Youth culture in global cinema

chapter 2
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the imported rebellion
Criminal Guys and Consumerist Girls in Postwar Germany and Austria
alexandra seibel
In April of 1956, a West German film production company organized a discussion
panel that set out to negotiate a fervent question. The question was
directed toward Berlin’s postwar youth, printed on red billboards throughout
the city: ‘‘Are you really like this?’’ ‘‘This’’ meant deviant, delinquent, or
dangerous.
The actual reason for posing the question at this particular time was the
promotional campaign that had just started for Georg Tressler’s teen movie
Die Halbstarken (West Germany, 1956). Even before its completion, the film
gained special attention with the public, not least because of the title ‘‘Halbstarke’’
and its pejorative association with rebellious youth, considered a social
problem since public awareness for juvenile delinquency—not unlike
the moral panics about juvenile delinquency in the U.S.—had been generated
by media reports which exaggerated youth culture as deviant and dangerous.
Die Halbstarken, produced by the Austrian-born director Georg Tressler,
became one of the biggest postwar box office successes in Germany. It was
released in the U.S. that same year under the English title Teenage Wolfpack
and was reviewed in Variety as follows:
It is the first German pic on juvenile delinquency, one of postwar Germany’s
biggest problems. It makes an obvious attempt to cash in on the
wide popularity of American pix of the same sort, such as Blackboard
Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. It’s an obvious effort to give young
Horst Buchholz, idol of local bobbysox set and winner of the 1955 FederalFilmAward...theopportunity
to come along. Halbstarke (which
means ‘‘Half-Strong Ones’’) has the kids, the basic problem and also the
realistic approach ...,butallsimilarity with its American predecessors