Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (review)

This edited volume, containing thirteen chapters examining differences in representations of German culture and history from one generation to the next in the post–World War II era, is both informative and a pleasure to read. Camden House is known for publishing books with high standards of scholarship that are accessible to diverse readers, and this anthology does not disappoint. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani invited a group of both younger and more seasoned scholars to write on generational views of German history as found in autobiographies, novels, and documentary and feature films. The chapters are organized under four main headings: “Victim Legacies and Perpetrator Postmemory,” “1968 and German Terrorism,” “East German Pasts,” and “Globalized Identities.” While the first three headings are self-explanatory, “Globalized Identities” refers not only to immigrants and their descendants in Germany who have produced texts or films centering on identity construction, but also to young eastern and western Germans in unified Germany who “shared the task of negotiating the rapid geo-political, economic, and technological transformations” that took place in the 1990s as well as a “desire to transcend cultural, local, and national identifications” (270). Each chapter treats one or more significant cultural discourses either perpetuated or emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They add to the existing scholarship that assesses generational perspectives from Germany, and trace the discussion forward in works published as recently as 2008. Each contribution is furthermore fully accessible to English speakers, as all German quotes have been translated by the individual contributors into English.

This volume’s greatest strengths lie in the straightforward organization of each article, the breadth of the featured primary and secondary sources, and the new insights provided by each contributor, as well as the lucid ways these individual insights tie into the overarching topic of generational views of recent German history. Each contributor begins his or her chapter by summarizing pertinent scholarship on generations and how members of each generation pass along memories of lived experience or engage in postmemory/affiliative memory work, and then embeds analyses of individual artworks in this larger context. The central arguments of most contributors hinge on the ways the latest postwar/third generation of German and immigrant authors and filmmakers opens up and expands the discourse surrounding Germany’s dark and controversial past, providing generally more variegated and sometimes provocative views of their parents’ and grandparents’ histories.

Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister’s helpful introduction not only draws on seminal German discussions of the roles of generations in perpetuating and breaking with past culture, beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche and moving to Heinz Bude, Rainer Lepsius, Karl Mannheim, Sigrid Weigel, Aleida Assmann, and Jörg Magenau, among others, but it also includes references to US historians like Mark Roseman and David Kertzer. Roseman laid the foundation for the current anthology with his 1995 collection Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generational Formation in Germany 1770–1968, which features historical and political topics. Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister’s volume, by contrast, focuses on literary, autobiographical, and filmic responses, working well in tandem with Roseman’s to make a strong case for why generational perspectives remain important as a basis for understanding German history and its past and present culture.

For the most part, second- and third-generation postwar artworks are compared cross-sectionally. For example, Friederike Eigler analyzes the multigenerational novels Landnahme by Christoph Hein and Die Unvollendeten by Reinhard Jirgl, both authors belonging to the second postwar generation, juxtaposing them with the multigenerational novels Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition by Kathrin Schmidt and Himmelskörper by Tanja Dückers, who belong to the third generation. Erin McGlothlin, by contrast, embeds her comparison of earlier and later works by the German-Jewish author Maxim Biller in the context of postwar Väterliteratur, second-generation postmemory literature, and German-Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust. Katharina Gerstenberger and Svea Bräunert provide insights into gender differences among generational responses...