A German Generation is a deeply engaging, penetrating, and challenging portrait of the Jahrhundertgeneration, those Germans born roughly between 1900 and 1915 whose lives spanned the twentieth century in all its darkness and light. The men and women collectively portrayed in this book lived under four, sometimes five, distinctive political systems: born and raised in Imperial Germany, they came of age in the Weimar years, and were young adults in the Third Reich—with all the complicity in propping up a dictatorial regime, waging an expansionist war, and committing an unprecedented genocide this entailed. They continued to live their lives in the Federal Republic after 1945 (some had fled from East Germany), and experienced the reunification of the divided country in old age. A rich and often troubled history thus flowed through these individuals, as Kohut outlines with great eloquence. Forced to adapt to changing circumstances, the loss of past certainties, and the “inversion of all values” (p. 122) multiple times over, they sought salvation in the collective throughout their lives—specifically in the Bunds of the interwar German youth movement and the Free German Circle, an organization of former youth movement members set up in 1947.

Kohut never claims that his book is a representative study of a whole cohort. Like most generational histories, he focuses his attention on a more clearly identifiable subset—in his case sixty-two Germans who were interviewed in the mid-1990s for an oral history project conducted by the German historian Jürgen Reulecke. The interviewees came from remarkably similar backgrounds: they had all been active in the youth movement and were from the same social milieu, the well-educated, professional, urban middle class; a majority of them were Protestant. This serves to explain why the stories they told their interviewers (Kohut was not one) shared so many traits. Although interviewed individually, they had honed their accounts in a collective setting: as members of the Free German Circle they had told, retold, and smoothed out their life stories in what were often lifelong conversations with their peers. All this produced narratives of “astonishing homogeneity” (p. 9). While this homogeneity is intellectually seductive, it also presented Kohut with a presentational conundrum: the interviews were not distinctive enough for a meaningful analysis of individual difference and lacked the drama to sustain readers' interest. He thus chose to present his material in a novel—and some might say problematical—way. Kohut created composite characters that “simultaneously capture the recalled experiences of all the interviewees and none of them” (p. 10). The book gives these “ideal types” the opportunity to recount significant parts of their lives without interruption. In Part II, for instance, “Magdalene Beck,” “born on 15 March 1914 in Hanau” (p. 100) enters the stage to take us through the 1930s and early 1940s. She relates her time in the League of German Girls, which she joined after the Nazis had dissolved the Bunds, and narrates her experiences with bombings, flight, and her eventual encounters with the occupying forces. We learn that Beck was “enthusiastic about National Socialism. At the beginning of the Third Reich, of course, we rejoiced. Many things made a positive impression on us. There were so many good things, and the successes were so visible. The unemployed were no longer in the streets” (p. 106).

But what reads like a continuous account of an eventful life is actually a tapestry of the lives of thirty-one different women. The short quotation above is based on the stories of four different women alone, clearly identified via coded numbers in the extensive reference section. This novel technique allows Kohut to create a seamless narrative without the mundane details and leaps between different subjects that life stories often entail. The characters' stories in each of the book's three sections are followed by analytical parts, which dissect the accounts. Each section concludes with brief but informative historiographical essays that provide context for the “individual” experiences (subjects range from the prevalence of antisemitism in Germany, to Women and Nazism, and the Family after 1945).

The book might have benefited from integrating the analysis and historiography, which seem to have been written with different audiences in mind. But Kohut succeeds admirably at his central aim, which is to render intelligible why Nazism appealed to ordinary Germans of the Jahrhundertgeneration, who nevertheless shared significant traits with their U.S. peers of the “Greatest Generation.” While he concedes that he found the Germans' “smugness and sense of superiority annoying” (p. 16), he treats his subjects with unrelenting empathy—the very thing, he argues, the interviewees lacked when it came to their Jewish compatriots. According to Kohut, it was the unwillingness of ordinary Germans to empathize with the Jews, illustrated by the fact that they only ever spoke of them in the passive voice, their ability to dehumanize them and to exclude them from their glorified collective—the Volksgemeinschaft—that made the genocide possible.

The reader does indeed gain a deeper and more intimate understanding of why ordinary Germans bought into the Nazi project and how they were able to lead “normal” lives after 1945. Kohut wants us to empathize, for he seeks to cure us of our own sense of moral superiority. “What separates us from those who carried out the worst horror in the history of modern Europe is nothing intrinsic to them or to us. What separates us from them is ‘the grace’ of historical experience” (pp. 240–41).

The book is stimulating in the best possible sense. And yet, this reviewer could not shake off a feeling of slight discomfort when it came to the composite interviews. Kohut himself admits that these “may divert the attention of readers away from the historical material onto its mode of presentation” (p. 12). In spite of the narrative flow, it is indeed difficult to suspend disbelief entirely when evaluating the choices of “Magdalene Beck” or “Franz Orthmann.” Even without insisting that oral history should primarily be about giving a “voice to the voiceless,” one wonders whether we should deny interviewees their individuality quite so readily. At any rate, oral historians with a more diverse sample of interviewees that followed a wider range of trajectories will be unlikely to want to replicate this method. But these are methodological and presentational quibbles. This is still a rich and compassionate history that does much to illuminate the experiences and choices of a generation of Germans that lived through the troubled twentieth century. The book is enlightening and thought provoking in equal measure and deserves to be read by students of German history and oral historians alike.