| 2.2 | Contemporary Background |
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Lois Lowry wrote The Giver in the early 1990s. She had already been a professional writer for nearly 20 years by that time. It is maybe surprising for a writer to have their most famous and critically acclaimed work come in the middle of their careers, rather than in an explosion of energy at the beginning or as a crowning achievement towards the end.
The 1990s and the “end of history”
The early 1990s were a strange time in history. Following the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, many people thought that the world had reached what was called “the end of history”. This was a philosophical idea made popular by Francis Fukuyama 1992 in his bestselling book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s idea, very basically, is that Western-style liberal democracy had “won” the competition between different political and social systems, and that from this point on all people and countries would be increasingly on the same path to shared enlightenment, progress, peace and security. Formerly competing ideologies like Communism and extreme nationalism would become weaker and would vanish into history.
But this view of the world turned out to be premature and optimistic. Within just a couple of years it was clear that rampant nationalism was still widespread, China’s capitalist-Communist hybrid system was becoming an increasing concern for Western nations, and globalised terrorism had a historic comeback in the public eye with al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. By the turn of the millennium Fukuyama’s theories seemed quaint and lost to history.
What is true of the period, however, is that with the end of the Cold War a universal sense of dread and doom was suddenly gone – the world no longer seemed to be a potential battlefield between nuclear-armed superpowers representing capitalism and Communism. This sense of dread and monolithic antagonism had fuelled a lot of pop culture, from British pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s song Two Tribes (1984) to the spy novels of John le Carré and successful, but deeply chauvinistic America = good / Russia = bad films like Red Dawn (1984) and Rocky IV (1985). With the collapse of the Russian “evil empire” (a term used by US President Ronald Reagan in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union[2]) and the apparent “end of history”, pop culture changed as well.
It became much less political: the eras of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979–1990, and Ronald Reagan, US president from 1981–1989, were both very conservative and pro-capitalism. Their administrations were both extremely polarising in their respective countries, and triggered energetic subcultural and alternative culture movements, including punk, US hardcore punk, the social-realist cinema of filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and a general willingness and need for art and pop culture to engage actively and confrontationally with politics. With the end of the era of the Cold War and Cold Warriors like Thatcher and Reagan, this political energy vanished from pop culture, and an era of curiosity, fusion, and non-political hedonism began.
Movie scene from Rocky IV (1985) with Dolph Lundgren as Soviet boxer Ivan Drago. © picture alliance/Everett Collection
Pop culture: Hybridisation and self-awareness
In pop culture, the 1990s saw the beginning of a widespread process of fusion and hybridisation. This occurred in cinema, music and literature. Previously underground or subcultural musical genres became increasingly mainstream – this was most dominantly and lastingly true of hip hop, which in the 1980s was seen by the mainstream as being a gimmick or an underground phenomenon, and is now possibly the single most popular pop music genre in the world. But various forms of heavy metal/hard rock and techno/electronic music were also crossing over into mainstream awareness, creating the alternative rock boom and the rise of techno-pop crossover dance music. Bands like Nine Inch Nails hybridised almost everything that had come before, combining pop and the experimental underground of Industrial and electronic music with heavy
