“In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” –Bertolt Brecht
When people imagine life under an authoritarian government, they probably don’t picture expressions of joyful nonconformity. The government itself would certainly prefer they do not — fascism, in particular, typically disdains individualism. In his essay “The Doctrine of Fascism,” Benito Mussolini wrote that the ideology “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State.”
This was especially true when it came to young people living under the Nazi regime. The Hitler Youth had existed since 1926, before the Nazis came to power, but in 1939 membership for children ages 10 to 18 was made mandatory by law. While the organization was first and foremost intended to indoctrinate the nation’s young people into the Nazis’ fascist, antisemitic ideology, it also furthered the image of a totally unified society.
But there was a major fly in the ointment of this plan: Multiple youth subcultures weren’t willing to go along with that project and had their own ideas about self-expression. Some of the most distinctive of those movements emerged not from Germany but France, under the German occupation and collaborationist Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. The so-called Zazous proliferated on Paris’s iconic Champs-Élysées, where they smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and partied to swing jazz.
Male Zazous wore oversize jackets and long hair that they slicked back, while the girls wore broad-shouldered jackets, bright red lipstick, and curls or braids they let hang down. The style was partly in imitation of the wide, high-waisted “zoot suit” popular in the US among figures like the flamboyant bandleader Cab Calloway, whose song “Zaz Zuh Zaz” is believed to have inspired the group's name.
That style, however, was also a deliberate, practical middle-finger to the Nazis and the collaborationist regime. To contribute to the war effort, citizens of occupied France were expected to conserve cloth and cut their hair to be made into slippers. Thus, to be a Zazou wasn’t just to defy the state’s idea of who a good French young person should be, it was to actively deprive the state of raw materials.
The Zazous “opposed the regime by ignoring it, which was a political act whether they knew it or not,” the American musician and jazz critic Mike Zwerin wrote in his book Swing Under the Nazis. “Wearing long jackets with wide collars and plenty of pleats is a political provocation during a highly publicized campaign for sartorial austerity.”
After the Nazi occupation mandated that all Jewish people in occupied France wear the yellow Star of David, a number of sympathetic gentiles donned their own stars with alternate messages, such as “Goy,” “Buddhist,” and naturally, “Zazou.”
Isabella Segalovich, who writes and produces videos on history for Hyperallergic, tells Teen Vogue, “One of the things that totalitarianism does, and fascism does, is the totalitarian leaders want everyday people to feel alone and helpless, and putting something on your body to show you are not happy with the state of things is something everybody else can see. And even if they're not in that place to do that, they can feel more strength so they can keep going on.” Segalovich compares the Zazous’ wearing badges to non-Palestinians who have taken up the traditional keffiyeh cloth in solidarity during the war in Gaza.
Across the Rhine River, a similar subculture had developed in Germany: the Swingjugend, or Swing Kids. Like the Zazous, they loved swing jazz and had distinctive style, derived from American and British fashions. This included checked sport coats, homburg hats, and shoulder-length hair for the boys, and “overflowing” hair with lacquered nails and penciled eyebrows for the girls.
While the Nazis aggressively discouraged deviation from the norm — and from German culture in general — jazz was particularly infuriating to them. The genre’s association with Black and Jewish composers led the regime to refer to jazz as “degenerate art,” embodied in an infamous illustration that depicted a racist caricature of a Black musician with a Star of David on his lapel.
Even more dangerous, from the Nazi perspective, the Swing Kids deliberately mocked the Hitler Youth, the national emblem of proper German boyhood. The lyrics to one popular Swing Kid song taunted their “crew cuts and big ears,” and the Kids jokingly greeted each other with “Swing Heil.”
The conservative press saw the cosmopolitanism and swagger of these movements as a threat, with French media accusing the Zazous of acting like American teenagers. “We are having great difficulty in eliminating the venom of Americanism,” the Vichy newspaper La Gerbe wrote in 1942. “It has entered our customs, impregnated our civilisation.” In other words, a regime organized on the basis of strict hierarchies — itself the puppet of a regime organized on racial supremacy — couldn’t thrive if its youth wanted to be more like the kids in a multiracial democracy, even one with its own problems.
A third subculture was less urbane and fashion-forward than the Zazous or the Swing Kids and had more in common with hippies or crust punks. The Edelweiss Pirates, named after a flower many members wore as a badge, were an even more pointed rebuke of the Hitler Youth. In addition to the group's opposing ideology, it also countered the structure of the Hitler Youth by being a loosely organized group of largely working-class kids who wore colorful, outdoorsy clothing and engaged in activities like camping and hiking, which were outside the Hitler Youth’s strict regimentation.
Significantly, the Pirates comprised girls and boys, while the Nazis consigned girls to the Hitler Youth’s female auxiliary, the League of German Girls, to remind them of their duty to the state and the family unit.
These groups may have started out being opposed to the Nazis largely for aesthetic reasons, but as time went on, some of them transitioned to more active opposition to the Nazi state. Some members of the Edelweiss Pirates engaged in resistance tactics like aiding fugitive Jewish people and deserters from the German army.
The fist of the state frequently came down on these subversive cultural movements. The Zazous became the subject of a moral panic in the Vichy-controlled press, which led to frequent beatings on the street and a campaign by the French fascist youth group Jeunesse Populaire Française to forcibly cut the hair of Zazou members. The Swing Kids were repressed even more brutally, with many of their members sent to youth detention camps or, in the case of legal adults and/or Jews, concentration camps.
The Nazis hanged 13 young adults without trial in Cologne in 1944, among them Edelweiss Pirates, in a place that is marked by a commemorative mural today. One of the Pirates killed, Barthel Schink, was recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. He was hanged weeks before his 17th birthday.
In a time when concerns are now running high about authoritarianism in much of the western world, these groups offer a historical lesson that joy is an act of resistance, however small, because it deprives authoritarians of the unified consensus they covet. “We don't see any literal effects of art most of the time and in that exact moment," Segalovich tells Teen Vogue. "But often these things are unseen. I have no doubt that it makes a very large difference in how we can sort of hold on to our humanity and our community during these times.”
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