, the chapter provides a genealogy of alternative thinking, arguing that the alternative left was part of a longer tradition reaching back to the life-reform movement of the turn of the century, if not earlier. By investigating four distinct traditions on which leftists could and did build, the chapter also highlights what distinguished the alternative left and its search for authentic feelings from those earlier movements. Specifically, the chapter discusses the German life-reform and youth movements that emerged around 1900; attempts to combine Marxist and Freudian theories by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse; artistic critiques of the dullness of modern life by the Beat Poets and the French Situationists; and finally, rebellious teenagers in West Germany during the 1950s and early 1960s known as Halbstarke and Gammler.