Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1997 by Robert Wegs

The essays in this work differ in their scope and the extent to which they accept or reject the generational theme but both "generations" and "youth" supply a thematic unity that is often missing in such collections. Roseman's lengthy, useful introduction provides a thorough look at the concept "generations" and an extensive evaluation of each essay and how they fit into the volume.

Joachim Whaley's essay, "The Ideal of Youth in Eighteenth-Century Germany," provides an important starting point by emphasizing that the youth "movement" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was narrowly middle-class and the aims were primarily aesthetic. It was essentially a revolt against the enlightenment "rationalist revolution." Whaley's essay also shows how elastic the term "youth" can be since in his essay "youth" has no specific age dimensions and it includes only a few leading literary figures (Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin) but represents a significant cultural-intellectual transition. Although Rainer Elkar's article, "Young Germans and Young Germany," concentrates on a literary elite (the Gottinger Hein), he shows how this youth culture spread to a larger student population in the early 1800s and took on a political "Young German" orientation that emphasized "liberal, free-thinking, emancipated, non-reactionary" perspectives. But the large gap that continued to exist between middle-class students and artisans indicates the continued influence of the "old social order" and the absence of a unified youth culture. In this period "Youth" meant urban males or "Jungling" and not all youth or "Jugendliche" of the late nineteenth century.

Jurgen Reulecke provides an outstanding survey of the forces that produced new conceptions of youth in late nineteenth-century Germany. He shows how important the concept of youth was in understanding elite attitudes - bourgeois fears regarding youth - and how these fears moved the elite to contain what they perceived as an increased youth criminality and waywardness. The reasons for this insecurity was, in his opinion, a bourgeoisie threatened by rapid technical and economic progress and what they perceived as a deteriorating social and political situation that threatened their social-cultural dominance. Youth became not only a life phase but also a "code-word for a renaissance" of the young against the old. In a concluding section, Reulecke goes a bit beyond his evidence to develop a theory of a front generation born out of the war experiences that provided many of the leaders for the Nazi movement.

Perhaps the most pointed use of the generational theme is Jacob Borut's "Jewish Politics and Generational Change in Wilhelmine Germany" which argues that a self-assertive Jewish youth generation developed in the 1890s which rejected the assimilationist policies of their fathers. Jewish youth resorted to political propaganda to counter anti-semitism, to interest groups (Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbuerger judischer Glaubens) that would defend Jews against attacks, and to organizational networks that promoted self-confirmation and association with other Jews. Borut's data on the Frankfurt and Berlin Jews provides strong support for his theory that youth, the generation of 1840-50 as distinguished from those born in the 1820s and earlier, led the activist movements.

Three of the four essays dealing with the Weimar period reject the theory that a "front generation" emerged from the war but do contend that the myth of a front generation was utilized by groups to gain their ends. Bessel rejects the concept of a Front generation because of what he contends are religious, occupational and geographical cleavages. But he does contend that the myth of a Front Generation was manipulated, especially by the Nazi Party, to gain political ends. Usborne argues that a new female generation, "with profoundly different values and behavior," emerged after the war and aroused fears among conservatives of cultural anarchy. Older people feared especially the new generation's sexual promiscuity and its impact on an already declining birth rate and women's changing role in the family. Elizabeth Harvey's essay on young Protestant women in the late Weimar Republic examines how three Protestant women's organizations responded to appeals to youth and to National socialism. Protestant women's identification with service, struggle and the search for space or territory, she contends, tied them to other women's groups and their initial urge to join in a national "mission of youth" joined them with their generation in support of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. Peter Lambert's essay on "Generations of German Historians: Patronage, Censorship and the Containment of Generation Conflict, 1918-1945" while an interesting examination of how an academic elite suppressed alternative and especially "leftist" approaches, does not fit well with the other articles in this collection.

The four essays investigating postwar attitudes and activities agree that Nazi youth organizations had a lasting impact on the participants. Alexander von Plato argues that the former Hitler Jugend generation tended to abstain from political activity after the war because they rejected collective activity since they had learned during the Nazi era that it was dangerous to reveal one's political views. On the other hand, he argues that there was "a willingness to put in enormous effort in return for recognition and personal advancement" in both Nazi and postwar German societies. He supports this by arguing that the Hitler Jugend generation viewed their Nazi youth activities as unpolitical and that this depoliticization of the past served as a "bond of understanding" among this generation. This article needs fuller explanation than is possible in essay length. Dagmar Reese's study of the Nazi League of German Girls, the Bund Deutscher Madel, shows how Nazi policies brought all youth together in "a non-sexual comradeship of limited duration, restricted to youth." The Nazis gave women a more public social role, thereby rejecting traditional women's roles, but restricted it to youth. Reese explains this generation's lack of protest about their poor economic situation in the 1950s by their experience in the Third Reich: their self perception was more generational-than gender-based in the postwar period. Michael Buddrus's study of youths' transition from the Third Reich to the Soviet Zone agrees that the Third Reich had brought about a unified youth generation and that this experience facilitated its integration in the new socialist regime through its "traditional willingness to submit to authoritarian rule." Mark Roseman's "The Generation Conflict that Never was: Young Labour in the Ruhr Mining Industry 1945-1957" asserts that the Hitler Jugend generation fit in "so quietly and so easily" because the rapid political changes left them distrustful of any ideology and, as a result, they were not susceptible to any radical group; the Allied presence; the union's promise of an organized non-conflictual representation of their interests; and the possibility of mobility in the mining industry.