Maybe that would have been it: dancing, smoking, kissing, fooling around, fashion and music as cool resistance.

It's difficult to imagine today whether one would have participated back in the 1930s, whether the love for wild music instead of marches, for free speech, for a lifestyle beyond racism, uniforms, stew and majority would have prevailed.

In any case, Henri Winkler is a “Swingheini”.

The swear word used by the Hitler Youth is a title of honor for him, and he casually answers the particularly fanatical among them with “Heil Hotler”.

He risks a lot.

Until he is taken to the Gestapo prison.

After the war, at the end of "Swing High", he is sitting in the Alster Pavilion: an English teacher trying to educate a new generation.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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For decades, eyewitnesses spoke to young people about life and survival under National Socialism.

Emil Mangelsdorff, for example, born in 1925, saxophonist and brother of trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, used to paint young people in schools and storytelling cafés in his hometown of Frankfurt what it was like back then, when he was one of those swing boys who secretly listened to jazz , made music themselves, wanted to be free in the middle of the dictatorship.

Mangelsdorff died in January.

Who continues to tell the story when there are no more eyewitnesses?

Maybe characters like Henri, who is of the same vintage as Mangelsdorff.

Even as a young girl, Cornelia Franz, born in 1956 and thus much closer to the time of National Socialism and its aftermath as a teenager today, asked herself what she would have done back then.

When she found out about the swing youth, which had its roots in her hometown of Hamburg and was a particularly large scene, she imagined that this might have been her kind of resistance.

Lucky that only the design of “Swing High” turned out to be black and white.

Otherwise, the author's youthful desire has given rise to a dense and differentiated picture of what life was like for young people under National Socialism.

From fanaticism like that of the Hitler youth Olaf, who goes "patrol", to Henri's childhood sweetheart Inge, who cannot make up her mind and becomes a traitor out of necessity,

Franz develops how difficult it is to make the right decision with her main character, the doctor's son Henri.

His resistance is slowly growing.

He tries to be smart, but his anger, courage and zest for life keep getting him into highly dangerous situations.

The story leaves no doubt about the brutality of even the smallest cog in the machine.

The young communist Robert, with whom Henri meets in a dark cell at the Gestapo headquarters in Hamburg, doesn't see it as resistance at all.

The political dialogues between the two, white on black, subdivide what Franz tells about Henri's life from the summer of 1939 to March 1941.

How political pressure grows at school as a result of the war, how Nazis beat up defenseless young people, to the applause of passers-by, how nuances reveal where someone stands ideologically.

From Polish forced laborers to Jewish classmates, Franz tries to accommodate as many types as possible.

The fact that this doesn't become striking is also due to the fact that Franz manages to capture the tension and literally the sound of the time over long stretches.

Not only with song titles and text quotes from jazz and hits, but also in different sociolects of all these representatives of an epoch: the young people go "hot," the Nazi sports teacher insults the "losers".

And it is not only in the parents' hesitation between regurgitated patriotism and human decency that one senses how close these questions are to the present.

Cornelia Franz: "Swing High - dancing against the storm"

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Roman.Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildesheim 2022. 224 p., hardcover, 16 euros.

From 14 years