Several books that have appeared in the last two decades or so suggest a huge variety of different “generations” in the twentieth century: “the forgotten generation,” “the lost generation,” “the thrashed generation”, “the 45ers”, “the 68ers”, “the 89ers”, “the post-war generation”, “the Baby Boomers,”, “the millennial generation,” and so on. Whether they are described with an adjective, a definite year or an object, these allocations suggest that everybody belongs or wants to belong to a certain generation that distances itself from others. Inclusion and exclusion have become crucial discourses within and between various generational groups all over the world when it comes to explaining political, economic and cultural new beginnings. In public perception and in self-representation, such specific generational groups—which are usually composed of individuals of similar ages with particular experiences, similar political ideas, social habitus and cultural practices—are supposed to establish the cultural hegemony of their point of view. At least, this is the classical definition of generational units since Karl Mannheim ’s ground-breaking article of 1928.1 Generations can be interpreted first as projects offered for the formation of communities; second as a place of longing with specific foundations of emotions; third as an obligation to pass on cultural values to the next generations; and fourth as a negotiation in the sense of a complex process in which many actors are involved.2
However, scholars disagree about how generations come into being, how they can be identified and what socialising effect they have over the lifetime of their members. First, while the graduate school of Göttingen University “Generationengeschichte. Generationelle Dynamik und historischer Wandel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert” (“Generations in History. Generational Dynamics and Historical Change in the 19th and 20th Centuries”)3 and other European publications—including the Russian context—emphasize the role of political generations,4 the US historiography gives more importance to consumer generations.5 The latter is also more attentive to locating generational units by contextualising the cohort’s size and its social demands, whereas analysing generation-conscious activists dominates the German debate.6 In France and Italy, there seems to exist a more heterogeneous interest attached to both generational types including gender issues.7 Generally, “generational identities have become more numerous, less politicized, less nation-specific and more consumer-orientated” in the course of the twentieth century.8 Nevertheless, it has become even clearer through recent works that generations do not make history; instead they explain it to the society and to themselves. In other words, generations are no natural element of our societies; rather they are created in the media and popularized through communication.9 Despite this broadening of perspectives for new categories and groups, it is striking to observe the high degree of nationalization and reinvention of generations in modern and contemporary history. Attempts to compare different national generations or to elaborate boundary-crossing, transnational generations still constitute an exception.10
In trying to fill this gap in the transnational component of political-generation formation, this collection of essays concentrates on one crucial moment of “the age of extremes” and on one specific generation: the year 1945 and its progressive politicians and intellectuals when the Second World War came to an end and was followed by the first one and a half decades of reconstruction in the post-war period. The book’s working thesis is, of course, that age does matter in twentieth-century European history. Generational studies have mostly focused on the memory aspect, i.e. on how to come to terms with the past. Even though several decades ago Reinhart Koselleck had already emphasized the future as an autonomous category undetermined by past traditions,11 research has mostly neglected and only recently begun to analyse how certain generational groups envisioned the future of their societies and Europe respectively, i.e. how to make sense of history by referring to past experiences when constructing a new democratic order.12 This double-time perspective is exactly what most of the articles represented in this volume tackle. By focusing on ideas, plans and projects that were conceived, drafted and set in the interwar-period, during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war years up to the outbreak of the Cold War, they also question the dominating theses in historiography about Americanization, liberalization and Westernization in post-war Europe, shed more light on hidden transitions and reveal once more the participatory dimension of democratic politics.13 Furthermore, considering the events from the decline of Nazi power from 1943 onward until the consolidation of the bipolar world of the Cold War allows one to break up the very German view on social history and experiences in the present literature.
The geographical focus lies on three Western European countries—Italy, West Germany and France—but is embedded in the broader European history and also considers the global dimension of the Cold War and its antagonists represented by the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Such an approach might be justified by saying that—despite its global importance—1945 had the most lasting effects on the European continent.14 Some questions concerning the crucial moment addressed in this volume are these: How did the experience of autocratic government inform the way in which politicians developed new policies in Germany, France and Italy after the end of the Second World War? What conclusions did politicians draw from their experiences with totalitarianism? Did a new “generation” of leaders with shared democratic ideas gain the leading positions of their countries? Alternatively, did some of them already have experiences with democratic structures prior to the dictatorships? Was there any kind of exchange, transfer, or international collaboration, or did politicians operate exclusively within their particular national contexts? Finally, was the experience with totalitarian regimes kept alive in public memory and did people try to develop and implement progressive, forward-thinking ideas of social organization? Taking these central questions as a starting point, one can raise specific issues about each respective country, which reflect the contrast between occupation and collaboration in France, fascism and German-occupation in Italy, and National Socialism in Germany. What role did the two dictatorial experiences, namely first with fascism and then with National Socialism, play for Italy? In the case of France, one must bear in mind the experience of the popular front, the discrediting of the counterrevolutionary right by Vichy and the disappearance of the “deux France” after the Second World War. Regarding the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, it is important to explore further whether the resulting conflict between the two systems was of greater importance to their development than the previous experience with the Nazi dictatorship.
It is obvious that different generations were involved in the national processes of democratic reconstruction after the Second World War. The protagonists whose actions and ideas are at the centre of this volume are not necessarily all young men or members of the Kriegsjugendgeneration (“War Youth Generation”), identified by Ulrich Herbert as one out of three political generations in the twentieth century.15 Nevertheless, these younger people, born between 1920 and 1933, play an important role because they had the chance to become active democratic politicians and intellectuals for the first time in their lives when the Second World War ended. Consequently, A. Dirk Moses describes these “forty-fivers” as a “generation between fascism and democracy.”16 But can we define these as a “new” transnational generation in terms of a strong common experience with totalitarian regimes? If we consider generations to be demographic categories and emotional communities distinguished and marked by political, military or economic events, and in the twentieth century by war and violence in particular, we can agree that some groups are more generational than others.17 In other words, the number of people of similar ages who shared common experiences, political ideas and cultural practices was particularly large in the last century. This hypothesis seems to be evident when we look at the dominant generation of politicians after the Second World War, who were born before 1900. All of them had personal experiences from one or, in most cases, both world wars.
Generation building is a communicative process in which common experience can be used as a tool for mobilization in certain moments for particular aims. Having said that, we have to take into account the fact that experiences are often only interpreted retrospectively and a generational relationship constructed at intervals.18 However, even if generations have been depicted as collective actors, only the most recent studies have started to do so with generations as collective communities of experience and to look closer at generational self-ascriptions and external ascriptions within which the biographical and social importance of war is particularly evident.19 Generations might thus serve as a link between individual experiences and self-ascriptions, on the one hand, and political and social ext...