From rock ’n’ roll to jazz, blues and grunge, musical movements have often been born out of human conflict. The devastation of the Second World War – more than 75 million dead; Coventry, Dresden and Warsaw reduced to rubble; ordinary people consigned to a lifetime of suffering with PTSD – was followed by an unprecedented cultural revolution.
In Britain and America, this meant teenage girls going wild for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, young people experimenting with drugs and finding their spiritual home in music by Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, and an explosion of filmmaking, visual art and literature.
But in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, a generation was being forced to face the horror of their history head-on….
