A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century by Thomas A. Kohut (review)

This book provides valuable insight into Germans’ experience of the tumultuous twentieth century. Kohut’s fine narrative about the generation of Germans born just before World War I studies the relationship between individuals and large political events. The book’s impact rests chiefly on Kohut’s creative synthesis of different modes of historical analysis: interviews, historiographical analysis, and essays on broader implications. Kohut’s “experiential” history is limited to sixty-two Germans with fairly common backgrounds who shared similar experiences in the twentieth century and were all interviewed as part of a large oral history project in the 1990s.

Kohut divides the book into three sections on World War I and Weimar Republic, Third Reich and World War II, and Postwar West Germany. Each section offers two lengthy interviews (one male, one female), a chapter that analyzes the interviews, and then a chapter of several short essays tackling major historiographical themes. Even more innovative is the use of “composite interviews.” The Germans interviewed for this project, Kohut explains, had similar enough experiences that it makes sense to distill their stories into two “biographies” per section. Readers may question the validity of this methodology. But Kohut documents the interviews in great detail and describes places where he made changes. His group of middle-class, mostly Protestant members of the outdoorsy youth movement of the 1920s who survived World War II and then joined the Free German Circle is an admittedly limited sample of Germans. But Kohut makes much of this homogeneous cohort, especially since their history offers important clues to the role of the Third Reich in twentieth-century Germany.

Part I on the Great War and Weimar Republic shows that interviewees recalled the 1910s positively but then contrasted those memories with experiences of the Weimar Republic. Chiefly nationalist and reactionary, they retreated from the conflicts of the 1920s into apolitical yet nationalist youth organizations that delighted in nature and self-reliance. All the interviewees named this experience away from family, the city, and even class expectations as liberating. These experiences also reinforced the need to belong, priming participants for 1930s activism and the apolitical, asexual liberation many encountered in the Third Reich.

Part II on the Third Reich is the heart of Kohut’s study, comprising nearly forty percent of the book. Kohut avoids teleology when detailing the reasons for this group’s overwhelming support for the Nazi regime. The Third Reich was a comfortably reinforcing collectivist and police state. Interviewees’ positive experiences in 1920s youth groups convinced them that Hitler’s regime was fulfilling their adolescent yearnings. Women especially treasured their collective work. Kohut’s discussions about antisemitism and the Holocaust are insightful. He demonstrates that these Germans (also standing in for many others) were eventually ashamed of what the Third Reich did. But they never admitted any guilt, because doing so would have forced them to remove themselves from the collective and to acknowledge that they recognized back then what the regime was doing was wrong. Instead they simply looked away. Kohut dismantles their claims not to have known about the Holocaust (and thus the refrain of many Germans in the 1950s and 1960s). He simply says, “[i]n order to look away, one needs to know what it is that one does not wish to see” (167). This section’s essays tackle important historiographical issues, including memory, modernization, gender, and antisemitism.

Part III on the postwar era receives the shortest treatment but is particularly rich. These chapters unpack the ways these Germans wrestled with the Third Reich’s legacy in their own lives, those of their children, and in their society. Filtered through fewer years of history, these insights reveal most directly the impact of Germans’ experience in the Third Reich. Family and collective action in the postwar Free German Circle aided this group’s “desperate flight into normality” after the war (233). Men especially threw themselves into rebuilding their...