Abstract Benjamin Möckel

german version

The youth cohorts of World War II are considered as one of the three political generations of German history in the 20th Century. As members of the “Flakhelfergeneration” or the “Hitler Youth Generation” these age cohorts are presumed to have made similar experiences during the war and were shaped by these experiences for the upcoming decades – or even until today. Apart from this, the “Hitler Youth Generation” also serves as a master narrative for the successful democratization of (western) German society after 1945.

The aim of this project is to differentiate this narrative in some of its main aspects. In this project it will be assumed that the experience of the war was not primarily a collective experience but rather an experience of isolation, in which many of the traditional communities were put at risk or even destroyed forever.
This paper will therefore argue that it is only ex post that youth started to interpret their individual experiences as part of a collective experience of a “War Youth Generation”. This “generationalization” of one’s owns memories presumably helped to enable youths to talk about their experiences of violence, loss, and guilt during the war.

This project tries to analyze these modes of communication by looking at individual diaries, letters, school works and other ego-documents. By looking at these self-interpretations of youths during the 1940s and 1950s this project will try to analyze how young people dealt with their memories of the war, and how they interpreted them as part of the collective experience of a “War Youth Generation”.
Apart from this, this project aims at widening the focus of earlier analyses of this generation by equally looking at individual ego-documents of youths that lived in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR.