Swing Heil!
Kids have always kicked against authorities. But could they kick against authoritarians? Meet the jazz-loving swing kids of Nazi Germany
One of the subtle points drawn by Hans Fallada in his 1947 novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein (alternatively translated as Every Man Dies Alone or Alone in Berlin) is the failure of different generations to understand one another. In the novel, set in Nazi-controlled Germany, this misunderstanding is particularly characterised as suspicion versus fear. The generation of young Nazi adults, represented in the book by the character of Baldur Persicke, viewed their parents’ generation as weak and decadent. For their part, the parents looked at their inheritors with a different emotion: they were afraid of their children. This is, to be certain, an extreme scenario, but it comes freighted with a universal truth: that of the inability of one generation to recognise itself in another.
The more recognisable pattern of this is of a parental generation looking with mild dismay at the fashion, musical and social choices of their teenaged children. This was probably at its most explosively profound in the adolescent behaviour of the baby boomers as viewed by their parents, but it is phenomenon a much older than that. Were he of a different political persuasion, the fictional Baldur Persicke could have exercised his rebellion in a far less harmful manner. He could have been a Swing Kid.
The swing kids, or Swingjugend, were what the teddy boys, mods, punks, goths or emo kids would have been had they come of age in Nazi Germany. Originating in Hamburg in the late 1930s, the Swingjugend were loosely-grouped gatherings of youths who adored the swing jazz that was then emerging from the United States and Great Britain. Like their counterparts in France, the zazou, the German swing kids coalesced around a love of music, particularly the swing dance records of Slim & Slam, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.
Jazz’s origins were explicitly a dance music and the sounds of the 1930s were a fully social phenomenon, a music for movement and connection. The natural outlet for jazz lovers was the dance club and it was in these spaces that the Swingjugend would congregate. Having formed themselves into loose ‘clubs’ with names like the Harlem Klub, the OK Gang Klub and the Cotton Klub, the youth would meet up at venues such as the Lippmann restaurant in Frankfurt (Horst Lippmann, the son of the owner, was a pianist and member of the Hot Klub), where entry was gained through a suitably jazzy password system, in which members would whistle the first few bars of the clarinet solo in 'High Society’ as a clandestine means of identification and recognition.
Of course, identification with the swing kids was more obvious than such coded behaviour suggests. As with other subcultures, membership was easily identifiable through modes of dress and behaviour. Dress codes were notably British in style; for the young men this meant checked jackets, narrow trousers and crepe-soled shoes, set off with flashy accessories such as scarves, umbrellas (even on dry days) and union flag lapel badges. Swing women wore elaborate makeup, including pencilled eyebrows, lipstick and lacquered nails. Their hair, in contrast to approved Nazi styles, was worn loose and overflowing. This anglophilic style extended to language, the swing kids, who were largely middle class and well-educated, preferred to converse in English.
This ‘westward turn’ may seem to have been deliberately calculated to antagonise the Nazi authorities but it is difficult to separate the push from the pull. The music and fashion of swing could appeal on its own merits, it was certainly desirable to the youngsters of Britain and America who had no authoritarian regime against which to kick, but the opportunity to provoke Nazi sensibilities gave German jazzheads an additional buzz.
Their principal target were their fellow adolescents, most obviously in the form of the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls. Indeed, the term Swingjugend was a conscious parody of ‘Hitlerjugend’. Members of the Nazi-approved youth groups were the target of abuse by the swing kids. The insults were politically sexualised: the Hitler Youth were dubbed ‘Homo Youth’ (a deliberately homophobic slur) while their female counterparts, whose societal role was to be groomed as dutiful and fecund Aryan wives, were dismissed as the ‘League of Soldiers’ Mattresses’. This language was a payment in kind for the official concerns about the swing kids, which included suspicion of promiscuity and sexual licentiousness, an exaggeration that played into Nazi propaganda about ‘degenerate’ culture.
This apparent degeneracy did not prevent thoroughgoing Nazis from indulging in a little swinging of their own. Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering were spotted dancing, in uniform, to records by Jack Hylton and his Orchestra, a British ensemble, much favoured by the swing kids. The dancing was also emulated by the leaders of the Hitler Youth, who saw the popularity of the swing clubs and sought to add dancing to their own programmes of activity. Sadly, the replacement of jazz with German community dances proved to be a failure. It simply wasn’t cool enough.
Ultimately, the existence of a jazz subculture was intolerable to the Nazis. Not only was it of black origin, it also promoted British and American cultural trends, anathema after the failure of Munich and Germany’s final shift away from any kind of accommodation with Britain and her allies. The swing kids found themselves among the growing list of ‘undesirables’, subject to detention by the Gestapo.
The clampdown began in the early 1940s. Over 300 swing kids were arrested in one police operation. In Hamburg alone, between 40 and 70 ‘ringleaders’ were sent to concentration camps. Although male and female prisoners were housed in separate camps, as single-sex groups they were permitted to associate behind the wire. Their love for jazz music endured defiantly and the strains of jazz standards could be heard coming from their lips. Nor were these performances acapella: as one prisoner recalled:
The salt mine where we worked had really nice acoustics. One of us played on the cartridges – these were like wooden boxes, and he would play drums with some sticks. We improvised all sorts of things. Sometimes it sounded horrible. Either way, we had successfully gotten through our so-called breakfast break. It was a survival strategy.
It was a small victory, but an important one. What had started as a simple act of youthful pleasure-seeking had, in the face of oppression, blossomed into a communicable medium of defiance. There is a spirit of rebellion at the heart of every teenage culture. We should be grateful for that.