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a new book–youth in a fatherless land.
Editor's Note: This review was inspired by last issue's "Real Deal" feature, a German photographic postcard of a girls' class during the war.
This is a fascinating study of the corrosive effect of total war on Germany from 1914-1918, with particularly emphasis of the impact of social mobilization and political polarization of civilian youth. Donson finds that German middle class youth who grew up steeped in nationalist war propaganda and inured to violence and embittered by disastrous defeat, turned to right wing fascist politics and armed Freikorps. Conversely, working class youth often turned to radical-left organizations after 1918 because they believed the moderate Social Democratic Party had sold out the working class first by supporting the Kaiser's war and then by failing to reform Germany when they gained power under the Weimar Constitution. Thus the Weimar government was crippled from the start and fated to be torn apart by violent political strife. The radical polarization of many German youth who were the cannon fodder for this political violence was the result of mass youth mobilization, the breakdown of family structures, and the hunger and depravation caused in part by the Royal Naval blockade and in part by German administrative incompetence.
The decline in adult authority over youth was the result of mass conscription of authority figures -- heads of family, police, teachers, and party youth leaders -- the breakdown of schooling as the war progressed, the fracturing of families, decreasing supervision at work and the opening of commercial leisure to well-paid youthful workers not yet subject to conscription, but drawn to crime and violence.
The author finds in this thorough and sophisticated sociological study many of the same wartime fissures identified by Roger Chickering in his study of the city of Freiberg, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany (Cambridge, 2009). He demonstrates why and how many thousands of the war generation were drawn to the Nazi and Communist movements which ravaged Germany more than 20 years following the end of World War One.
Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism and Authority in Germany, 1914-1919, Andrew Donson, Harvard, 2010, 330 pages, photos, graphs, index, bibliography, notes, ISBN 978 0 764 04983 3, $49.95 HB.
Editor's Note: This review was inspired by last issue's "Real Deal" feature, a German photographic postcard of a girls' class during the war.
This is a fascinating study of the corrosive effect of total war on Germany from 1914-1918, with particularly emphasis of the impact of social mobilization and political polarization of civilian youth. Donson finds that German middle class youth who grew up steeped in nationalist war propaganda and inured to violence and embittered by disastrous defeat, turned to right wing fascist politics and armed Freikorps. Conversely, working class youth often turned to radical-left organizations after 1918 because they believed the moderate Social Democratic Party had sold out the working class first by supporting the Kaiser's war and then by failing to reform Germany when they gained power under the Weimar Constitution. Thus the Weimar government was crippled from the start and fated to be torn apart by violent political strife. The radical polarization of many German youth who were the cannon fodder for this political violence was the result of mass youth mobilization, the breakdown of family structures, and the hunger and depravation caused in part by the Royal Naval blockade and in part by German administrative incompetence.
The decline in adult authority over youth was the result of mass conscription of authority figures -- heads of family, police, teachers, and party youth leaders -- the breakdown of schooling as the war progressed, the fracturing of families, decreasing supervision at work and the opening of commercial leisure to well-paid youthful workers not yet subject to conscription, but drawn to crime and violence.
The author finds in this thorough and sophisticated sociological study many of the same wartime fissures identified by Roger Chickering in his study of the city of Freiberg, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany (Cambridge, 2009). He demonstrates why and how many thousands of the war generation were drawn to the Nazi and Communist movements which ravaged Germany more than 20 years following the end of World War One.
Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism and Authority in Germany, 1914-1919, Andrew Donson, Harvard, 2010, 330 pages, photos, graphs, index, bibliography, notes, ISBN 978 0 764 04983 3, $49.95 HB.
