Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Every generation sees the world as new. The Sixties generation saw the world as new and young. Most young people in history have entered a world full of older people, where it is their seniors who occupy positions of influence and example. For the generation of the mid-1960s, however, things were different. The cultural eco-system was evolving much faster than in the past. The gap separating a large, prosperous, pampered, self-confident and culturally autonomous generation from the unusually small, insecure, Depression-scarred and war-ravaged generation of its parents was greater than the conventional distance between age groups. At the very least, it seemed to many young people as though they had been born into a society reluctantly transforming itself—its values, its style, its rules—before their very eyes and at their behest. Popular music, cinema and television were full of young people and increasingly appealed to them as its audience and market. By 1965 there were radio and television programs, magazines, shops, products and whole industries that existed exclusively for the young and depended upon their patronage.