In Europe

between 30–50,000. The scantily-clad girls on the cover are seen nowadays in every underwear advertisement, but created a huge uproar at the time.One reader, Arthur de Groot, reported on 30 December, 1966 that he had been kicked off an Amsterdam bus, number 19, simply for reading his favourite magazine: ‘The whole bus got involved: “scandalous”, “every-where you look” and “young people these days”’. The editor, André van der Louw, later mayor of Rotterdam and minister of culture, recreation and social work: ‘The greasers are out of the picture. Their place has been taken by a new youth.’ I find only one ad in the whole publication: ‘Clearasil dries up acne.’
    The initial phase of the young people's rebellion of the 1960s, the cultural upheaval, was at first a largely British affair. The Beatles made their breakthrough in 1963, followed by the Rolling Stones a year later, and in 1965 the skinny London model Twiggy was gracing covers all over Europe. In that same year, the Italian
Epoca
described the youth of Britain as ‘five million young people under the age of twenty-one who have undermined all the customs and conventions of British society; they have broken through the borders of language and class; they pay a great deal of attention to what they wear, they make noise and rebel against the prescribed restraint and modesty concerning sex. What do they want? Nothing, save to live in this fashion.’
    Two years later, the pivotal point had shifted to Amsterdam. In the Summer of Love in 1967, the city filled with exotically dressed young tourists who slept in the Vondelpark and spent hours lounging around the National Monument on the Dam. Music that summer centred around the new Beatles album
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, 2.5 million copies of which were sold within three months.
Hitweek
wrote: ‘Playing in parks and on squares, just because we're all beautiful and need each other.’
    The mid-1960s was an exceptionally romantic period, perhaps the most romantic since the start of the nineteenth century. But just as there had been worlds of difference between the countless splinter groups of the right and ultra-right in the 1930s, thirty years later the progressive revival also split off into many movements which ultimately had little to do with each other. In Holland, the groups surrounding
Hitweek
and
Provo
, for example, lived in different worlds.
Hitweek
was concerned with music, parties and lifestyle. Provo was a typical urban movement which brashlyaddressed social issues: pollution, traffic jams, the housing shortage, the decay of the old neighbourhoods.
    The students in Paris, in their turn, primarily sought contact with workers and trade unions; their movement was bigger and much more political. German activists, on the other hand, adopted slogans that the French and Dutch students would never have used: ‘Be high, be free! A little terror is the place to be!’ The hippies foraged wherever they could: they mostly shut themselves off from the political and urban world, they chose emphatically for a rather drugged, relaxed and sometimes even sluggish way of life – a clear reaction to the hustle and bustle of the 1950s – and they were often enamoured above all with each other and themselves.
    Were the young people the only ones who, in the words of the Dutch 1960s specialist Hans Righart, granted themselves the luxury of ‘placing the creation of the earthly paradise on the agenda’? Was the ‘teen boom’ the only cause of all this unrest?
    That would be too simple. The 1960s constituted a mentality crisis for both the older and younger generations. Starting from their own pasts and backgrounds, everyone suddenly had to respond to an overwhelming series of changes. And this time the crisis was caused not by an economic depression, as it had been in the 1930s, but by its opposite: unparalleled economic growth throughout Western Europe; a striking increase in leisure time and mobility; an endless series of technological innovations; the mass availability – for the first time – of cars, motorbikes and other luxury articles; a contraceptive pill that ‘liberated’ sexuality from the burden of reproduction after 1962; a decline in the ideal image of America as a result of the war in Vietnam, and the enormous rise of the television and the transistor radio, making young people from San Francisco to Amsterdam feel united in the same rhythm of life.
    Provo Rob Stolk