Mary Fulbrook's Dissonant Lives is an excellent history of the two twentieth-century German dictatorships viewed and given interpretive focus through the lens of generation. Viewed through that lens, people in Fulbrook's study are participants in history, shaped by and shaping history through the choices they make among the options presented them by historical circumstance. Indeed, what comes through powerfully in Dissonant Lives is that generations coming of age at moments of historical transition have especially great impact and significance. Fulbrook calls such generations “sore thumb” generations.

Fulbrook identifies two such generations in twentieth-century Germany. The first is the “war youth generation,” born in the years before World War I, that experienced the war in childhood and came of age with the advent of the Third Reich. It was this generation that more than any other put National Socialism into practice during the Third Reich. Fulbrook sees this generation dissolving after 1945, becoming simply part of a wider “KZ generation” made up of those who had been adults during the Third Reich. The tiny minority that had opposed the Nazis became the leaders of the German Democratic Republic. The second “sore thumb” generation identified by Fulbrook is what she calls “the 1929ers,” generally known as “the Hitler Youth generation,” born in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Indoctrinated in National Socialism, this generation experienced a sense of betrayal with the collapse of the Third Reich. Rejecting Nazism, the 1929ers turned their energies to building a different form of socialism in the German Democratic Republic. This generation and the German Democratic Republic came of age together. The Communist leadership needed to mobilize this generation to build socialism, and this generation was ready to be mobilized. These two generations neatly parallel one another then. Both experienced war in childhood and early adolescence. Because of that experience and because of when they came of age, both played crucial roles in establishing the two German dictatorships. In fact, these two generations can be described as the protagonists of Fulbrook's book.

The greatest strength of Dissonant Lives is the way it brings the history of the two twentieth-century German dictatorships to life by presenting individual subjective responses derived from a wide range of imaginatively selected and sensitively analyzed sources. Using interviews, memoirs, personal letters, essay competitions, letters to an alumni association, complaints about pensions, reports from veterans, and more, Fulbrook brings her sweeping history down to earth. She also writes a series of micro-histories to illustrate broader historical themes and issues. Fulbrook has a knack for finding human points of historical contact, presenting individual lives, affected by and affecting history.

Although the Third Reich has been massively studied and analyzed, including from a generational perspective, and Fulbrook does not offer a new interpretation of National Socialism and of its experience by Germans, her treatment of Nazi Germany is insightful and sensible. Above all, Fulbrook's presentation of individual subjective experiences brings to life how National Socialism was lived and enacted by people in the Third Reich. Not surprisingly, given her past scholarship, Fulbrook's treatment of the German Democratic Republic is particularly illuminating. Using the category of generation, Fulbrook helps to account for the fact that the German Democratic Republic survived for forty years with a not inconsiderable degree of popular support. The relative success of the first two decades of the German Democratic Republic is explained in part by the predominance of the 1929ers during those years. The coming of age of a new generation, born during World War II, appears to have contributed to the stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s, and the East German Kriegskinder are presented as something of a lost generation. Slightly younger East Germans born in the late 1940s and early 1950s came of age during the Honecker years, when a consumerist ideology was propagated by the Communist leadership. The failure of the regime to fulfill its materialist promises coupled with the more cosmopolitan outlook of this generation helped to turn some of its members against the regime and most into nonsupporters. It is ironic that the first generation to have grown up exclusively in the German Democratic Republic contributed most to the regime's downfall.

Twentieth-century German history does not lead inevitably to the Federal Republic in Dissonant Lives. Indeed, in reading Fulbrook's book, I came to appreciate how many histories of the German twentieth century have been implicitly written from a West German perspective. In this book, the German Democratic Republic becomes integral to that history, neither a detour nor an interlude on the way to the Federal Republic.

Although Fulbrook rightly gives East Germany pride of place in the second half of her book, I still sometimes wished that she had focused more attention on generations in the Federal Republic. A comparison of Germans of the same age living in East and West might have enabled Fulbrook to develop further her ideas about generation formation and dissolution and about the impact of historical circumstance on generational identity and influence. I also found myself wishing that Fulbrook had theorized “violence” in the way she theorizes “generation” in her book. The book's subtitle is “Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships.” The meaning and significance of “violence” is not self-evident, however, either as a twentieth-century historical phenomenon or as a category of historical analysis. How did Germans define violence? Did those definitions change over the course of the century? Was there a relationship between the experience of violence and the infliction of violence in twentieth-century Germany? What role does violence play in generation formation, in generational identity, in generational expression?

But it seems inappropriate to complain about omissions in a book that is already 500 pages long. Indeed I worry that the length (and attendant cost) of Dissonant Lives may discourage potential readers. The book could have been significantly shortened, thereby sharpening its analytical focus, without losing any of the many individual voices and experiences that bring this fine history of Germany's twentieth century to life.