From John Savage's Teenagers, 2007, Viking.

One of the most haunting moments in Peter Pan...occurs when Peter waits to be submerged in the Mermaids Lagoon. He hears a "drum beating within him" that repeats the phrase "To die will be an awfully big adventure"Although it was George Llewelyn Davies who actually uttered this famous epigram--in 1900 during the Boer War--it was Barrie who had planted the idea in his head, thanks to the relentless descriptions of dead children and the paradisaical Never Never land to which they flew...
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One of Peter's most fervent fans was an unmarried man in his mid-forties. Robert Stephen Smyth Baden Powell was so taken with Barrie's play that he returned the next day to see it again, recommended it to his friends, and developed a relationship with the actress who played Mrs Darling...
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The new war madness was defined by the pyschologist Charles Myers, who in Feb. 1905 called it shell shock. Doctors quickly noted a cluster of symptoms that "followed the shock of an exploding shell":paralysis, stupor, amnesia, an uncontrollable jerking of the limbs in a demented echo of Nijinsky's prewar dances. In July 1915, the professor of medicine at Oxford recorded an "orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cant imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men...hysterical dumbness, blindness and anaesthesia galore."...
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During the first years of the (first world) war, A Manchester gang called the Napoo practiced their own version of American Indian Lore: They'd creep up behind girls and young women int he street" one of their contemporaries remembered, "then they grab the long plaited hair that hung down he back, that was the style of the day, and with a sharp pair of scissors cut off the plaited hair and run off w. it as a souvenir...the Napoo were readily identifiable by their group uniform of pink neckerchief. With their very public "scalpings" they quickly gained a fearsome reputation...
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As part of the morality drive against the London's debauched nightlife, the young women of "West End Bohemia" were linked with drugs. In a January 1916 column, a journalist named Quex observed the prevalence of "that exciting drug cocaine": "It is so easy to take--just snuffed up the nose, and no one seems to know why the girls who suffer from this body and soul racking habit find the drug so easy to obtain. In the ladies cloakroom of a certain establishment two bucketfuls of thrown away small circular cardboard boxes were discovered by the cleaners the other day--discarded cocaine boxes"
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...Dr Frank Buchman's Oxford Group set up in the early 1920s, instituted an unaffiliated religious revival. With no membership lists or rules, the Oxford Group practiced a new kind of Christianity;it's young mainly middle-class adherents attended weekend house parties where they publicly shared their sins. The sect pursued both moral renament and pacifism as well as its four point doctrine of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love...
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Youth was at the sharp end of national breakdown, as the bellicose nationalism of the previous four years turned inward. German adolescents brought the war home, as they engaged in pitched street battles justified by extremist ideologies. George Grosz remembered how "the youth of Germany grouped itself in loose political unites, marching in shirt sleeves and singing 'Croak Jew, while behind them another group chanted rhythmically:'Hail Moscow!" Conflicts inevitably took place. Many skulls were broken, shinbones shattered, and even occasionally stomachs riddled with bullet holes..."
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This was not an entirely spontaneous outburst. (Valentino)'s sudden death had created a big problem for his studio. With two Valentino vehicles on the marker, The Eagle and the Son of Shiek, united Artists was set to lose many millions of unless the star;s name could be kept alive. It later transpired that the whole mob drama in New York had been stimulated by Frank Campbell and UA publicity man Harry C Klemfuss, who stayed around the clock at the funeral parlor to make sure that everything was going to plan...
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Berlin was well known for its cosmopolitanism, but during the early 1920s the city became an pen house for pleasure seekers for all kinds...as well as the themed restaurants and the jazz dance clubs, there were huge pleasure palaces like the huas vaterladn, which occupied an entire city block and could accommodate six thousand customers per hour. In its Rhineland Wine Terrace, a calm sunny panorama of the Rhine was replaced every hour, by a violent storm that lasted five minutes...Berlin...was the sex capital of the world...the lesbian social clubs, the transvestite balls, and the myriad brothels. The open nature of Berlins nightlife and adolescent male prostate, the Doll Boys an the Line Boys, hanging around hotels and arcades...young Germans flocked to the the capital to join what one former line boy called the "mad carousel line"...
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Born in 1865 Joynson-Hicks, or Jix as he was quickly nicknamed, came from that very generation that had sent young Britian out to die. When he decalred war on sex in general, homosexuality ino particular, and Londons club life, a section of the yong took up the gauntlet with gusto...
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...The schoolboy look taken up by working-class girls might have hinted at homosexuality, but (Harold Acton and Brian Howard) were the real thing. At another time, their brutal effeteness might have passed unnoticed, but in the 1920s, it struck a chord. The slaughter had decimated British masculinity: the rigid physical vigour and martial Christianity of the late nineteenth century had no match for the reality of mass shelling...

True to modernist form, Noel Coward lived up to the worst possible public perception of him, acting out the principal characters role in a sequence of scandalous press stories. In in the sketch, he was pictured in bed "wearing a Chinese dressing-grown and an expression of advanced degeneracy" As he told the Evening Standard"I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens and other evil places. My Mind is a mess of corruption"
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Violence worked. For many of Germany's young, war was perfable to peace..
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...the "wild clique of homeless youths were very much toughs. They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums" they wore a bizarre costume of Chaplinesque bowler hats. "old women's hats with the brims turned up in Amazon fashion adorned with ostrich plumes and medals: with handkerchiefs or scarves in screaming colours: their ears were pierced with pendants or enormous rings, while their leather shorts with surmounted by immense triangular belts also of leather-both daubed with the colours of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as wildfrei (wild and free) or Rauber (badnits)" The wild cliques had begun in the cahoots of the great war and multiplied with postwar inflation and post crash unemployment,. Completely without adult control, these "Ring Youth Gangs" ran wild in the outer Berlin districts linked by a concentric riming of avenues. As their numbers were swelled by thousands of homeless youths, these adolescents--mostly aged between sixteen and eighteen--organized themselves into a tribal society that completely rejected civilized morality. They turned their hatred the society that had abandoned them. The names that he Wild Cliques chose illustrated their "unbridled instinct": Blood of the tartars, Blood of the Indians, Blood of the Cossacks, Wild Crime Girls Terror, Red Apaches, Black Love, Bloody Carcasses, Pirates of the Forest, and Schnapps Guzzlers." With no legal earnings or state support these wildfrei lived by homosexual prostitution car theft and burglary. Comprised of both sexes...the cliques exacted regular financial contributions to support comrades in trouble with the police. Secrete initiation violent sadistic group orgies--exposed the true savagery of the Wild Cliques. Living totally outside society, they were able to give full rein to the rampant adolescent sexuality that successive generations of youth experts and warned against...
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In the Rhine-Ruhr area, resisters from the Socialist Worker Youth, the Red Falcons, the Bunde, and Catholic Youth Groups got together in large, ad hoc delinquent groups called the ... Kittlesback pirates. With size and local knowledge on their side, they openly defied the Hitler Youth, the the extent that the organization became "virtually defunct" in some areas. The most consistent irritant for the Nazis, were the Catholic youth org., which refused to integrate with the Hitler Youth even after they had expressly ordered to do so...
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A contention of prewar groups like the Edelwiess Pirates, these gangs existed throughout industrial Germany, In Dusseldorf, the Shambeko Band and the Killesbach Pirates, In Essen the traveling dudes, in Cologne, the Navaho, in Alberg The Snake Club. The names indicated the kind of life they wanted, freedom from the constant harassment of the Hitler Youth and the police, These wild Cliques and boys and girls traveled around the country, hitchhiking and walking as far as the Black Forest, Berlin or Vienna in direct contravention of police controls and travel restrictions...
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Denounced by the Vichy minister of Education, Abel Bonnard, as "the last vestiges of an individualistic society" The Zazous got their revenge by ridiculing his statement was that Joan of Arc was the perfect example to all young France. This was the perfect example of the crystallised perfume of stupidity: that sent them sourcing the Vichy newspapers for the latest nuggets that they passed around for fun. Inspired "with the spirit of contradiction, we could not stomach the trinity of Travaiil-FamillePartie that they were trying to force upon France. We got energy from the absurdity of the situation..."
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