Abstract
In 2010 USA Today launched as series of articles marking the beginning of the retirement age of the first members of the Baby Boomer generation. The coverage features a US-centric online quiz inviting readers to test their generational affiliation by cultural markers in the categories music, film, TV, news, fashion, technology, toys and sports. Depending on the results of the quiz, readers are assigned to one of six different generations. Each cohort comprises people born over a period of 25 years ranging from the GI generation that ‘fought and won World War II’ to the post 9/11 generation ‘Z’. A closer look at the quiz reveals that different criteria are brought into play to define each generation. Some are primarily defined on the basis of demographic data (boomer) others are linked to technological innovations (generation x) or historic events (GI, silent generation). In this way the quiz nicely illustrates the flexibility and plasticity of the concept of generation that easily transitions from academic to non-academic contexts (USA Today, 2010).
The notion of generations facilitates communication between main street, Fleet Street, and ivory tower and helps us negotiate many semantic binaries in our lives. Political generations mediate successfully between nature and culture, subjective perceptions and social structures, and the continuities and discontinuities of history. Whatever is explained as a result of generational sequentiality and cast into metaphors of family relations appears as inevitable as one’s own parents and as pervasive as human reproduction. Generational thinking naturalizes such highly abstract theorems as national history and transnational identity. In its ability to reduce confusing complexities into neat comprehensible information packages, the concept is right up there with class, race and gender, and appears all the more natural and innocent because it has never been involved in the kinds of withering, divisive battles that the other three categories retain as part of their intellectual history (Jureit, 2010: 6–7).
But there is a price to be paid for considering the world from this intuitively compelling vantage point. The comfortable analytical perspective of generational thinking has important ideological implications. The concept of generation is a tool of intellectual compromise that delegitimizes experiences of relentless homogeneity as well as perceptions of radical discontinuity. In fact, as a scholarly explanatory strategy, the concept of political generation is perhaps best described as an intellectual antidote against the upheavals of (post)modernity. In this capacity, it became ‘the master trope of the twentieth century’ (Weigel, 2010, 140).
The fabulous versatility as well as the ideological underpinnings of the concept are perhaps most clearly visible in contemporary German cultural contexts where the concept of political generations is particularly frequently deployed as a tool of historical explanation. Consider for instance the most infamous generation of 20th century German history, the Nazi generation. In important books on Nazi history, the zeal of some of the most committed Nazis is attributed to a specific generational constellation. These Nazis, so the argument goes, had experienced the end of the First World War as adolescents and ever since grappled with their fate of having been prevented from joining their older brethren in the trenches. The ‘war envy’ turned them in particularly merciless technocrats and killers once they received the opportunity of waging a war of destruction and genocide in Eastern Europe (Herbert, 1996: 42–5, also 282–3).
This model powerfully illustrates the dialectical core of generational arguments. Every political generation is defined by how it differs from its predecessor, i.e. it is defined by a relational void. According to Herbert (1996), who cites extensively from ego documents of former Nazis and their contemporaries, the essence of the Nazi identity consisted of not having fought in the war. Subsequent generations in German history have rallied around similarly beneficial absences. Both the Hitler Youth and the generation of 1968 were first and foremost defined by what they were not, i.e. they were not responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. On the level of generational self-definition, the self-serving agenda of generational thinking is thus obvious even if its proponents do not publicly celebrate the grace of late birth in the way that German chancellor Helmut Kohl did in the 1980s.
The moral implications of the scholarly concept of political generation is less obvious but hardly less relevant. Herbert’s model, for instance, clearly favors one type of causal explanations at the expense of others. It implies that 1918 is a significant, maybe even the single most significant, point of origin of the relentless criminal energy of a core group of Nazi perpetrators. The explanation highlights the generational agenda informing Nazi policy and probably inadvertently but not arbitrarily attributes less importance to factors linked to the concrete social, ideological and psychological context of autumn 1941 when the German perpetrators started to commit mass murder and genocide. I do not think it is a coincidence that the most brilliant historical studies of the Nazi generation have been written by German scholars born in the 1950s who, by deploying the generational model, have located the origins of Nazi inhumanity in the 1910s and thus gave themselves a little historical breathing space. As an analytical tool of contemporary history, the generational model makes the immediate past appear less contemporary and more historical. By the time the deeds of a given generation can be conclusively assessed, the period of psychological imprint has occurred at least 50 years ago (Burnett, 2010: 35 and passim).
When it comes to the pitfalls of generational thinking memory studies experts seem to be in a better position than historians. For historians, applying the concept of political generation triggers unwelcome commitments to specific models of causality, as the above example illustrates. Memory studies experts can contend themselves with sticking to a less ambitious explanatory model. They may reconstruct prevalent strategies of interpretation as an end in itself without having to explain how these memories shape history. Put differently, from a memory studies perspective, political generations can be acknowledged as what they most manifestly are, i.e. more or less consciously imagined social networks that reveal a great deal of information about the groups that describe themselves in those terms and the scholars who organize their historical research with the help of such imagined communities.
But before we celebrate the epistemological and moral superiority of memory studies over historical analysis we should acknowledge at least three serious risks that are linked to the explicit and implicit use of generational thinking in memory studies. All too often histories of memory and the concomitant deconstruction of past generations’ strategies of remembrance serve the purpose of legitimizing and naturalizing one’s own aesthetic and political preferences. Moreover, highlighting other generations’ power of historical representation and manipulation might inadvertently diminish one’s own memory agency and political responsibility. But the most serious moral challenge of our scholarly pursuits is linked to the paradigmatic transition from history to memory per se.
The ever so subtle yet important shift in perspective is beautifully illustrated in a classic of German memory studies deeply invested in generational analysis. In his magisterial study of the history and memory politics associated with the Dachau concentration camp Harold Marcuse begins his discussions of German generations and their memories of Nazism with the following statement: ‘The first politically relevant cohort in the twentieth century, which I will call the 1918ers, is important in this context only inasmuch as its members created the pivotal event that set the whole dynamic into motion: the Nazi accession to unprecedented political and cultural power after 1930’ (Marcuse, 2001, 291).
The ‘only inasmuch’ signals the turn away from history to memory and raises the disturbing question of whether the study of the memory of events like Nazism serves the purpose of not having to engage with its history. Are we developing sustained curiosity about the acts of (mis)representation of postwar generations in order to avoid a direct encounter with the moral depravity of the perpetrator generation? Marcuse does not bear much guilt in this regard because his book contains detailed discussions of Nazi as well as postwar history. But I do not have to look far to find people like myself who have exclusively studied the memory of the Nazi period from generational and other conceptual perspectives (Kansteiner, 2006: 77–81 and passim). Are we studying how our predecessors have avoided looking at Nazi crimes in an attempt not to have to look at Nazi crimes ourselves? Is memory studies a generational aftermath phenomenon that will tell future historians a great deal about our lack of historical curiosity and intellectual courage?