Making Space for Youth Culture History: Berlin’s Archiv der Jugendkulturen

Discovering and Studying the Archiv der Jugendkulturen

I discovered the Archiv der Jugendkulturen in the spring of 2002 when I was looking for an internship with a nonprofit organization in Berlin. As someone who had participated in and was beginning to study subcultures, I was fascinated that such a place existed. At that time, I did not know of any comparable archive in my home country of the United States or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. While internship placements had been assigned for that summer already, I still visited the archive during my stay in Berlin. By 2002, it had been open for 4 years and was located in a two-story building in a small, industrial park in the city’s Kreuzberg district. In 2006 and 2007, as a visiting Fulbright scholar based in Hamburg, I traveled to Berlin to conduct research at the archive. I was impressed with the many hard-to-find German-language magazines and fanzines the archive housed. Moreover, the complete set of Bravo (Germany’s premiere youth magazine) was also available.

When I returned in 2013, I observed the daily operations of the archive itself. I wanted to see how people were using the space and what facilities made it easy or difficult to conduct research there. Initially, it was a fact-finding mission to see if instituting a similar archive might be plausible at my university. I was curious, too, how those closest to the archive thought of it as a culturally important space for both Germany and Berlin. One major difference between visits was that, by 2013, the Archiv had relocated. Though housed in the same industrial park in Kreuzberg, it had moved into a one-story building (where it remains located as of early 2018). What had stayed the same was that the Archiv’s collection was still primarily made up of print media spanning from the 1950s to the present. While the archive focuses on German youth culture, it nonetheless also has some fanzines from countries such as Great Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Japan, and Malaysia. As these fanzines are rare, they are located in a restricted area of the archive and must be retrieved by a member of staff.

The move to this smaller building also meant that, at the time of my last visit, certain collections were still in storage. This included documents from Planetcom, the original organization behind Berlin’s Love Parade (1989-2003), as well as the complete Berlin Pop and Rock Archive. Several interviewees, including founder Klaus Farin and director Gabriele Rohmann, indicated that the lack of a dedicated librarian in recent years has been one of the archive’s great challenges. Finding and keeping such an employee over the long term has been difficult given the lack of steady funding. Most monies come from donations rather than from the government. Nonetheless, researchers still come, and the archive is ostensibly more well-known today and easier to find than it was previously. In 2007, I was the only non-German researcher on-site during my multiple visits there that year. In 2013, I met students and independent researchers from the United States, Ireland, and France who were working with many of the archive’s fanzines. For instance, the American researcher I met there, who did not speak or read German, shared with me that she had heard about the archive through a website called DIY Berlin. In the age of social media and a more advanced Internet than in the early 2000s, there are multiple ways to discover unique spaces and destinations such as Berlin’s Archiv der Jugendkulturen.

Germany’s Youth Culture History: Setting the Scene

To better understand the significance of the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, it is important to first reflect on youth’s role in German history. A healthy amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the cultural importance of young people there even prior to the much-studied World War II period (Ferchhoff, 1990; Speitkamp, 1998; Stambolis, 2002-2003). In such accounts, youth is depicted as a positive and vital force for social change. From the mid-19th century onward, each young generation (and its adherent leisure practices) is also shown as inextricably bound to the sociocultural realities of its era. Most significant to Germany’s youth culture history, and what marks its trajectory as singular, are the seismic shifts that occurred there—from the mid-19th century’s unification of principalities into a nation-state to the late 20th-century’s post–Cold War reunification between East and West. A series of monumental sociopolitical changes fostered questions about self-definition and identity among German youth. Namely, how does one define oneself as a young person within Empire, fledgling democracy, fascism, foreign occupation, or capitalism versus communism? Such successively different social contexts, and all within a relatively short span of time, make Germany’s youth culture history distinctive.

During Germany’s initial age of Empire, what is often referred to as the Wilhelmine period, and which fostered the newly founded country’s first significant push toward modernization and industrialization, youths known collectively as the Wandervogel (“migratory birds”) sought refuge from the supposed ugliness of urban, adult-defined culture by retreating into rural spaces (Herrmann, 2006). The era of Germany’s subsequent Weimar Republic (1919-1933) saw the advent of wild, jazz-loving youth akin to Anglo-American “flappers.” This brief reprieve of liberalism, particularly in Berlin, was a dynamic time for youth; a period when Germans were very receptive to foreign culture. Young people equated American imports especially—whether music, film, or comics—with modernity (Schäfer, 1986; Speitkamp, 1998). Unlike the Wandervogel, this cohort was keen to be seen as modern and urbane. By the early 1930s, however, the nationalistic fervor that ignited young people in 1914 once again found ground with National Socialism. Despite pockets of resistance, such as the anarchic Ruhr Valley “gang” known as the Edelweiss Piraten (“Edelweiss Pirates”) and Hamburg’s “Swing Youth,” many young people were drawn into the fascistic mainstream—whether by sincere interest or coercion (Breyvogel, 1991; Kater, 2004).

After World War II, the division of a defeated Germany into Allied sectors meant that the influence of the British, American, and French occupying forces would be felt in the western part of the country, while those in the east—those areas that became the German Democratic Republic—were influenced more so by the Soviets (Blessing, 2006; Fisher, 2007). Nonetheless, prior to the 1961 erection of the Berlin Wall, youths in both West and East German states gravitated toward Anglo-American imports such as rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans. Unfortunately, the Wall, and all it symbolized, ensured that East German youths would have little to no access to further Western imports (Poiger, 2000). West Germany, however, became a key player in youth culture by the mid-1960s. Young people unapologetically listened to English-language rock music, wore mod fashions, and had their own popular music TV shows. Interest in Anglo-American youth culture was not only a knock-on effect of the postwar occupation but also bespoke this generation’s desire to be internationally minded. This was in reaction to how they saw the previous generation: dangerously nationalistic and xenophobic (Feldman, 2009). Alongside these trends, some university students were galvanized by the left-leaning politics of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extra-parliamentary Opposition), which staged protests against the government—some questioning the state’s seeming lack of interest in helping heal the nation of its Nazi past (Bude, 1995). While similar to British and American protests of the time, West German youths could call their parents fascists and, in most cases, mean it. Likewise, it was during this period that adults also viewed the younger generation more critically: as a potentially destructive social force rather than a benevolent one. Clearly, much had changed since the early 1900s, when adults had idealized youth. Now, as was the case elsewhere in the West, youthful activities tended to elicit various levels of “moral panic” among adults (Cohen, 1972; Poiger, 2000).

In the 1970s and 1980s German youth continued to focus on popular music, with both punk and goth genres (and styles) adopted from the United Kingdom, while hip-hop was imported from the United States and heartily embraced by the country’s Turkish youths (Elfein, 1998). By this time, these children of Turkish Gastarbeiter (“guestworkers”), who had grown up in Germany, were either teenagers or young adults. They were still, in many respects, betwixt and between identities and living a bicultural existence. Thus, the latest African American music and youth culture struck a chord with them in a way that punk and goth, genres and subcultures dominated by White Europeans, could not. These also were the decades when (West) Berlin established itself as an important hub for “alternative” youth culture worldwide. This was the period of the Neue Deutsche Welle (“German New Wave”), a rock and style movement that moved away from using English lyrics and sought to further establish German youth culture identity through music (von Dirke, 1989). However, by the early 1990s, another British import, dance-oriented Rave culture, became a staple of the country’s youth scene—punctuated by Berlin’s Love Parade, which ran annually from 1989 to 2003 (Foreman, 1997). It is significant, too, that by the mid-1990s, the early years of German Reunification, the Hamburger Schule (“Hamburg School”) rock bands continued in the tradition of the Neue Deutsche Welle by providing the country’s youth with a German-language soundtrack to their identity (Grimm, 2014). Importantly, the inclusion of former East Germany and its people into a united Germany illuminated the fact that the German Democratic Republic’s youth culture shared only some historical markers with its Western sister state (Engelhardt, Reichling, & Wagner, 2009; Saunders, 2013). This music had the potential to bring these two distinct groups of young people together.

When mapping this history of German youth culture, it becomes apparent that this country’s young people have been caught in the ebb and flow of inward- versus outward-looking periods of the nation’s history. Additionally, the trajectory of German youth culture speaks to changes in adult attitudes toward youth in the second half of the 20th century. Instead of equating youth with a hopeful future, the postwar period is defined by a growing distrust and/or fear of youth due to young people’s questioning of (or rebellion against) national identity and adult culture. Interestingly, some young people’s continued preference for German-language rock music also shows an aspect of national pride. Most important of all, Germany’s narrative of youth is one that foregrounds the questioning of identity—particularly in dialogue with Anglo-American modernity—all amid the tumult of the nation’s many sociopolitical changes since the mid-19th century.

Berlin: Germany’s “Youth Culture City”

While Berlin’s Archiv der Jugendkulturen is an archive that represents the nation’s youth culture history, it is a space that is also symbolic of Berlin’s history as a bohemian enclave and alternative youth mecca. For many, the starting point of this reputation is during the Weimar era. According to Grésillon (1999), it was at this time that Berlin “became a fully-fledged cultural metropolis, and vied with Paris for cultural supremacy in Europe” (p. 286). As the country’s largest city, and throughout most of the nation’s history, its capital, Berlin was where young people could find myriad attractions and activities—both conventional and outrageous. The city’s stylish decadence attracted youths from throughout Germany, Europe, and overseas. While National Socialism stripped Berlin of its contrarian culture temporarily, where, like the rest of the country, difference and/or defiance could come with a death sentence, bohemianism returned to Berlin in the postwar years. In the 1960s, with its communes, most famously Kommune 1, and, during the 1970s, with its squats, alternative youth culture and lifestyles vigorously reenergized the city. This new Berlin, which now was “West Berlin,” due to the Cold War, was an island of capitalism and Western values in the geographic heart of East Germany. The Wall was a constant reminder of both a divided Germany and city (T. S. Brown, 2013; Clarkson, 2012).

West Berlin embodied a tension between East and West that often gave it a thrilling (if sometimes bleak) atmosphere that attracted a particular cohort of young creatives. From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, and starting with David Bowie’s move to the city in 1976, an international cavalcade of musicians and artists descended upon the city to live and/or work (Greco, 2001; Pugh, 2015; Rüther & Matthews, 2014). Young West German men could also free themselves from the Federal Republic’s mandatory military duty by opting for civil service in the still Allied-occupied West Berlin—something the city’s government offered in order to keep this Western outpost well-populated (Clarkson, 2012). West Berlin’s low cost of living (also facilitated by its availability of squats) allowed young people a good amount of disposable income to spend on creative pursuits and nightlife. Potentially, especially given that less working hours were needed to survive, young people also had more time for political activism. The West Berlin districts of Kreuzberg (adjacent to the Wall—and where the Archiv der Jugendkulturen is located) and Schöneberg (where Bowie lived) became the most popular neighborhoods for this cohort of young bohemians. This period is documented in the film B Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989 (Hoppe, Lange, & Maeck, 2015). The film is based on Manchester transplant Mark Reeder’s experiences living and working there during this time. He takes viewers on a tour of the city’s seemingly nonstop, underground nightlife where Australian expat and goth rocker Nick Cave often held court and local musician Blixa Bargeld (of proto-industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten) might be your bartender at Risiko Bar. According to Reeder, “the Berlin scene never seemed to sleep. . . . You just didn’t want to miss out on anything.” B Movie convincingly shows how West Berlin was truly a 24-hour alternative space and place appealing to young people looking for a non-mainstream city to call home.

Alongside this rock-oriented scene, other music genres and youth subcultures came to the fore. Hip-hop culture—inclusive of music, graffiti (or “tagging”), and breakdancing—was noticeable within Berlin’s urban landscape starting in the 1980s. As previously discussed, its music and scene were especially attractive to West Berlin’s Turkish minority community. Meanwhile, the originally British mod and skinhead cultures also emerged between the late 1970s and early 1980s, with noticeable presence in West Berlin (Elfein, 1998; Farin, 1997; Feldman, 2009). In many respects, it was during this decade before the Wall came down that (West) Berlin cemented its reputation as a truly alternative, youth-oriented city (Shaw, 2005). This reputation was further developed with Berlin’s techno-themed Love Parade, an annual summer event that began in 1989 and attracted an international crowd. Until 2003, 13 years after Reunification and after the city’s center had shifted east, the parade was still held on thoroughfares central to “West Berlin”: the Kurfürstendamm and Strasse des 17. Juni. Like elsewhere in the Western world, the Berlin of the 1990s and 2000s saw post-subcultural trends in music and fashion. This meant that a bricolage of past, youth styles, from punk to hip-hop, continued to mix with new trends. In this sense, Berlin’s streets, clubs, and venues—now expanded into old “East Berlin” districts such as Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain—were teeming with young people whose style choices, musical allegiances, attitudes, and mannerisms also alluded to past youth cultures. Moreover, this cohort included former East German youth who carried memories of life in the Democratic Republic with them. Despite all the changes that Berlin has undergone since the Weimar era, the city still remains a destination and hub for young people looking to explore unconventional aspects and spaces of urban life.

Youth Culture, History, and the Archive

The fact that an archive like the Archiv der Jugendkulturen exists today is important in that it speaks to both youth’s changing position in cultural history as well as the changing nature of archives—both in Germany and elsewhere.

As detailed in the last two sections of this article, the meanings and experiences of “youth culture”—both in the national context of Germany and in the local context of Berlin—have changed over time due to a series of sociopolitical upheavals. Nonetheless, both in Germany and in other Western countries, too, youth culture per se is usually not central to discussions of cultural history overall. While not a fully marginalized topic either, as there is a good amount of scholarship in this area, discourse of youth history instead may be seen as ancillary to greater discussions of “adult-led” history. Moreover, if this “adult-led” narrative is the one that most people consider History, then it is also what those gatekeepers of historical knowledge deem important and what they will most readily document and archive for posterity.

Not surprisingly, then, archives traditionally have housed official, state records that reflect governmental and institutional power within any given society (Blouin & Rosenberg 2011). Thus, they have not only served as storehouses of state-approved documents and artefacts, but spaces which support the way in which a country or culture would like to be understood in the future. Archives try to ensure a particular national legacy in this way. However, as Assmann (2010) asserts, these repositories of the past also can become sites for debates about history and social memory. In her view, although archives are often used to activate and emphasize a society’s “canonic” history, their latent power is such that a researcher can “awaken” and activate dormant histories that either have been overlooked or differently interpreted in the past. In this way, archives can be radical, transformational spaces used to contest mainstream, authoritative views of history. Similarly, Ketelaar (2012) reads archival research as a liberating experience embedded in the project of meaning-making. This is due to the way social memory can be read anew or contested by the researcher through further cultivation, interpretation, and appraisal of archival artefacts.

These readings of “the archive” are significant when considering the Archiv der Jugendkulturen. While the topic of youth culture history has received some attention more recently, it is still not part of mainstream, “canonic” history and, therefore, permanent spaces dedicated to the preservation of youth culture are few. In this respect, Berlin’s Archiv der Jugendkulturen offers a unique site of social memory and one which asserts that young people’s activities and experiences are worth remembering and recording. Researchers who utilize this space, through their exploration of youth culture, are actively reiterating the cultural value of both this topic and place. Their “assigning of meanings and values to [such] archives—and thus constructing and reconstructing archival heritage—is a political act, an act of memory politics” (Ketelaar, 2012, p. 29). In the context of Germany’s Archive of Youth Cultures, it is made clear that these youth-oriented documents and objects do matter and that the preservation of them is indeed a political act. The archive’s existence proposes that young people’s experiences deserve both more attention and a more central role within German history.

Das Archiv der Jugendkulturen: A Space for German Youth Culture

The reason it also has been important to outline the youth culture history of both Germany and, specifically, Berlin is that the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, with its location in old West Berlin’s bohemian district of Kreuzberg, not only serves as a key destination for information about this history but its presence is also symbolic of it. Moreover, the relationship between youth culture, history, and archival materials can be read as a project of ongoing sociopolitical meaning-making; whereby a country’s social memory is a site of contestation. The following discussion, based on observations of and interviews conducted at the archive during June and July of 2013, aims to not only further define this alternative space and social memory site but also to show how the archive’s collections meaningfully present and embody German youth culture history. This will be done by speaking in more detail to the nature of the archive’s actual collection as well as to its operations and in-house culture.

As mentioned in the introduction, the archive was opened in 1998 by journalist Klaus Farin. Farin was able to do this with a loan that he believed would cover operating costs for 1 year. With these funds, he was able to rent a space in Kreuzberg and employ one full-time staff member. This employee was Gabriele Rohmann, who now serves as the Archiv’s managing director. Farin was motivated to open the archive because he was frustrated with how negatively young people were portrayed in the mainstream media. He believed an independent archive about youth culture could serve as a corrective to negative accounts that heightened moral panic. Through his own research into German youth, Farin had already accumulated a fair amount of documents and various media himself. ⁴ Attempts to donate this collection to libraries or archives were often met with interest in only those materials about radical, right-wing youth. These institutions were not interested in documents to do with, for instance, goths, or other style- and music-oriented subcultures (K. Farin, Personal correspondence, July 1, 2013). Thus, Farin opened the archive with a substantial amount of materials that covered many aspects of German youth culture. In this regard, he saw the importance of edifying German adults about youth more holistically.

While the archive started with this collection, it has grown through the efforts of the archive’s staff, volunteers, and interns. Daniel Schneider, an archive employee, explained to me that individual staff’s personal affiliation with or interest in particular youth cultures or scenes have led to further acquisitions for the archive. For instance, he shared that there was an intern in 2011 who was involved in football (“soccer”) culture and greatly expanded the archive’s collection of football fanzines. According to Schneider:

He was still an active member of the Potsdam-Babelsberg Ultra-Szene [the German name for the hardcore football fan community], which often concerned itself with antidiscrimination. So, the fans he belonged to were very politically active and would host politically-oriented events, exhibits, seminars, everything. He was also a sociologist, so he was interested in such things. He still had some great contacts [in that scene] and was able to get us a lot of fanzines.

Schneider also stated that something similar happened regarding the archive’s hip-hop collection. Because of an intern’s interest and efforts, the archive went from having very little available on hip-hop to suddenly have a rich array of materials (D. Schneider, Personal correspondence, June 26, 2013).

While those with a personal interest in or connection to a subculture or scene may be driven to find sources for the archive, this is not the only way the collection has grown. Author and DJ Arvid Dittmann, who has been affiliated with the Archiv der Jugendkulturen since 1999, once had a more dedicated role in terms of acquiring materials for the library. In the late 1990s, he was editor for the Journal der Jugendkulturen [Journal of Youth Cultures], which is affiliated with the archive. Since the journal included many book reviews, he was able to ask a wide range of publishers for books about youth culture, which were then added to the archive’s library. However, he also added that once more people knew about the archive—its mission and what the kind of materials it was looking for—“many people simply donated some of their [personal] collection or, sometimes, also their entire collection. That’s how it [the archive] kept getting bigger—especially in terms of fanzines” (A. Dittmann, Personal correspondence, July 2, 2013). Thus, the archive’s growth was thanks to donations of those interested in seeing such an organization succeed.

According to Jürgen Bacia and Cornelia Wenzel, who have experience running independent archives and authored the 2013 book Bewegung Bewahren: Freie Archive und die Geschichte von unten (Preserving the Movement: Independent Archives and History from the Bottom Up), these methods for growth are in line with how most independent archives emerge, operate, and survive. In Bacia’s words:

Independent archives must be active in their endeavor of [attaining] materials because they have, at least in part, grown out of some sort of movement… [Those starting the archive] still have good contacts in these movements and, thus, are in a good position to get materials that traditional archives would never have. (J. Bacia, Personal correspondence, June 21, 2013)

Wenzel, who was involved with the German women’s movement, concurs and explains that the archive for the women’s movement began because it was clear that traditional or state-sponsored archives did not have such materials, nor did they really want them: “That’s how it goes for most [movements or scenes] . . . I think that’s exactly how it’s been for youth culture and other groups… those for the environment . . . or the peace movement” (C. Wenzel, Personal correspondence, June 21, 2013). In her estimation, it is clear than any independent movement or non-mainstream group must work from within to establish such DIY institutions (see also Baker, 2015).

The Archiv der Jugendkulturen’s collection, which is well-known throughout Germany and, increasingly, throughout the Western world, is also an excellent resource for fanzines. The thousands of fanzines available to researchers and other interested parties reflect the many subcultural scenes that have existed in Berlin and throughout Germany between the 1970s and 2000s such as mod, goth, and punk. This historical bracketing reflects the fact that print fanzines emerged as the premiere medium for youth subcultures with the advent of punk in the mid-1970s and, then, by the 2000s with the rise of digital culture, transformed into scene-specific websites and “e-zines.” Prior to fanzines, the youth medium of choice in many Western countries during the 1950s and 1960s was the magazine (Atton, 2002; see also Tinker, 2011). This is why the entire run of Bravo magazine was an important acquisition for the archive. Moreover, and considering that the archive was established after Reunification, it is equally important that some issues of youth magazines from the former German Democratic Republic such as Neues Leben (New Life) and Melodie & Rhythmus (Melody & Rhythm), are available as well. A separate section of 60 binders full of articles relating to graffiti culture is also on hand. These materials deftly reflect and represent various aspects of Germany’s postwar youth culture trends and clearly do not favor the darker aspects of the nation’s history. There are some researchers, however, who with special permission are able to access a part of the archive that is usually off-limits for legal reasons. These texts and artefacts of extreme far-right or neo-Nazi groups are not normally available to the general public (A. Brown, 2016; Stegbauer, 2007). They are kept under lock and key in what Daniel Schneider called the “Gift Kabinett” (“poison cabinet”). Thus, while the Archiv does not avoid housing such materials, they are neither easily accessible nor central to its collection.

During the course of my interviews, several employees and volunteers remarked on what they found most interesting about the collection as it is tied to either local or national youth culture history. Andrea Merk was captivated by the way the collection made her think of youth and history more broadly and as connected to her identity as a Berliner. In her words:

It is not just ‘history’ . . . it is not just numbers, facts . . . and I also know as a Berliner that German history and ‘German youth’ [culture] does not start with the Nazis. There was a lot going on before that, in the 20s and 30s. . . . History does not begin on a specific date. (A. Merk, Personal correspondence, July 4, 2013)

Another employee, Andrea Gampfer, studied political science at university with an emphasis on women’s studies and antifascist politics. A longtime resident of Kreuzberg, she discovered and was fascinated with materials related to the district’s Bethanien hospital building, which became one of the city’s first squats in the late 1960s. She shared that her discovery of the squat’s discussion minutes showed a greater variety of youths involved. Instead of suggesting that all of the squat’s residents were from the [university] student movement, as is popularly believed, the minutes uncovered that recent high school graduates learning trades and teenage runaways from children’s homes were also living at Bethanien during this time. For her, this find was “really a treasure” (A. Gampfer, Personal correspondence, July 8, 2013). Overall, the variety of the archive’s collection—aggregating a wide swathe of sources (with varying rarity)—makes Das Archiv der Jugendkulturen a unique and important place. Employee Christian Karschnik put it like this:

The way in which we do it . . . that we cover so many youth cultures in one place is singular. With us, anyone can inform themselves about various youth cultures . . . they can find things all in one place. We hear this a lot—that people have come and spent a long time conducting research here . . . wrote their Master’s thesis here [and] that we really are unique in how we make our materials available [to researchers]. (C. Karschnik, Personal correspondence, June 27, 2013)

While the collection is what draws visitors to the archive, it is worth mentioning that its in-house “alternative” culture is important as well. This means several things: First, those involved in the archive have an ardent interest in topics within youth culture (from leisure activities to politics) or have had involvement with youth subcultures and affiliated music genres at one time. Second, this organic interest in such topics among the staff has lent itself to various affiliated projects that have subsequently come out of the archive—making it more than a library or “storehouse of memory.” While this again speaks the changing nature of archives, it also demonstrates how this space for non-mainstream history (youth culture history) reflects its equally unconventional location (Kreuzberg, the historic heart of subcultural Berlin): It is an alternative space within an already alternative place.

When I asked the archive’s founder Klaus Farin how he identified himself or how he would describe his own youth culture experience, he told me, “Well, I actually come from the leftist scene . . . Antifa and the Peace Movement . . . and I once put together a student magazine, a leftist youth magazine.” In terms of music, he says that when he was a teenager, in the early 1970s, there “wasn’t so much rebellious music [but] Udo Lindenberg was important . . . heavy metal at 14 or 15 years old . . . and then by the late seventies punk and reggae” (K. Farin, Personal correspondence, July 1, 2013). Martin Gegenheimer, who runs a graffiti tour out of the archive, was interested in hip-hop culture as a teenager, and was, for a time, a [graffiti] tagger (M. Gegenheimer, Personal correspondence, July 3, 2013). Daniel Schneider wrote his MA thesis about the Detroit techno scene; a result of already being interested in the music and participating in Berlin’s techno scene himself (D. Schneider, Personal correspondence, June 26, 2013). Arvid Dittmann and Andrea Merk spoke to this aspect of subcultural connection in a different way:

In these comments, it is apparent that these interviewees’ involvement and/or identity as related to a sub- or youth culture varies. In all cases, though, there is acknowledgment that one’s own history with youth culture provides a form of cultural or subcultural capital (Thornton, 1996) that is beneficial to the archive.

This knowledge among those working at the archive can help further educate Germans as to why youth culture is an important aspect of their nation’s identity writ large. As mentioned earlier, Farin hoped the archive would serve as an alternative source of information to counter negative press and perceptions about German youth. While the archive’s collection offers such information, the addition of various events, workshops, and seminars further fosters this process of cultural edification. For instance, the “Culture on the Road” program (2001-present), is a mobile workshop that allows teenage students 14 years or older to experience the styles and sounds of various youth subcultures; to understand them better rather than to make assumptions about how, for instance, goths, punks, skateboarders, or taggers spend their time. As the archive’s webpage for this program explains, it is also further proof that most German youths are creative and looking for fun activities, rather than wanting to be involved in violent, or antisocial behavior:

Youth cultures are exciting, creative, and, as a general rule, colorful—not brown [i.e., fascistic]—even as more and more radical, right-wing and racist elements have become visible. It is in this area of conflict that we present “Culture on the Road.” It offers those things that young people interest themselves in: music, fashion, and leisure time. (http://www.jugendkulturen.de/culture-on-the-road.html)

Experts in the form of subcultural scene members and educators alongside DJs playing genre-appropriate music have brought these workshops to many schools and youth centers around Germany. The program, currently still coordinated by Gabriele Rohmann and another staff member continues to be a popular one for the archive.

While “Culture on the Road” caters to young people per se, other events are intergenerational in appeal and, similarly, can help ensure “that grandma isn’t scared of being attacked when she sees a punk and then runs away [and] so that people don’t think that every skinhead is a Nazi” (M. Gegenheimer, Personal correspondence, July 3, 2013). For instance, Klaus Farin, Gabriele Rohmann, and Daniel Schneider all stated that the “50 Jahre Bravo” (Fifty Years of Bravo) exhibit (2006) was a highlight in this regard—really attracting a diverse and intergenerational audience that would not have necessarily known about the archive previously. Farin believes that the 2008 Keine Zukunft war Gestern—Punk! [No Future was Yesterday—Punk!] exhibit did similar work. This theme of intergenerational understanding was also evident in the now-defunct archive project “Zeitmaschine Bauen!” [Build a Time Machine!], which, in 2011, asked young people to conduct oral history interviews with older people about their past involvement in youth culture (Fricke, 2011). Such programs and exhibits fulfil the goal of the archive in further educating the German public about the nature of youth culture as integral to their nation’s culture and identity. It is not just politics and policy that define a country but also the ways in which young people, who will be the next generation of adults, experience their youth and what aspects of those years stay with them throughout their lives. That is why understanding youth culture past and present can lead to better understanding the history and culture of any nation. That is why an alternative archive and space like this one matters.

Conclusion: Making a Space for Youth Culture History

Today’s interdisciplinary scholarship within youth studies is increasingly reflective of past youth cultures. Whether in sociology, education, media studies, or history, researchers are actively trying to document the ways in which youth culture has evolved and, also, how youth culture reflects and embodies the greater tides and trends of any nation or era. The importance of the Archiv der Jugendkulturen is in its recognition that young people’s creativity, styles, and even their sometimes caustic behavior, are all worth remembering. This assertion is an act of sociopolitical meaning-making that suggests future cultural histories should be more inclusive of youth-led phenomena. This is really only possible when researchers have access to an inventory of youth-oriented materials. As the Archiv’s director, Gabriele Rohmann astutely states:

Archives are quite simply humankind’s memory . . . and if you just dispose of them, only mainstream accounts will remain . . . [or] what mainstream research believes and communicates . . . or mainstream historical accounts. One only has to look at a school’s history textbooks [to see] how much of history is not included. And, that’s where I find that archives still have a very important educational mission. (G. Rohmann, Personal correspondence, July 4, 2013)

The fact that such an archive has appeared first in Germany, rather than in the Anglo-American sphere, speaks to founder Klaus Farin’s belief that such a space would be of significant cultural benefit to both Germany and his hometown of Berlin. Moreover, that this archive is located in Berlin’s longstanding alternative enclave of Kreuzberg underscores not only this district’s reputation (even despite its more recent gentrification), but also the fact that the city itself continues to be associated with bohemianism and avant-garde activities more so than cities such as London or New York.

Though it is clear that founder Klaus Farin anticipated scholars and other researchers would be interested in accessing his sources, he could not have anticipated that youth studies would start to take a historic turn or that his collection might become both intriguing and invaluable to those outside of Germany. As of 2018, the archive is still active, is continuing many of its programs, and now even boasts a digital database for easier researching. Today, the Archiv der Jugendkulturen serves as an important stop and space for all those who want to understand a vital component of both Berlin and Germany’s cultural history.