Capitalism as Provocation—Resistant Youth Scenes in the GDR using Bricolage

In the following article, the tension between a collectivist conception of man and juvenile communalisation in peer groups and scenes is traced using the example of typical bricolages in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) of the 1970s and 1980s. Against the backdrop of a tradition of discourses of social neglect from the early twentieth century to the penally relevant stigma of antisociality and the politically connoted so-called “negative-decadent” appearance, irritations in generational relations were framed as a social problem, if necessary. In the GDR, against the background of the political East-West confrontation, young people's initiatives to materially establish and performatively confirm their participation in global youth scenes could therefore not only convey their desire for participation, but also their stubbornness and political resistance through symbolic recourse to the culture of the “capitalist class enemy”.