Maura Kelly

The Germans have resuscitated the long-running debate over xenophobia in their country and the best way of dealing with it. Increased media attention has helped illuminate an issue that had largely disappeared from the front pages in recent years, if not from Germany’s streets. In recent months there have been Adriano’s murder June 11; a July bombing in D|sseldorf that injured 10 immigrants, including six Jews; and innumerable far-right incidents, including neo-Nazi demonstrations and the physical and verbal harassment of immigrants.

Not surprisingly, violence is at its worst in eastern Germany, where the economy collapsed following reunification in 1991 and the unemployment rate is hovering at a stratospheric 17 percent, a figure almost double that in the west. Against the backdrop of soaring unemployment, 1.5 million asylum seekers have flowed into Germany since 1993, intensifying the nationalist sentiment that spawned the recent violence.

Many Germans, including prominent politicians like Secretary of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer and members of Germany’s ruling Social Democratic party, are dismayed by the latest incidents, saying they damage Germany’s standing abroad and jeopardize foreign investment. Fischer recently lamented to the New York Times that the current wave of xenophobia reminded him of the “twilight zone” between democracy and German totalitarianism during his youth, telling the paper that it would take at least a generation and a half to eliminate rightist extremism in the former East Germany.

Despite the skepticism of Fischer and others about a short-term embrace of diversity in Germany, Berlin is pushing ahead with the launch of a $35 million education effort aimed at dispelling racism. And Schroeder has begun a two-week tour of the former East Germany. He will visit a makeshift memorial at the spot in Dessau (better known to Americans as the birthplace of Bauhaus and modernist architecture) where Adriano died and rally former East German citizens against the neo-Nazi menace and racism.

More dramatically, on Aug. 11, Germany took the first steps toward banning the right-wing National Democratic Party (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands or NPD), a group that plays a key role in mobilizing young skinheads and promotes blatantly racist and nationalist rhetoric that many believe helped fuel the recent attacks.

In early August Bavaria’s interior minister, G|nther Beckstein, had called for the NPD’s abolishment. (Under the terms of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s constitution, the federal constitutional court can abolish any party that threatens democracy within the country. “Parties which, by reason of their aims or the conduct of their adherents, seek to impair or destroy the free democratic basic order or threaten the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany will be considered unconstitutional,” Article 21 of the Grundgesetz states.)

The government appointed a group of legal experts to assess whether NPD posed a constitutional threat. If the committee — which will announce its findings in October — determines there is enough proof to go forward, the government will ask the constitutional court to consider abolishing the party.

“It is not enough that a party is hostile to the constitution,” explained Reiner Lingenthal, spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, describing the burden of proof the government must meet before it can ban the party. “There must be proof that it is actively and aggressively fighting against our constitution.”

“It is crucial for us to know whether or not the NPD is dealing with those who are committing anti-Semitic [and anti-immigrant] crimes, attacking and murdering people,” Lingenthal continued.

Of course, that kind of violence is not openly advocated by the party. Instead, NPD leaders couch what many would perceive as racist statements in classic isolationist chestnuts. In a recent interview with the New York Times, party leader Udo Voigt said, “We support the separation of races, but we don’t say that one race is superior to another. There is no justification for banning us.”

Sascha Rossmiller, 27-year-old chairman of the NPD’s youth organization, the Young National Democrats, recently told Salon News, “The NPD has always put a great distance between itself and people who have used violence to their political ends.”

“The NPD stands for community for people in every country. We stand for people who are against foreign infiltration because we think that real cultures can only develop if there is a separation between countries. With a mixed population, you have problems between the different groups: social problems, language problems, education problems. We also stand against global capitalism — against all the countries coming under the so-called globalization,” Rossmiller asserted.

Asked for his opinion about efforts to link the NPD to the right-wing attacks, either physically or ideologically, Rossmiller got defensive. “If a society has more and more problems, it will get more and more violent,” he said. “The NPD has said for years that if [German government officials] go on with their policy of foreign infiltration, you’ll get racial problems.”

“It is only the political establishment, not the NPD, that is responsible for violence,” he continued. “They have gone too far with the policy of foreign infiltration. People come here from poorer countries to improve their standard of life. But Germany can’t give any longer. It is not possible for us to be the social charity for the whole world.”

Returning to allegations of NPD’s involvement in the attacks, Rossmiller offered terse words for the government: “The political establishment knows the NPD has always been against violence and they won’t have a chance to win if it goes to the court.”

But, if senior party members are found to belong to right-wing groups that espouse violence, the government could succeed in shutting down the NPD. “We need to show that the inner circle is linked to the right-wing violence,” explained Lingenthal.

Despite the recent high-profile incidents, there is no evidence that xenophobic attacks are more frequent or severe in Germany than in the rest of Europe. In fact, unlike Austria, Belgium and France, no anti-immigration party in Germany has been able to mobilize a significant share of the popular vote. The European Union even went as far as imposing diplomatic isolation on Austria earlier this year after Joerg Haider’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FP) was voted into its government, and hinted at expulsion for Belgium because of the FP’s strength there.

Yet it is also true that Schroeder and other German politicos are painfully aware that their country’s anti-immigrant image abroad — especially in places like India — needs improvement to attract much-needed foreign workers who could help the country better compete in the global economy, particularly in the Internet sector. To this end, the government initiated a program in August that will grant five-year work visas to about 20,000 information technology experts; many of the visas will go to applicants from India and Eastern Europe.

“In Germany, it is important that the state and society make it clear that right-wing extremism is not acceptable,” said Lingenthal. “This ban would be a clear sign to the people who believe in right-wing extremism and to foreigners that we do no tolerate neo-Nazis in Germany.”

But the NPD accuses the government of ulterior motives. Rossmiller claims that Beckstein, the Bavarian interior minister, called for the federal ban out of anger after a German court knocked down his attempt to forbid an NPD party congress in Bavaria. “I think it was an act of personal revenge,” Rossmiller said.

As Rossmiller sees it, power-hungry German government officials are intimidated by the recent growth of the NPD, and want to stamp the party out before it becomes a threat to their political prominence. “More and more people are joining the NPD and [the government] can’t accept a national opposition,” he said.

Still, the NPD doesn’t seem poised to become a formidable political force any time soon. The party captured only .03 percent of the popular vote during the last general election. NPD’s 6,000-strong membership is far from mainstream when one considers there about 82 million people living in Germany, and more than 7 million are foreigners. Nonetheless, the NPD has become stronger and better organized in recent years under Voigt’s charismatic leadership — membership has grown from 3,500 in 1996.

But NPD and other extremist parties still have a long road to travel before they become established in mainstream politics. Of the six parties presently represented in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, none are affiliated with right-wing extremism. The successes of the far-right German People’s Union and Republican parties have so far been limited to seats captured in regional elections.

Of course, there are bigger questions at play in the debate over the rights of the NPD and other far-right political groups. Free speech absolutists have long been critical of the German constitution, written shortly after World War II, for being too influenced by the chilling legacy of Hitler to be truly democratic.

“If parties are banned in a democratic society, then it is no longer a democratic society,” Rossmiller pointed out. “That’s demo-crazy,” he quipped.

This is not the only instance of Germany coming under fire for its controversial interpretation of free speech or religious association. Recently, for instance, civil liberties organizations criticized the German government’s efforts to shut down Web sites it accused of hatemongering.

Even more embarrassing, U.S. trade officials alleged in a report to Congress that the German government unfairly discriminates against Scientologists. The Church of Scientology is not recognized as an official religion in Germany, where the group has been monitored for anti-constitutional activities. A German Embassy statement issued around the same time stated that “because of its experiences during the Nazi regime, Germany has a special responsibility to monitor the development of any extreme group within its borders.”

The government doesn’t take its decision on whether to ban a political party lightly. In fact, according to Stefanie Schmal of Potsdam University law school, only two parties have ever been banned: the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei or SRP) in 1952 and the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) in 1956. Both were found to promote political policies that were explicitly anti-democratic and to encourage anti-democratic behavior by their members. By the time it was banned, the SRP was already promoting the “f|hrer’s principle,” a phrase, inspired by Hitler, that granted authoritarian powers to the party’s leader. The KPD, meanwhile, planned to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“The ability to ban parties is based on the conclusion we’ve drawn from our own history,” Lingenthal said. The clause permitting the ban of far-right parties was given a nod of approval by the most influential 20th century democracies: the French, British and American forces who occupied the Federal Republic of Germany after the war.

Christian Jetzlsperger, a political scientist at Erfurt University, has said a ban “won’t accomplish anything at all. The neo-Nazis aren’t going to stop using violence just because the party is banned.”

Yet: “Many radical-right culprits believe they are acting in consensus with the population,” German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin recently explained, describing the motivation behind the ban. “We must destroy [that] belief.”

But as with most things, the best solution to the neo-Nazi problem may lie in a moderate approach, like the one advocated by Erhard Denninger, a professor of public law and legal philosophy at Frankfurt University. In an open letter published by the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung on Aug. 22, Denninger wrote that banning the NPD, which plays such a small role in the political system, would only consecrate its supporters as heroes. He goes on to say that a better remedy would be enforcing strict punishments against hate crimes and banning right-wing organizations, rather than an entire political party.

After all, Denninger notes, it is the responsibility of the German government to protect every one of its citizens — including both foreigners and right-wingers — from discrimination.

Jumping off a bridge, when you happen to be on the bridge in question, was different. I’d been weeping the whole way up the cyclist path, but it wasn’t until I reached the top that the idea took on a startling power. As I stood there in the darkness, watching the cars pass beneath me, I suddenly felt like a real threat to myself. If I lost my balance and fell off the beam into the traffic before I made it all the way out, the impact surely wouldn’t kill me, but would a car? If I did jump, what would happen after I hit the water? Would I break so many bones that I’d die immediately? Or would I drown?

I’d never thought of myself as seriously depressed. Sure, my childhood had been unhappy — my mother died of cancer; my father and I fought bitterly and constantly; I spent four months of my freshmen year of high school hospitalized for anorexia — and I’d evolved into a brooder. But by my early 30s, mental illness seemed long gone. I had some “issues” to “work through” — I had problems getting into healthy romantic relationships, I made impractical career moves, I refused to give up on certain unrealistic dreams — but hey, that describes half of New York.

My real problem, I would’ve told you, was exhaustion. Not that I didn’t have time to sleep; it’s that I couldn’t. My insomnia started eight years before, after one of my best friends killed himself on his 28th birthday. (He’d taken Ecstasy for the first time, which led to a manic fit, followed by a severe crash.) In the following weeks and months, I would wake up in the middle of the night, haunted by questions: Why had he done it? Why hadn’t he told me what he was thinking?

Eventually, I came to terms with his death, but my sleeping never returned to normal. The slightest sound could stir me, and I’d be up till dawn, or I’d awake suddenly after six or seven hours, even eight, feeling grainy and exhausted but unable to go back to sleep. I did all the things that are supposed to improve sleep quality: I used a white noise machine, earplugs, an eye mask. I exercised regularly, maintained a regular sleep-wake schedule as best I could, quit booze entirely, and even gave up caffeine (for a while). Nothing worked. I plodded through my days with a strange hangover — an achiness, like I was always on the verge of getting the flu. Sleeping pills were only a temporary relief. Both Benadryl and melatonin worked, but left me in a groggy daze.

My exhaustion shaped — or mangled — my life. I became flaky about meeting up with friends. I’d say yes to social outings, then bail at the last minute. Whenever I managed to get involved with a guy, I rarely spent the night at his place; if he stayed at mine, I pulled out the love seat. Luckily, I was able to work as a freelance writer, because after a few years, I couldn’t imagine ever having a 9-to-5 job again. Often, I simply could not make it through the day without napping. It’s embarrassing to remember all those awful customer service calls, where I’d try to explain whatever computer problem or Internet issue I was having, only to break down in tears while the disembodied voice on the other line tried to calm me down. I’d cry on the mat at the gym or on the subway platform because I felt so tired that trying to retain my posture and composure till I got home seemed daunting. On one occasion, I fell apart in front of my former landlord, who took me in her arms and gently suggested Prozac. I appreciated her compassion, but depression wasn’t my problem. Fatigue was.

By the time I found myself contemplating diving off the edge of Manhattan, I felt out of options: I’d tried everything to no avail. A life of chronic debilitation just didn’t seem worth living. The straw that broke the camel’s back was absurdly minor: That night, an ex, who I’d assumed would try to reconcile with me eventually, told me he had a new girlfriend. I didn’t want to get back together with him but I’d been propping myself up with the idea that he loved me, and even minor setbacks like realizing he didn’t required more energy than I had. How could I possibly slog through another half-lifetime of them?

Before that day, being at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge had lifted my spirits during some of my bleakest moments. I loved the urban majesty: the red-pink sun sinking between Jersey and downtown Manhattan; the yellow moon that sometimes hangs so low over Brooklyn it’s nearly hidden among the building tops; the train crawling along the Manhattan Bridge like some outsize glowworm. To stand on that bridge was to feel on top of New York City — for once!

But on that terrible night, life didn’t seem full of grandeur and possibility; it seemed relentless. Directly in front of me was a way out. Knowing how exhilarated I normally felt there made me realize I wasn’t in my right mind; so did the sense of terror that dominated some part of my consciousness. Moved by my body more than my brain, I pushed my bike down to street level, too vertiginous to ride. When I got home, I knew I was clinically depressed.

The next day — feeling furious with my shrink for letting me get to such a scary low — I paid an emergency visit to my physician. After I told her what had happened, she prescribed an antidepressant, explaining my fatigue was probably either caused by, or a symptom of, depression.

After a few weeks on Celexa, I found myself sleeping remarkably well and feeling healthier, happier and more stable than I had in nearly a decade. All sorts of things began to seem possible again — going away on vacation, working for hours at a stretch, making social plans in advance. The one negative side effect: Though I was eating less and exercising a bit more, I was rapidly gaining weight. So my doctor and I experimented with a number of alternatives till we found a good medication cocktail; now, I’m taking Wellbutrin along with five milligrams of an herbal supplement called 5-HTP (a precursor to melatonin, a neurochemical the body makes to put itself to sleep) before bed. I haven’t felt so good since high school.

I’d never attached any real stigma to psychopharmaceutical drugs. I appreciated how crucial they were for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and saw firsthand how much antidepressants had helped my father after decades of mood swings. All the same, I had the impression that most of the people I knew who were taking them didn’t really need them; they all seemed so well-adjusted! (Funny how that works, isn’t it?) Now I appreciate just how crucial they can be for functioning. And when I saw the reports that they don’t help cases of mild depression, all I could think was, “Welp, mine must’ve been serious, because they sure work for me.”

This week marks two years since my night on the bridge. And though I still have occasional dreary moments, offing myself no longer seems appealing, not now or 10 years down the road. I don’t cry uncontrollably in public anymore. I can take the subway without fear I’ll have an emotional breakdown somewhere underneath New York City. I can depend on my body to come through for me and restore itself when darkness falls. My morale is sturdier, too. When I bike over the Brooklyn Bridge these days, I don’t feel fear. I feel happy. I feel alive.

In early 2012, Free Press will publish the book that Maura Kelly is co-writing, tentatively titled, “Jane, Don’t Err: What Great Literature Can Teach Us About Moby Dickheads, Brief Wondrous Relationships, and Love in the Time of Internet Dating.”

People might have been wondering the same thing about me just a few months ago, when I was an otherwise young-looking 29-year-old woman with a head full of prematurely gray hair.

How had I ended up with such a unstylish, unflattering look? The journey to bad hair started for me when I was only 10 and my first two or three silver hairs showed up, sticking out like desperadoes against the rest of the law-abiding jet-black citizens of my scalp.

The rogue follicles were exotic enough at that age that I was a schoolyard celebrity for a few days after discovering them. A more significant settlement of unpigmented tough guys put down roots during my freshmen year of high school, around the same time that I spent four months in the hospital getting over a bad case of anorexia. When I finally got out of the kiddie psych ward — with 40 extra much-needed pounds and a thin but distinct line of white growing out from the right-front corner of my hairline — I didn’t want to ever go back again. But the only way I could stay free (and, I realized, not be totally miserable for the rest of my life) was by maintaining a healthy weight. To do that, I forced myself to make peace with the body and looks I had been born with. So I wasn’t going to try and look like anyone else: not Alyssa Milano, the teen star of “Who’s the Boss?” whom all the boys I knew had a crush on, nor the twiggy models in the New York Times “Fashions of the Times” magazine, who I thought were so perfect. From then on, I was going to be perfectly honest with myself and the world about my appearance. After all, wasn’t truth beauty, beauty truth?

As a consequence of my willful reprogramming, I decided early on I would never dye my prematurely aging hair, even though by the time I was in college I had a full-blown white stripe in the right-front corner of my head. Though that was long before the hair-streaking craze hit, I thought my look was super cool: rock star, badass. Sometimes I even thought it marked me as a survivor, or someone destined for greatness, like being able to pull the sword from the stone did for Arthur. And my skin was in such great peaches-and-cream shape then that my hair actually accentuated my youthfulness. Another unexpected thing: All the guys I knew told me how hot they thought my do was — calling into question the conventional wisdom that men hate gray. Just more proof, as far as I was concerned, that Keats was right and that the accepted rules of behavior were worth challenging.

By the time I was halfway through my 20s, the gray took up more real estate on my head. Like a black-and-white Mrs. Robinson, I had three or four streaks by then, but they were still attractive enough that people regularly asked me if I had them professionally done. Around the same time, I accepted a job in the news department of Glamour magazine. There, I was happy to be working on stories about inspiring women who fought back against their rapists, helped impoverished kids get out of the ghetto, and battled Congress to get stricter gun-control laws. But I was also very careful not to drink any Kool-Aid: I told myself when I started (somewhat ridiculously and self-importantly, I’ll admit) that if anyone at Glamour ever even hinted I should change my hair, I would quit! (No one ever did.) Along the same lines, I doubted that the makeover candidates that appear just about every month in the pages of Glamour experienced any deep or lasting benefits; I pooh-poohed the idea that any superficial adjustment would make anyone truly happier with herself. Meaningful change needs to come from within, right?

Sure. But by the time I turned 29, I was much less enamored of my hair than I had been during my days as a college student. I was predominantly gray then — less punk chic like the Bride of Frankenstein and more Church Lady dumpy, like Barbara Bush. Though men were still regularly complimenting my hair, they had started saying they admired me for daring not to dye, rather than telling me it looked sexy. (Yes, I want to be respected, but I also want to be lusted after!) Worse, they started saying I reminded them of their mothers, who were graying naturally, too — as if that was the biggest compliment in the world. Clearly Oedipal! I’d tell myself. But it wasn’t much consolation.

A far bigger downer, though, was simply looking in the mirror every morning. It had become too much like flossing my teeth: an unavoidable chore. My skin had lost the rosy luminescence of youth, and all the white hair surrounding my face nullified any speck of color left; my reflection was washed-out, tired, haggard. I was like a reverse Dorian Gray: The image I saw appeared years older than I was.

This is the way you look now, like it or not, and you need to accept it, I would tell myself, like some puritanical and slightly cruel matriarch, relying on my old philosophy. Under its terms, dyeing was not an option; I had too deeply inculcated myself with the idea that coloring my hair would qualify as a lie and worse, an act of self-hatred — that covering my gray would be on a par with blanketing my “true” self. If I did it, wouldn’t I once again be trying to look like someone else, as I had when I was anorexic, rather than myself?

Then, last fall — after three people overestimated my age, horrifically, by 10 years, and a well-intentioned Indian man told me I looked like a movie star (Richard Gere!) — Glamour’s fabulous and gorgeous style editor, Suze Yalof, sent around an e-mail asking if anyone knew a great hair makeover candidate. Rather than deleting her message right away as I had similar ones in the past, I kept it in my inbox. Living with my ugly hair was making me totally miserable, and if I could see what it looked like with color for free, why not try it out?

After a week passed, I decided I had nothing to lose and offered myself up to the makeover gods. The minute I called Suze to tell her I’d do it if she’d have me, she said, “Oh, good! I love your style, but I’ve been dying to get my hands on your hair for a long time.” (I think it’s fair to say there was no pun intended.)

The day before the big transformation was going to take place, I freaked. I don’t think I want to do this, I thought. What if I hate it? My hair had been my identifying characteristic for so long, like Harry Potter and his glasses. What would I be without it? Would I ever stand out in a crowd? Would I lose the power of my personality as Samson had lost his strength? And even if I liked it, would I ever be able to make it to the beauty salon once a month to maintain it? I could barely make it there twice a year to get my layers cut.

I called Suze in a panic, begging her to let me out of my commitment, but she laughed: If the makeover and photo shoot scheduled for the next day didn’t happen, Glamour would be out of a story it was depending on for its next issue, and a ton of money — easily thousands of dollars, by my estimate — would go down the drain. I asked if we could use a rinse instead of the permanent stuff — thinking myself incredibly helpful, I even offered to pick it up at Duane Reade — but Suze said washout color wouldn’t be dramatic enough for the camera.

So the next day, I, er, let the dye be cast. In a huge West Village brownstone that doubled as a photo studio, Suze, her makeover team and I decided on my “new look” while the photo crew took my “before” shots. The cameras kept clicking as I was dyed and highlighted by Emilie, a top colorist for John Frieda Salon in New York; shorn and blown out by Frieda creative consultant Richard Marin; and had my face painted by makeup artist to the stars Mally Roncal. When they were finished, I had been transformed: Where once I had salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, I now had a chestnut base with golden highlights, long bangs, and “texturized” layers. Everyone around me was oohing and aaahing, and — silently — so was I. I was genuinely amazed and absolutely thrilled: I was still me — just younger looking and prettier than I’d been in a long time. And, frankly, I finally felt as though the babe I looked like on the outside matched the babe I felt like on the inside. I felt a bit like Dorothy newly landed in Oz — except it wasn’t the world that suddenly had color, but me!

And I’m continuing to enjoy the hell out of my new mop. I get a lot more second (and even third) looks now; the number of men who ask for my number has quadrupled; and this jaw-droppingly hot 21-year-old from my gym suddenly asked me out for drinks. (When I told him I had been working out there for at least a year, he said, “Why didn’t I ever notice you before?” Hmmm. I wonder…) Once they recognized me, my family and friends all said they loved the look, too — even the ones, and there were plenty of them, who had voted against the change.

The only person who said he liked me better before — a security guard who works in my office building — told me he had always found it refreshing that I had been bold enough to look so unusual amid the mass of perfectly coiffed, stick-thin, stiletto-heeled fashionistas who work in my building. (Condé Nast, the company that owns Glamour, also owns Vogue, Allure, Lucky, Self, GQ, Vanity Fair and a number of other top glossy magazines.) When I mentioned this to Suze, maybe with a bit of wistfulness, she said: “But was being the poster girl for coolness worth the sacrifice of not looking as great as you do now?”

And it wasn’t, I realized; I didn’t want to be a Rebel Without a Hair Color anymore. I was sick of being miserable just to prove some point.

And what had the point been, anyway? Oh, right: that I needed to be content with the body and looks that were my birthright — a smart move back when I’d been treating myself like a concentration camp prisoner. But dyeing my hair isn’t in the same league as starving myself. It doesn’t threaten my life or health. It doesn’t cause me an ounce of unhappiness. In fact, it does the opposite — and the thing that had been paining me was not dyeing my hair.

I realized that depriving myself of color was pretty similar to withholding food from myself: a practice that I had taken too far, that had turned into a punishment, that had warped my self-perception. When I was anorexic, nothing was ever enough: no matter how much weight I lost, I never felt satisfied with my appearance. Now the only thing I can’t get enough of is checking myself out in the looking glass.

There were plenty of other movies that came out around the same time that I liked. “The Outsiders” (1983) made me incredibly melancholy before I even knew what the word meant. “Return of the Jedi” (1983) and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) thrilled me with their epic tales, and “Ghostbusters” (1984) amazed me with its ingenuity and special effects. “Footloose” (1984) made me sick with the desire to be beautiful and sexy and daring like its stars, Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer. And then there was “Risky Business” (1983). All I remember about that one is the nudity, which made me, a strictly raised Catholic girl, feel guilty and confused. But four John Hughes movies — “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” (1985), “Pretty in Pink” (1986) and “Some Kind of Wonderful” (1987) — were more than entertainment for me. They were comforting and smart but also funny and cool, intimate and personal without being uncomfortably sappy.

Hughes dropped out of the University of Arizona after only a year and began working in advertising, traveling to New York regularly to see clients. During one of these trips, he met some editors from National Lampoon, who eventually asked him to join their team. It was during his time as a Lampoon editor that he made the break into films. In 1978, Hollywood took a Lampoon story and turned it into the hugely successful frat-party movie “Animal House.” Sensing they’d stumbled upon a gold mine, the big Los Angeles film companies raided the Lampoon offices, signing movie development deals with a number of people there including Hughes. In 1983, a short piece he’d written, “Vacation ’58,” was translated into the huge screen hit “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” The same year, Hughes had his second big winner with a script called “Mr. Mom.” The movie, based on Hughes’ own experience, starred Michael Keaton as a stay-at-home dad.

Around the time that “Mr. Mom” came out, movie industry executives were figuring out that teen dramedies could be big winners, thanks to the success of movies like 1982′s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Risky Business.” Hughes caught on quickly and in 1984 parlayed his early successes into a deal that allowed him to direct a quirky script he’d written about a day in the life of a suburban Chicago girl whose family forgets her 16th birthday. “Sixteen Candles” featured unforgettable performances by Molly Ringwald in the lead role and Anthony Michael Hall as the geek.

What set “Sixteen Candles” above others of its genre was that it was so real; the primary characters were like the kids you’d known since pre-K. Ringwald was 15 years old during filming, with the soft face and figure of someone that age. Her character, Sam, was dorky and vulnerable enough that we could relate to her, but also cool enough that we were proud to, as when she tells herself in the mirror on her birthday morning, “You need 4 inches of bod and a great birthday.” I needed some inches myself as I sat watching the film in the dark theater, my mouth full of metal, squinting because I refused to wear the geeky glasses I needed so badly. Sam was so hip she had bangle bracelets and a flouncy skirt that another arbiter of ’80s chic, Madonna, would have been proud to wear; but it was also an outfit that I thought I might be able to pull together with babysitting money and a little time at the mall.

Hughes’ movies made the awkward angst of adolescence funny and bearable without romanticizing or glorifying it. And Hughes did it best in “The Breakfast Club,” about a group of high school students forced to spend morning detention together. As we learn in the opening voice-over, the students are seen by adults, their peers and maybe even themselves “in the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions [as] a brain, a prom queen, a basket case, a jock and a criminal.”

Now that “The Breakfast Club” has become a teen movie classic, it’s hard to believe it was ever viewed as a commercial risk. But before the movie was released film critic, Gene Siskel asked: “Will today’s young audience sit still for a film that’s virtually all talk? Do teenagers want to see an adolescent ‘My Dinner With Andre’?” Siskel wasn’t the only one who knew it was a gamble. Hughes himself warned his actors that the movie might bomb but that if it did they would have nothing to be ashamed of. “We have made a movie that will be around for a long time,” he told Siskel. “Even if it doesn’t do any business, we have documented a slice of life that normally doesn’t get documented in the movies. It will live on … We can be proud of this.”

“The Breakfast Club” is basically plotless, an action-free drama about abstract themes like teen identity and social dynamics. As it begins, principal Vernon — the embittered detention underlord, the classic authority figure — tells the kids to write an essay describing who they think they are. His assignment is an echo of that favorite adult demand: “Who do you think you are?” It’s a rhetorical question that usually implies some version of the answer “You’re just a kid. What do you know?” But any kid who’s asked knows the real, often unspoken, answer: “I know what I experience; I know I am someone you don’t understand.” The characters seem to forget about the assignment until the last few minutes of the movie, yet they spend the entire detention period exploring the topic. They define themselves as part of certain cliques, as members of certain clubs, as children of difficult parents, as different from each other, as similar to each other.

For these kids, what goes on at home is a lot more significant and formative than what happens at school. And “The Breakfast Club” recognizes all kinds of domestic dysfunction and child abuse, from the subtle to the blatant. Judd Nelson’s character, Bender, has his dad to thank for a cigar burn on his arm; and though the moment when Bender announces this to the room is almost maudlin, Nelson’s performance and a challenge from Andy (Emilio Estevez) that Bender prove it make the scene snap with tension and rage. The effect is at least as visceral when Andy cries as he talks about his dad’s relentless pressure on him to be the best, and when Andy asks Alison (Ally Sheedy) what her parents do to her and she whispers, “They ignore me,” as tears well up around the thick black eyeliner she wears. By talking about their parents, the kids relieve some of the pressure and pain they feel. They also mature a little by recognizing they are not the only ones who have unhappy homes — and that their pain is helping to make them the people they are.

Hughes was able to capture the youth Zeitgeist on-screen in part because he talked to the teenage children of colleagues and relatives, asking them what they thought of his scripts and generally treating them like underage consultants. When Siskel asked him what he had observed about his young friends, Hughes said, “Many filmmakers portray teenagers as immoral and ignorant with pursuits that are pretty base … [as not] very bright. But I haven’t found that to be the case. I listen to kids. I respect them … Some of them are as bright as any of the adults I’ve met … The other thing that many filmmakers miss is that a lot of kids are very conservative about sex.”

Later in 1985, Hughes started shooting “Pretty in Pink,” which he wrote the week after wrapping up “Sixteen Candles.” He had Ringwald in mind for the lead after she told him she liked the eponymous song by the Psychedelic Furs. Though “Pink” was the first Hughes movie actually inspired by a pop song, in his earlier films Hughes expertly matched scenes with the kind of rock ‘n’ roll songs that, then and now, make up the soundtrack for every American kid’s personal drama about growing up. Hughes’ movies helped bands like the Furs and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark find fame as much as they shone the spotlight on some of the best and brightest young acting talents of the ’80s: Hall, Ringwald, Nelson, Sheedy, Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Eric Stoltz and John and Joan Cusack, to name a few. (He also, incidentally, launched Macaulay Culkin’s career.)

The plots of “Pretty in Pink” and its follow-up, “Some Kind of Wonderful,” aren’t startlingly original. In “Pink,” Ringwald is the poor little poor girl Andy, who gets romanced, spurned and then reunited with rich-but-sensitive guy Blaine (Andrew McCarthy); a brilliantly funny Jon Crier plays Andy’s best friend Duckie, who is also in love with her. In “Wonderful,” Keith (Stoltz) wants to win over beautiful Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson) so badly that he overlooks the fact that he might be in love with his best friend Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is definitely in love with him. What makes these movies resonate is not story so much as Hughes’ respectful and candid treatment of his characters. When Duckie tells Andy, “I live to love you,” anyone who has ever had a crush feels his anguish. Anyone who has ever been passed over or dumped understands why Duckie grabs Iona (Annie Potts in a crackpot role) and kisses her in the hopes of making an onlooking Andy jealous. Hughes also knows that the socioeconomic aspects of the schoolyard make for some of the most loaded emotional material. In another scene in “Pretty in Pink,” Blaine can’t understand why Andy won’t let him drop her off at her house. Finally she blurts out, “I don’t want you to see where I live, OK?”

Had Hughes started his career in 1988, he would probably never rank as an exceptional filmmaker because in the time since, though he’s made plenty of blockbusters and many really funny flicks, like the first “Home Alone,” he hasn’t done much with staying power or impact. But the quartet of movies he made for teens growing up in the decade of greed has yet to be beat. He has influenced every filmmaker putting out work for that demographic since; director Kevin Smith went so far as to thank Hughes in the credits of his film “Mallrats” (1995) and centering the plot of “Dogma” (1999) around the main characters’ quest to find the fictional town where a number of Hughes’ movies are set, Shermer, Ill. “Everybody can relate to a good teen movie; it’s more immediate [and] honest,” Hughes told Lollipop. It’s his candor that has made Hughes’ greatest works relevant and resonant to kids, then and now, who have to do the hard work of growing up.