In Europe

told me how the new era started for him: it was on the day a white car entered his street, full of young girls who passed out a new kind of soup to everyone there: Royco soup from a package. ‘That was unheard of. People were simply given soup to try out, something they'd had to stand in line for only a few years before. Suddenly they were being taken seriously as consumers. A new era started for me that day.’
    It was not only Rob Stolk and my little group of friends who had to find a way to deal with that, it was our parents as well. We, young Western people, had never known anything but prosperity, a prosperity that also kept growing. Older people, on the other hand, were being confronted with a society that was changing so quickly it took their breath away. They still attached great value to a materialist value system, which had proven its worth in times of poverty and war. Their children, who had grown up in safety and luxury, dared to go a step further. For them, bare existence was no longer the issue.
    In this way, the young people's rebellion around the 1960s formed, after the Second World War, a new dividing line in Western European history. One can hardly speak of ‘the’ movement of ‘the 1960s’: in actual fact, the period covered more than a decade and a half, between the release of the movie
Rock around the Clock
in 1956 and the start of the international oil crisis in 1973, with the years 1966–8 as its zenith. What our little group of friends was experiencing – we were, in fact, hardly aware of it – was a high-speed change in mentality, a pounding surf full of currents and counter-currents, a revolt with a character all its own. It was, as meteorologists say, a ‘perfect storm’, a temporary conflux of four or five elements that unleashed hitherto unknown forces.
    First there was the factor of youth. The letters to the editors of
Hitweek
remarked upon it time and again: everyone older than thirty was suspect, everyone older than forty was the enemy. The editors wrote:‘In November 1966, fifty-two per cent of the Dutch population was under thirty. High time to start running things for ourselves.’ The feeling of ‘us against the rest’ was continually underlined in music, clothing, hairstyles, symbols and rituals.
    This generation gap was widened, however, by the cultivation of the phenomenon of ‘youth’ itself: ‘youth’ was no longer seen as a preparatory phase for adulthood, but as the ‘definitive and most perfect stage of human development’. In comparison with our parents and grandparents, we children of the middle class in the 1960s were able to leave home earlier. But, at the same time, all manner of new facilities – student grants, social benefits – shielded us for much longer from a tough, adult life. Many young people, in other words, were able to remain for years suspended in a state of perpetually postponedadulthood. In this way, the universities in particular developed into ‘islands of young people’.
    The second impetus behind this ‘perfect storm’ was the exceptionally international, even intercontinental, nature of the revolt. In every student town from Barcelona to Berlin, one saw the same books in shop windows: Herbert Marcuse (the individual is merely a means of production, divorced from all joy and pleasure), Marshall McLuhan (‘the medium is the message’ and the omnipotence of the modern media) and the new proclamation as gospel of the works of Karl Marx. The London fashion – boots, brightly coloured stockings, jeans and miniskirts – designed by the youthful Mary Quant in her boutique in Chelsea, was to determine the look of young people all over Europe and North America. The same went, from 1962, for the long hair and the music of the Beatles.
    This sense of particular identity was further boosted by a newly won sexual freedom. The very first issue of
Provo
magazine contained a plea for a ‘completely amoral promiscuity’. On 30 June, 1967,
Hitweek
published an extensive dissertation on the question: ‘Where can you make love peacefully, uninterruptedly and with full concentration?'The author advocated the organisation of festive ‘sex-ins’ and the creation of public ‘copulation zones’ to be used by all those who felt the urge. The Pill became the ultimate free ticket, abortion could be no crime, jealousy was an anachronism. At the same time, also thanks to the Pill, baby boomers could keep postponing marriage and parenthood and