In conversation with RevDem editor Lucie Hunter, Joachim Häberlen discusses his latest book, Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Allen Lane, 2023).
Joachim Häberlen, Ph.D., is a historian of modern Europe and a writer focused on protest movements in post-war Europe and the experiences of Afghan and Syrian refugees in Germany. He received his academic training at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Modern European History in 2011. Some of his publications include The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left: West Germany, 1968-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Citizens and Refugees: Stories from Afghanistan and Syria to Germany (Routledge, 2022), and Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe (Allen Lane, 2023).
Lucie Hunter: I would like to start our conversation on a more personal note. In multiple parts of the book, you mentioned that you were personally involved in some of the causes and movements that you discuss. Could you tell us more about your personal history of activism, what impact did it have on your life and what did you learn from it? And how, if at all, did it influence your decision to write this book in the first place?
Joachim Häberlen: Before I moved to Chicago to do my Ph.D. in the early 2000s, I was involved in typical left-wing activism, e.g. protests against neo-Nazis, against deportation policies. In 2015, I became, a bit by accident, involved in supporting refugees. That was a very different kind of activism. How did it influence my book? Not so much, really. But it influenced my general interest in left-wing politics and left-wing activism, which is a red thread running through most of my work. What really fascinated me about these topics were the attempts to not just criticize policies but to try something out, to create spaces that could be different and create a sort of ‘promised land’ of solidarity and freedom. Everyone knows that these simply do not exist in practice.
But there are attempts to, at least, do things differently, be it in communes, in leftist youth societies, but also as part of the solidarity movement with people fleeing to Europe. This spirit of experimentation, practical solidarity, and constantly questioning decisions and ideas, that was and still is something that deeply fascinates me and influenced how I approached the book.
Let’s turn our attention to the content of your book. It covers a greatly symbolic period in the study of social movements, ranging from the tumultuous wave of protests in multiple European countries in 1968 and going all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. In terms of methodology, why did you decide to focus specifically on this period and how did you choose your geographical case studies?
When you introduced the book and said that it covers roughly 30 years from 1968 to 89, I was a tiny bit unhappy, I have to admit. It is absolutely true that 68 and 89 stand out as pivotal moments in the struggle for creating a better world in post-war Europe. The book does indeed focus very much on the 1970s and 1980s, when we see a plethora of new forms of struggling for that better world, but also experimenting with building a world in the here and now rather than waiting for some kind of big revolution that would change everything. Having said that, I find it important to stress that the 1950s were definitely not the boring and politically quiet period that they are often presented as. There were countercultural movements and political opposition movements spanning from the 1950s to the early 60s, well before 1968. Think of the Situationist International, for instance, or the riots of German teenagers who challenged the establishment. It is important to keep this pre-history in mind because 1968 did not happen out of the blue. And similarly, 1989 is not simply an end to this story. Many chapters of the book actually point to the present, be it environmental politics, struggles against racism or the women’s movement, which, in a way, anticipated or paved the way for the gay movement and for contemporary queer politics.
To come back to your question about why I picked this specific period of time, particularly the 1970s. Firstly, because it was a moment of tremendous experimentation, which fascinated me. Secondly,
a lot of current day protest movements dealing with issues like racism, queer politics or sexual politics can be traced back to this moment of the long 1960s or even 70s.
When it comes to geographical case studies, above all, I wanted to cover a wide range of places and I wanted to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western Europe. That was really important to me because oftentimes you have discussions of protest movements that are mostly about Western Europe or the US and then some studies on Eastern Europe or the Communist East, as if these were two utterly separate worlds. I think that is simply not true. People read each other and if you look into cultural habits, cultural politics, styles of music, fashion and so on, you can see many similarities. Punk, for example, was a subcultural movement that managed to cross the Iron Curtain. The same goes for environmental politics or the peace movement, so I am trying to cover the continent as a whole. That being said, there are countries that I left out. I did not discuss Greece or Spain or Portugal at any length. There is obviously a lot more in terms of protest movements that I could cover. I picked what I thought were particularly interesting and revealing examples of people struggling for better world and, above all, experimenting with new ideas, new ways of organizing their lives, work or private matters but also the challenges they encountered on the way.
I feel like there is always a danger when writing comparative studies that readers will think their own country was not given enough attention. Coming from Eastern Europe, I also wish that you had dove even deeper into examples from the region to create stronger bridges between the East and West. Switching gears, I would like to ask about your theoretical approach. Many of the phenomena you discuss in your book have already been studied at great length by social movement or cultural studies scholars. Be it the emergence of the so-called new social movements in the 1970s, the concepts of prefiguration and radical imaginary, lifestyle politics, or the importance of non-material values for public mobilizations from the 1970s onwards. However, in your book, you do not seem to engage much with this conceptual vocabulary, nor with the wider theoretical underpinnings of these fields. What was your approach to theory while working on this book and what would you see as its added value in comparison to other studies on the same subject?
This is a multi-layered question that requires a longer answer. First, let me note the nature of the book. It is a trade book aimed at a general audience, not so much at specialists in the field. I still hope that even specialists will learn something from it because I cover a lot of ground and many different examples that might not be familiar to experts and which they might find useful for teaching. But in general, the genre of the book simply does not call for theory. I also have to admit that I find some of the theoretical work in the field not particularly inspiring. Sometimes, it does not seem to get at what I think is crucial about these movements. In the literature, the 1970s movements are often presented as single-issue movements. This does not take into account the connections between different activists and their struggles, and the fact that they often had a shared vision of a better world which brought them together.
Similarly, the lifestyle politics approach or the focus on post-material values often denigrates the type of activism that I am talking about. It tries to portray lifestyles as not quite political, as if these were two separate things: lifestyle on the one hand and ‘real’ politics on the other. What we can see in the book is that the private sphere, which is often considered distinct or separate from politics, becomes profoundly political. It is about feelings, bodies, and a radical re-definition of what politics is all about.
If you take into consideration the kind of spiritual politics and the new line of thinking that emerged in the late 1970s and early 80s, it is even about how people relate to the natural world and to the universe as a whole. For me, the concepts of lifestyle politics or post-materialist values simply do not quite grasp this fundamental rethinking of the political map.
What is the added value of my book and what is different about it? There are some books, particularly by leftist historians, that present these movements as role models for the present. While I admit that I have a bit of sympathy for these protesting cultures, that is not my objective. I do not want to provide a sort of blueprint for successful protesting. The major takeaway where I hope that the book is different is that it might serve as inspiration to imagine something, to imagine alternatives and to keep dreaming in a way. However, it is also important to sometimes take a break and reflect on what went wrong with these movements and how they re-created the very power structures they wanted to dismantle.
Let me tell you an anecdote. Your podcast is called the Review of Democracy, so it might be fitting. In September, there was a study in Germany about the right-wing populist AfD and why people vote for it. The author of the study claimed that it was not because of a longing for some imaginary past that has never existed but because of, what he called, a ‘nihilist rage,’ which has emerged out of the inability to imagine anything better. What I focus on in my book is the ability to dream and imagine something different. I think that makes studying these protest movements worthwhile.
This probably is not a real theoretical takeaway, but for me it is crucial because it shows what we can actually learn by studying history. This is a fundamental question that has been asked over and over again. Writing this book has really changed my perspective on this question because I am getting more and more interested in how history can inspire me to imagine a different future.
I think that is a really beautiful approach, which directly brings us to the question of impact. Impact is something that keeps coming up all the time when studying social movements and protest cultures because there is a general expectation that such actions should produce tangible results, which are not always delivered. In your book, you focus on movements that, in one way or in another, tried to make the world a better place. Looking at the impact and political dimension of these actions, would you say that the movements you discuss were successful? And if so, in what ways?
As you said, questions of impact and success or failure are tricky. If the stated goal of a movement was to overthrow capitalism and consumer society, well, we would have to consider it a failure. However, if you look more closely at some of the smaller, lesser-known movements, housing activists in Rome, for instance, this movement accomplished something. They managed to stay in the houses that they initially occupied or managed to lower their rents. Ultimately, some of them were even able to buy their apartments. Or if you look at struggles of some of the migrants that I mention in my book. Some of them managed to get their residence papers, others were deported, others failed. As we can see, some movements succeeded and accomplished what they set out to do, not in terms of a big revolution but smaller goals. However, you can also look at this issue more critically. Take the examples of housing activists in Rome again. As I mentioned, some of them managed to lower their rents and buy their apartments. But did they do anything to improve the overall housing situation in Rome? Probably not. Question of impact is always relative, but I think it is important to keep these successes in mind, to see that people did indeed have some kind of impact, that they did make a difference. Perhaps most importantly, that this difference is not always easily measured.
In one of my chapters, I discuss the plan of German authorities to build a nuclear power plant. When activists spotted the construction site, they built a sort of camp there to prevent the construction from going forward. The interesting thing here is that leftist student activists from a nearby university city but also from all over Germany joined the protest camp alongside local farmers who feared that their livelihoods could be endangered by the construction and other locals. It was a strange moment of encounter between the students using a highly academic jargon criticising capitalism and the more conservative local population speaking in dialect. The actual success of this campaign, as one of the activists said, was that these two very different groups of people had a chance to meet, put away their prejudices, and build friendships, which, in many cases, last until today. Perhaps this is what a democratic society needs. To allow people to see and connect with others from different cultural and political backgrounds, as is often the case during street protests or other forms of activism.
This is something we should think about when it comes to impact and success but which is often left out of academic discussions. Sometimes, these successes might last only a short moment. In the book, I discuss the squatting movement of 1980/1981, most prominently active in West Berlin, that some describe as a ‘short summer of anarchy,’ when you could spend your afternoons having breakfast on the roof of some of the houses and build communities. It was a beautiful summer but only a short moment in time. Another example would be the Polish Orange Alternative, which organised colourful, joyful happenings. One lady that attended one of their happenings described with joy and enthusiasm, saying that for a short moment, her crazy everyday normality in Communist Poland was interrupted and life suddenly did not seem all depressing, even if only for a few hours. That is a success too.
Apart from these liberating and freeing experiences, in the book you also show the other side of the story. In many cases, these ‘radical’ students were perceived as patronizing and the community did not accept them. Often, they would leave disappointed because the workers and other protesters simply did not want the same things as them or decided to use different tools to achieve their goals.
You are absolutely right. I feel like I am perhaps painting too good of a picture of these movements. Unsurprisingly, these encounters produced many conflicts as well, mostly because people did not behave the way the activists expected them to. Many activists had a more theory-driven approach, calling for occupation of factories etc. People on the ground sometimes said no because, at the end of the day, they were the ones putting their lives and livelihoods at risk. One of the big catch phrases of the 1970s was autonomy, which is a bit paradoxical if we take into account the students who came to the protesters and tried to explain to them what they should do differently and how they should act.
However, I should say that it is not my personal insight to show that such encounters produced conflicts. Activists were very much aware of that too. They were very critical and self-critical about coming to factories, going to farmers, going to local residents and telling them what to do. And they realized quite quickly that such an approach would not yield any results.
That is another thing that fascinates me about the 1970s and 80s, just how self-critical these activists were, constantly worried about re-producing the very policies that they were trying to fight, which makes it tricky to write about them analytically because they were perfectly aware of most of these issues and were actively seeking solutions to them.
To bring our conversation to the present, I think it is safe to say that we are currently experiencing a form of resurgence of similar movements to the ones in the 1970s. Be it the MeToo scandals, limited access to abortion or staggering rates of femicides mobilising the women’s movement, or the looming climate catastrophe giving rise to Fridays for Future or The Last Generation groups. Then we have Black Lives Matter empowering the global justice movement and the resurrection of peace movements in response to the war in Ukraine or Gaza right now. What inspiration do you think these contemporary movements take from the ones discussed in your book and what is different about them? In a way, I am coming back to the questions you pose at the very beginning of your book: what can we learn from this history of insurgence, why does it matter for our world today and in what ways?
I am a bit hesitant about the resurgence of protesting because it implies that we saw less protesting in the years prior to it. In early 2000, there were big protests against global summits, tens of thousands meeting in Genoa, for example. There were huge protests around the financial crisis, too, or against the Iraqi war. If you look closely, people take to the streets all the time. Back then, the press was full of articles about the peace movement coming back to life, but I do not think it ever left. So, I am a bit hesitant. However, I should say that while I am looking at these contemporary protest movements with interest, I am no longer part of them nor study them extensively. Maybe I just do not know them well enough.
What I find different is that I do not quite see the protesting and subcultural scenes that were so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. There used to be subcultures with tons of local magazines and their own style of clothing, you could identify who belonged to which scene simply by their looks and the clothing they wore. There was what some scholars have called a counter-public, which connected people and different struggles. I do not think that exists anymore.
I am not sure that TikTok or Instagram can recreate such a counter-public sphere, it seems simply too fragmented. I went to one of the Black Lives Matter protests in Berlin, I think it was in 2020, which was huge and very impressive, lots of young people participated. This made me hopeful, but I am not sure how long this wave actually lasted. Fridays for Future seem to have lasted longer. However, I recently read an interview with one of the German Fridays for Future activists, in which she said that during the last international climate strike, two thirds of the global participants came from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. From the way she presented it, it seemed like the interest has been reduced a lot, which is a sad thing to hear.
If I look at the anti-nuclear power movements in the 1970s-80s that squatted on construction sites, I can see that people really lived their lives through this struggle, in the sense that it was much more than just going to demonstrations once a week. This physicality and space for experimenting with different lifestyles and forms of living, for example, seems to have shrunk. It reminds me of what one of my students once said, that nowadays, whatever you say or do is forever saved on social media. So this space for experimenting, making mistakes and perhaps learning from these mistakes and trying again later has become much more difficult to achieve. In a situation where everything matters for your career, with at least some students having the impression that every single thing in their lives matters for their CVs, the creative space for simply trying things out seems to have shrunk. Again, I am not sure whether this is true, but this is the impression I got from talking to students.
In a way, this inspired me to write this book, to show how important it is to have the courage to do things differently and use our imagination. When I look at some of the contemporary protest movements, they come across as utterly serious. There is nothing joyful in the kinds of protests they are staging. Of course, many of the anti-nuclear or peace movement protests in the 1980s were all about fear and they were not very joyful either. But they had lots of moments of joy, like the women-run environmental camps outside of a military Air Force base in the UK where nuclear weapons were stationed. These camps became spaces for trying out queer forms of living and various joyous experiences. Looking back at the movements in the 1970s-80s could perhaps help bring back the courage to experiment a bit more. But maybe I am completely wrong in my impressions and would be happy to be proven wrong.
We would need an entire conversation to go deeper into this. I think there is some truth in the sense that there are fewer opportunities for experimentation, which might also be caused by the general precarity of the youth. You cannot really afford to suddenly disappear from your life and join a commune or a protest camp. At the same time, I am not sure that I agree with the overall pessimism. I am currently based in Italy and I can still see a very thriving civil society culture here with a lot of space for experimentation, including various feminist spaces or even squatting and occupation of buildings, which is still relatively common. There are also many cultural centres and areas that are involved in neighbourhood and community-building activities, be it fighting for accessible housing or other issues. I agree that Fridays for Future has been one of the most successful movements when it comes to recent mass mobilizations though. However, when it comes to influences on lifestyle choices, I would agree that this has mostly moved to the digital sphere. Not necessarily to platforms like Instagram or TikTok but primarily Discord. We can see a big growth of more fandom-based digital spaces, fostering these online communities and creating completely new, digital-first subcultures.
Maybe I am just a bit nostalgic for the times I am studying. I am glad to hear that there are still spaces for experimenting and that civil society is still thriving. Maybe I am just getting too old to be really part of them. Sometimes I try to figure out what I should read to get a sense of what the lefties are thinking about nowadays. It seems to be very difficult to get a sense of these comparable points of reference. But again, if experimentation is happening, perhaps looking into the 1970s-80s can still be inspiring. If only to see what activists did back then, how did they go on strikes and so on. There is still something there for me, even if it is just this spirit of trying things out, that can be really inspiring.
I think it can be both inspiring but also disheartening to see that some of the topics social movements were dealing with in the 70s, 50s, or even 20s, are still pertinent and that, in many respects, not that much progress has actually been achieved. However, you mentioned earlier that you feel a lack of the joyful atmosphere that was typical of some of the older protest movements that you focus on in the book. I actually found these to be some of the strongest passages, these moments of freedom, joy and communal laughter and this generally festive carnivalesque atmosphere where we could most clearly see the glimpses of the better world that the activists were striving to create. However, aside from your mostly sympathetic outlook, you also caution the reader to take these utopian conceptions with a grain of salt. In conclusion, how would you advise the readers to approach your book and what should they take away from it?
In general, to be inspired, to dare to imagine and have the courage to try out different things and not accept that there are no alternatives. At the same time, it is important to be cautious, to take a break and reflect on how to build a better world that would not simply re-produce oppressive power structures.
To give an example, in the movement of the late 1970s-80s, there were many students who moved to communes because they felt that living alone in large cities or as part of a conventional family would be utterly depressing. Family life, for them, seemed just plain boring and reproducing patriarchal power structures and other issues. During this time, many young people became associated with commune’s radical visions of a different life through doing things communally rather than on their own. That included raising children, right? The idea that children should not be considered their parents’ property and all adults living in a commune and shared apartments should effectively be involved in raising them as well. It sounded good in theory but reality was perhaps a bit more complicated. Many adults that moved into a commune often stayed there for only a year or so before moving out because they wanted to live with different people. Children had just come to know these adults, they built personal connections, and suddenly these new companions were gone. But there were more practical issues, too. For many, going out for drink was certainly more attractive than changing diapers at night. In the end, and perhaps quite predictably, it was the biological parents who usually ended up looking after the children. In theory, it sounded like a really nice alternative, at least some support for normal family life and a way of getting more people involved in looking after children. It had a potential to take away some of the burden from the shoulders of biological parents and especially mothers. However, things often did not quite work out that way.
Because of that, it is important to have a bit of caution when it comes to these hopes for different lives, to question how they played out in reality and to ask why they turned out the way they did or what could be done differently to make things actually work. In a way, to really allow for these reflective moments and not only see things as rosy and beautiful.
The title of the book is Beauty is in the Street. There is a lot of ugliness as well. Having the courage to try things out but also remain careful and take time to reflect on where things went wrong. That is what I hope people will take away from the book.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
In collaboration with Benedek Kovacs.
