No youth movement of its own
Essay by author Lea Streisand on the concept of generation
Generational shift. I had to google the word to begin with, boomer in spirit that I am.1 At least, I didn’t look it up in a dictionary because that definitely would’ve exposed me as geriatric.
I’ve never been particularly fond of the concept of generations. Florian Illies’ 2000 bestseller Generation Golf never applied to me, as my parents didn’t have a drivers license and their friends drove Trabants or Wartburgs.
I was born in East Berlin in 1979. The first thing I think of when I hear the word generation is a British rock song from the year 1965.
I was one of the revivalist hippies of the 1990s, the post-wall and post-reunification era, shaped by disoriented parents and helpless teachers, which we then infused with the codes and insignia of the previous generation’s rebellion. This once brought my mother to exclaim “Can’t you find a youth movement of your own?”, when she found her records and her clothing in my room.
When I came home with my first pair of flared trousers, all my father could say was “Ewwww, seventies!” in disgust. He was never a hippie, but revered the beatniks, worshipped jazz, and pranced through life with a late-pubescent inferiority complex disguised as arrogance, which would ultimately be his downfall. But that is a different story.
The idea of a generation being a sociological unit of peers was developed by Karl Mannheim about a hundred years ago, as an instrument for talking about the intergenerational trauma of the First World War. This happened at around the same time, by the way, that Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was published in Vossische Zeitung, a renowned newspaper, right between the two world wars.
The impact of this book was likely as powerful as the televised broadcast of the moon landing. Everyone had read Remarque. If you hadn’t read him, you were best advised to keep that for yourself.
Literature creates identity. By stringing together actual and/or fictitious events, I create a narrative, and the more carefully I do my work, the more "logical" it will appear. I call it the Agatha Christie effect of reading, a pleasant tingling in the brain reward system when the realisation hits: “Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly how I feel.”
The Germans hadn’t realised what was happening to them until Erich Maria told them. He created the template that people would have to grapple with in the future. In the late 1920s, you had to have read Freud and there wasn’t a single party between Berlin and New York where people weren’t enveloped in cigarette smoke, murmuring to one another about their wet dreams.
The generational concept is based on shared experiences, products, and historical events. It seems like its primary purpose nowadays is economic, used to sell people things they didn’t want to have in the first place.
Supposedly, 2025 will mark the beginning of a new generation. For me, this new age has already begun a year ago. Since 7 October 2023—faced with the reflexive blame placed on the victims of the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust—, I have begun to fundamentally question my belonging to any generation. As a Jewish women with a disability from East Berlin, when people talk about contemporary German society in more general terms, I have found that I am not typically included.
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1 The term boomer does not have a female form in German, which has to do with Friedrich Merz. We’ll talk about that more in our next lesson.
Lea Streisand writes novels, essays, and columns. She is co-editor of the essay collection “Sind Antisemitisten anwesend? - Satiren, Geschichten und Cartoons gegen Judenhass” (Are Antisemites Present? – Satire, Stories, and Cartoons Against Jew Hatred), which was published by Satyr Verlag.