Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe

In this fast-paced, unusually detailed and focused book, German social historian Häberlen (The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left) exhaustively outlines and demonstrates the roots and results of the protest movements born in Central Europe after World War II. Positing that rebuilding postwar West Germany, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia necessitated working hand-in-glove with a burgeoning utopian social and political activist movement, Häberlen tugs on a series of rich and expanding thematic threads that begin in the 1950s and early 1960s, explode in 1968, run aground then revive themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, and culminate with the fall of the USSR in 1989. Familiar historical pathways, like left-wing movements and terrorism, are explored, but Häberlen also charts the birth, growth, and contextual grounding of newfound sexual freedom, musical expression, personal exploration, and psychological expansion.