Andrew Donson has written an excellent history of youth policy and youth experience in Germany during World War I. Although operating on territory that has already been well reconnoitered, Donson uncovers new findings and insights, above all in the complex relationships between authority, martiality, and new freedoms. As a result he has something to contribute to three major questions about modern Germany history—whether World War I represented a temporary disaster or a major caesura, how far the German youth movement and youth policy were able to create genuine generational identities, and what the relationship was between World War I experience and later propensity to support the Nazis.

Youth in the Fatherless Land shows convincingly that war brought important changes to young people both in and outside the classroom, changes that had lasting consequences for the cohort of youngsters born between 1900 and 1910—the war-youth generation. But these changes are not entirely what we expect. For example, it is no surprise that war and militarism invaded the classroom as never before. It is a surprise that these changes went hand in hand with experiments in progressive teaching methods, and that many of those who were cultivating nationalism were doing so while pushing for more child-centered pedagogy. The study thus undermines easy assumptions about the linkage between the authoritarian and the martial. Indeed, it is the dialectic between participatory and militarist currents in classroom and youth movement that is one of the book's most interesting themes. (Readers of Peter Fritzsche's accounts of Weimar populism will see resonances here.) Reform pedagogy or no, Donson shows how dramatically the war increased the cultivation of violence and “strenuous masculinity” in the classroom, youth group war games, respectable youth literature, and the penny dreadfuls. Girls were, of course, confronted with a rather different set of messages, and Donson is again alive to the contradictions around freedom and authoritarianism, here in the form of a mixture of greater opportunities at home, youth group, and work on the one hand, and more strident assertions of maternal qualities and the virtues of domesticity on the other. Though this latter point is not strikingly new, Youth in the Fatherless Land is more careful and precise than many studies in tracing the changes to tone and style that took place after 1914. The discontinuities wrought by war are very evident.

The second half of the book deals with the latter years of the war. Here the emphasis shifts from pedagogical innovation, which in any case was replaced by a more standardized war curriculum, to the breakdown of authority. The paradox shifts now from a “reformist militarism” to a more rigid and intrusive state on the one hand, but the progressive removal of fathers and men of authority on the other, a combination creating both new pressures and new opportunities for the young. Food and energy shortages compounded the picture, disrupting lives and schooling, and inflaming opinion. Although there has been some effort of late to claim greater solidarity on the home front than we had earlier thought, Donson reminds us of just how disruptive shortages and manpower losses were; while France might match the latter, it suffered nothing like the same shortages. Class experiences varied considerably, leading many middle-class youngsters engaged in voluntary work in military companies to feel intensely alienated from their working-class counterparts, who were either in the factories or too concerned with getting food on the family table to engage in such patriotic volunteering. But the mixture of politicization and repression that characterized young people's experiences in the second half of the war polarized the middle-class youth movement, too. Thus there was no one generational experience, and certainly no one response, yet the acute disruptions, opportunities, and threats were felt by almost all young people.

Although the book limits itself to just a few remarks about the linkage between these developments and the origins of Nazism, its precise and plausible account of the special circumstances that formed the war-youth generation are in fact highly pertinent to recent work on the formation of a Nazi cohort. We are familiar with accounts of war youth that emphasize the frustrations for many boys at being too young to participate in the fight or the shock of recognition in summer 1918 when it became clear that the war was lost. But rarely has the mixture of opportunity and constraint, of authoritarianism and unexpected freedoms, as well as the gendered character of male and female youth experience been explored so well as here. The manuscript was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History.