Hare, Laurence

English

North Georgia College & State University: Digital Commons

International Social Science Review
Volume 90 | Issue 1 Article 10
2015
A German Generation: An Experiential History of
the Twentieth Century by Thomas A. Kohut
Laurence Hare
University of Arkansas
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr
Part of the Anthropology Commons, Communication Commons, Economics Commons,
Geography Commons, International and Area Studies Commons, Political Science Commons, and
the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in
International Social Science Review by an authorized administrator of Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository.
Recommended Citation
Hare, Laurence (2015) "A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century by Thomas A. Kohut," International
Social Science Review: Vol. 90: Iss. 1, Article 10.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol90/iss1/10
Kohut, Thomas A. A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century. 
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. x + 335 pages. Paper, $30.00. 
 
In June 2014, Arts.21, the cultural magazine of German news service Deutsche Welle, unveiled 
“When We Were 17: Youth at the Crossroads,” an online exhibit showcasing the experiences of 
young Germans at six key moments in the country’s history during the last century. The exhibit 
followed closely on the heels of the television miniseries, Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter 
(Generation War), which was produced by German broadcaster ZDF and told the story of five 
friends coming of age in Germany during the Second World War. Such examples attest to the 
ways in which generational approaches to the German past have recently became all the rage. 
Scholars, too, have undertaken new studies of German history through a generational lens, 
including the historian Mary Fulbrook, whose 2012 work, Dissonant Lives: Generations and 
Violence through the German Dictatorships, followed two “war youth” generations through the 
years of Nazism and Communism. And now fellow historian Thomas A. Kohut has joined the 
conversation with his latest, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth 
Century.  
Kohut, whose background is largely in psychohistory, comes to the study of generations 
to understand how historical events shape the human psyche. Such questions, of course, tend to 
be controversial among many historians, who debate whether scholars can derive a psychological 
profile utilizing only the limited resources of the historical record. But here Kohut is on firmer 
ground, as he turns to sociology to frame a set of historical questions in the context of collective 
experience. Specifically, he builds on the work of the German sociologist Karl Mannheim, who 
argued for a notion of  “generational consciousness,” for individuals who, in his words, “had 
been exposed to the same—generally destabilizing—social and historical forces in adolescence” 
(p. 5). Kohut examines one such group belonging to the so-called Weimar-youth generation, 
whose members grew up during the First World War and Weimar era, reached young adulthood 
during the years of the Third Reich, and retired in the postwar Federal Republic. His first 
objective is to reveal the ways in which “different historical experiences gave distinct shape to 
each German generation” (p. 8), with a specific focus on how these experiences are imprinted 
most strongly during childhood and adolescence. 
Kohut’s approach largely succeeds, mainly because his source base is so unique. Mary 
Fulbrook attempted to convey the experience of two wartime generations by leaning heavily on 
statistics and contextual sources and embossing them with rich anecdotal evidence. Kohut, by 
contrast, focuses on a much smaller sample to yield a more in-depth assessment of a single 
generation’s experiences. Specifically, he relies on a set of interviews of former members of a 
German youth group known as the Free German Circle. The cohort is fascinating because they 
had so much in common, including a predominantly middle-class upbringing and a similar set of 
encounters with the troubles of the Weimar years, and also because their experience in the Free 
German Circle led them to willing participation in the Nazi movement. At the same time, there 
are only sixty interviews, which raises the question of whether there are enough sources to speak 
for an entire generation. Kohut claims that there are, arguing that the interviewees were highly 
representative in terms of class, gender, and age. However, one might counter that what he has 
actually delivered is the history of a cohort rather than a generation at large. 
 Kohut divides his book into three sections covering the years between the First World 
War and the rise of the Nazis, the era of the Third Reich and Second World War, and the postwar 
years. Within each section are chapters providing glimpses at the personal stories of both a male 
1
Hare: A German Generation
Published by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository, 2015
and female subject and an analysis of the stories for the given period. By far, the analysis 
sections are the strongest components of the book. Rather than force the accounts into a 
theoretical framework, Kohut is content to observe moments in which patterns in experiences 
and responses seem to emerge. Though qualitative, these points are illuminating and persuasive. 
Kohut notes common instances of rebellion within the cohort, revealing the ways in which the 
communal ethos of the youth movement provided ways of coping with the devastating changes 
that the cohort encountered at each stage of Germany’s convulsive history. At the center of the 
trauma was the notion of loss, which Kohut traces from a personal to a societal level. “The losses 
suffered by the family,” he writes of the Weimar years, “were inscribed by the losses suffered by 
the nation” (p. 63). Kohut is also keenly aware of how the historical periods were experienced 
along gendered lines. In the 1930s, for instance, he notes that both males and females supported 
the Nazis’ concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or national community, and though they were pushed 
out of the youth movement, they nevertheless gravitated towards activities within Nazi-oriented 
groups. But their motivations bore gendered characteristics. He notes, “Whereas the women 
seem to have welcomed the opportunity these institutions provided to prove themselves to 
themselves, the men appear to have felt the need more to prove themselves to others…” (p. 129). 
With these insights, Kohut manages to capture the experiences and responses of the 
interviewees. But he also seeks to explain their choices. Here the interviews are especially 
fascinating, as we see the subjects relate accounts of Nazi genocide that move inexorably from 
disavowal of any knowledge of atrocities to admission and apologetics. In his analysis, Kohut 
argues that this response is conditioned by social experience. “What Germans ‘knew,’” he 
explains, “was, in part, a product of social consensus, and accepting what was commonly known 
was a condition for membership in the community” (p. 141). Kohut thus shows how the intense 
need for belonging informed a specific way of knowing, and more specifically a way of seeing, 
and how this in turn led a group of “ordinary” Germans into complicity with the crimes of the 
Nazis. The conclusion is chilling: “It seems important to remind ourselves that what ultimately 
separates us from those who carried out and enabled the genocide is historical experience” (p. 
240). Kohut further strengthens his arguments by including in each section an essay situating his 
analysis within the current historiography. In many cases, we see that the literature supports his 
analyses, but it would also have been nice to see Kohut use his study to challenge or otherwise 
suggest new possibilities within current scholarship. 
 The chapters that are at once the most promising and the most disappointing are the 
interviews themselves. Kohut maintains that the interviews have so many commonalities that 
they border on redundancy. For this reason, he elects to present them as “composite 
biographies,” in which the details of several individuals merge together in a single narrative. 
While I am sure this approach improves the narrative flow and helps readers more readily see the 
points Kohut makes in his analyses, I nevertheless find this strategy troubling. As a historian, I 
would much prefer to see the author present the authentic experiences of the individuals he is 
studying, even if there is repetition or the occasional lapse into the mundane. Moreover, the 
incongruities of the accounts may be bothersome to readers familiar with Germany. For instance, 
in the Weimar interviews, the male subject recalls a childhood in eastern Germany, but then his 
story jumps awkwardly to Flensburg in the far north before resting in Berlin. In reality, these 
were the accounts of three different subjects, which forced Kohut to add sentences to make sense 
of the geographical discrepancies in the story. It would have been far better either to produce an 
exemplary interview or to offer selections from multiple interviews. Otherwise, the approach 
threatens to efface the authentic experience of individuals in search of broader patterns. 
2
International Social Science Review, Vol. 90 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10
http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol90/iss1/10
 Despite this regrettable shortcoming, the fact that it provides a glimpse of the interviews 
and then supports them with analysis and historiography has made A German Generation a great 
addition to my own advanced course on twentieth-century Germany, and I would further 
recommend it for readers interested in historical methodology, historical sociology, or 
psychology. I simply hope that Kohut may have the chance to produce an updated edition in 
which he can let the subjects speak more for themselves. As he has so ably shown, they have a 
lot to tell us. 
 
J. Laurence Hare, Ph.D. 
Assistant Professor of History 
University of Arkansas 
Fayetteville, Arkansas 
 
3
Hare: A German Generation
Published by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository, 2015


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

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&amp;context=issr

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

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

North Georgia College & State University: Digital Commons