Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg

Germans on Drugs is both a groundbreaking study of the creation of youth drug culture in Hamburg during the 1960s and 1970s and an innovative exploration of the paradoxes of modernization. The very processes that allowed West Germany to flourish after the devastation of the Second World War - consumerism, globalization, and democratization - created the conditions under which a new intractable set of social problems could emerge. Placing Hamburg’s drug scene within national and international contexts, Robert P. Stephens examines the ways in which mass consumerism created complicated forms of resistance to state power and cultural norms and highlights the fragility of the physical and cultural boundaries of the nation state in a globalizing world. The book will interest not only German historians, but also those engaged in the history of consumerism, the process of globalization, the culture of the psychedelic age as well as scholars interested in transnational and comparative history, cultural history, economic history, and social history.