Subculture Swing Kids Essay Example

military haircuts of other boys by growing “whips” of long hair, sometimes over a foot in length from their foreheads, that were combed backward with Brillantine or sugared water.

Female Swing Kids openly violated the traditional, braided hairstyles approved for girls by letting their hair grow long and loose, and by sometimes inserting permanent waves with chemicals and curlers). Of course, individual styling of one’s hair has often marked youth rebelliousness, as demonstrated in more recent times by hippies or punk rockers. They developed a jargon mostly made of Anglicisms. German Swing Kids also gave themselves English nicknames. Walter was changed to Bobby, Bill or Teddy, and Frank became Frankie.

Affiliation with the jazz culture was damaging whenever other incriminating information could be factored into a formula for persecution. For example, many half-Jews (Mischlings) were sought out and persecuted before others if they were known as Swing Kids. Jazz music was offensive to Nazi ideology, because it was often performed by blacks and a number of Jewish musicians. They called it "Negro music" or "degenerate music". Moreover, song texts defied Nazi ideology, going as far as to promote sexual permissiveness or free love.

Despite this, not all jazz was forbidden in Germany at the time. A popular term that the swing subculture used to define itself was Lottern, roughly translated as something between "laziness" and "sleaziness", indicating contempt for the pressure to do "useful work" and the repressive sexual mores of the time. On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation

of the leaders to concentration camps.