Underdog kids who just want to do their thing, the uptight authority figures who just don’t get it and want that thing to stop, and the triumphant but tragic finale where the kids get to speak truth to power. What if Pump Up The Volume meant talking hard against the Third Reich?
That’s right, Swing Kids were sent to home video in August of 1993, after a March 5th theatrical release.
People called it Footloose with Nazis, which, when you hear it out loud kind of sounds like a wild pitch to make in a Hollywood boardroom, but the Swingjugend were a very real subculture that formed in Hamburg in 1939. While the state wanted its youth marching in lockstep, these teenagers grew their hair long, wore oversized English-style clothes, carried umbrellas purely as a fashion statement to mimic British gentlemen, and organized their entire social lives around sharing and smuggling contraband jazz records.
Jazz had been banned from German radio as far back as 1935. The regime labeled it degenerate music on strictly ideological grounds, since it was improvisational, individualistic, and created by many Jewish and Black Americans, and embracing it was an affront to racial purity. One Nazi publication called Benny Goodman the “Pied Piper of New York,” and this wasn’t just another oppressive regime giving their enemies clunky nicknames, they meant it as a genuine threat to the state.
The state’s patience for these dancing kids and their disruptive music eventually faded, and on August 18, 1941, the Gestapo arrested over 300 of them in a single raid. They shaved their heads, and the perceived ringleaders were sent to the youth camps. Some of them never made it out. The regime took a bunch of kids who just wanted to dance and turned them into the resistance.
Hollywood took that grim historical reality and overlaid a ‘kids vs the establishment’ story right on top of it. Only if you cut footloose, you could lose your life.
Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division gave it a $12 million budget, and it made barely half of that after the critics eviscerated it. Roger Ebert gave it a single star and wrote, “There are moments here where the movie seems to believe Hitler was bad, not because he mapped genocidal madness, but because he wouldn’t let the Swing Kids dance all night. If Hitler had encouraged the swing clubs, would the Kids have still developed problems with Nazism?”
Ebert was right about the kids’ motivations, he was just wrong to read it as a flaw in the story.
He wanted an Indiana Jones hero who punches Nazis because it’s inherently the right thing to do, but real life doesn’t work like that. Real life is fucked up, basic and stupid. Most people never oppose this type of authoritarian machine on principle. It’s hard to fight an abstract injustice you have little connection to. They only oppose it the day it comes for their stuff, or their crowd.
The records from Nazi Germany back that up in detail. After the war, the public clung to a self-protective myth, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” which roughly translates to “we didn’t know”. Historians have dismantled that defense completely, because the Holocaust was an open secret. Starting in October of 1941, Jewish families were rounded up in daylight and marched through the streets to the train stations while their neighbours stood and watched. Soldiers home on leave brought back stories of the mass shootings behind the Eastern front, wrote them into letters to family members, and some even brought back photos to show their friends. Hitler repeatedly pushed for the annihilation of European Jews in public speeches broadcast on national radio and printed in the daily papers. Those people knew what they were supporting, even if they didn’t want to know.
And when families were deported, the state seized their apartments, their furniture, their clothing, and held public auctions. Ordinary citizens lined up to buy the dining room tables and winter coats of the neighbours they had just watched get marched down the street. To stand in that line, you had to convince yourself those people deserved it, or at least that it wasn’t your problem. If you admitted to yourself that this was criminal, your own participation made you a monster. And no one ever wants to face that in the mirror.
It’s like living in a big ol’ apartment building and ignoring a roaring fire on the ground floor because you’re several stories above it. You can smell the smoke in the hallway, but you feel safe as long as you lock your door and turn up the radio. You only start screaming when the fire starts ruining your record collection.
Christian Bale plays Thomas, and by rights he’s the last kid you’d expect to fall for any of it. His slide begins when his best friend is forced into the Hitlerjugend, and so Thomas signs up voluntarily. The plan is just to fake it, you know, Hitler Youth by day, dancing fool by night. The uniform was just a costume to keep the adults off their backs.
But then the Nazi machine starts slowly absorbing him, but it’s not like it ever asks him to do anything particularly monstrous. Well, not at first. It offers him what any disaffected teenager wants, like structure, approval, maybe a little prestige to hold over his peers, and more importantly, somewhere to belong. You don’t have to sit an angry kid down and force him to read Mein Kampf to turn him into a Nazi, sometimes, you just have to give him a sense of purpose. And maybe a badge.
Bale plays every stage of that descent as a series of small self-serving decisions rather than just siding with the bad guys. And when his instructors teach the boys that informing on friends and family is the duty of a patriot, well Thomas turns his own father in to the Gestapo, and they back him up.
When I first rented the film, I came at it from a very North American angle, where World War II was taught as a heroic rescue mission that rolled straight into a golden age of postwar suburban prosperity. From my vantage point, a movie where American pop culture is the beacon of freedom for German youth feels perfectly natural. I’ve been there myself and I dug it for exactly that reason. It took Mom, with her European upbringing, to point out the missing details. Europe spent those same years digging themselves out of the rubble, rationing into the mid-1950s, and the American aid came with strings attached, with markets pried open for American corporations and the greenback was at the centre of everything. We’ll help you rebuild your country, sure, provided you buy American goods to do it, and never forget who’s in charge. From that side of the Atlantic, a Disney picture claiming the jitterbug helped fight fascism came off like cultural narcissism. The big message about creeping authoritarianism was real, but so was the soft American revisionism that cushioned it.
Nobody queued up Swing Kids expecting a treatise on the banality of evil. You rented the PG-13 tape from Blockbuster, or your history teacher wheeled in the TV cart so you could zone out for the next hour during history class. Your guard was all the way down until the lesson danced right in.
Our job as a person living in a society is to draw the line before these machines come for your stuff. We’re all each other’s stuff. If you look around one day and there’s no one left to defend you when they finally come to your door, it’s because you lived under the mistaken, comfortable impression that the machine was on your side. You thought you were safe because you put on the uniform, or because you stayed quiet and minded your own business. But the machine only ever uses you, thats its nature, and when it runs out of enemies, it turns on you.
We don’t have youth groups marching in the streets anymore. Mostly. We have algorithm-driven echo chambers eager to tell us who the problematic people are, who belongs, and who needs to be cast out. It’s all the same stuff that seduced Thomas, it’s still just the offering of a place in the in-crowd in exchange for a bit of innocent complicity.
Roger Ebert’s review wasn’t really concerned with history, he just wanted a better story. One where the heroes are steadfast and morally superior from the first frame. But that’s just movies. That wasn’t the reality back then, and he should have understood the distinction.
You don’t get to rewrite history because it makes a more satisfying story. -Pop