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

“The Kaiser is a dear man, he liveth in Berlin/And if it weren’t so far away, I’d run right there to him/And what I’d with the Kaiser do, I’d offer him my hand/and present him flowers that were the prettiest in the land”

(54).

Many have considered whether one song—or genre of music—can come close to defining a time period. What becomes evident in A German Generation is that it is perhaps not simply lyrics that can influence a particular era, but, further, the shared act of singing. It is this notion of collectivity that Thomas A. Kohut argues to be integral to understanding the “war-youth” generation that was raised during World War I, came of age in the Weimar Republic, and experienced firsthand the political turbulence of Germany in the twentieth century. To examine the themes of both inclusion and loss, A German Generation draws heavily upon the biographical narratives, or life histories, of sixty-two members of the Freideutsche Kreis (Free German Circle).

The Free German Circle was formed in 1947 to reunify participants in the 1920s youth movement of the Bunds as a system of support in the postwar period. The original groups of the Weimar Era served as organizations of young people focused upon unity and order in an age of economic and familial instability. Membership included involvement in “wholesome” social activities, with strong bonds being forged through loyalty to the group and its ideals. The youth movement was envisioned to be apolitical but later became controlled by the Nazi Party, thereby dividing participants in their positions and alliances. After World War II, the reinvigoration of those connections through the Freideutsche helped men find employment, provided families with housing, and facilitated the rebuilding of their personal lives to support national reconstruction.

Conducted between 1994 and 1995 for a project under historian Jürgen Reulecke’s guidance, the interviews with Free German members were subsequently intended to help produce a “collective biography” that represented the lives of these individuals within a larger historical context and to “serve as a model for an aging generation” (3). The book is separated into three parts by era: spanning World War I and the Weimar Republic; the Third Reich and World War II; and finally, postwar Germany. Each section is then divided into three chapters consisting of interviews, analyses, and essays.

The interview segments include excerpts from the oral histories formed into composite narratives and paired with endnotes indicating their origins. Kohut gathered passages that he found to be particularly “significant within the context of the interviews as a whole” and those “exceptional” to the representative portrait after noticing similarities in the stories due to the comparable backgrounds and experiences of the narrators (11). He further reasoned that the reminiscences began to merge by way of the generational emphasis on collectivity and through the act of exchanging stories socially within the Free German Circle.

Kohut immediately reveals that he was not one of the interviewers for the project, which perhaps worked to his advantage because the narrators had rather contentious relationships with their children’s generation, of which he was a part. Project personnel instead selected Kohut for his background in psycho-history to analyze the interviews from a multidisciplinary perspective. Because this approach included an introspective element, the book is made especially compelling by the transparency of his methodology and reflexivity. Most notably, Kohut shares the story of his father fleeing Austria in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution, and the presence of his latent victimhood and loss is a contributing factor behind his analyses of the narratives in the second chapters of each section. Although these influences could very well be deemed as biases, the level of self-disclosure appears to transcend personal judgment by grounding his interpretations in the context of historiography in the third set of...