History by Generations

göttinger studien zur generationsforschung

Veröffentlichungen des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs“Generationengeschichte”

Vol. 11Edited by

Dirk Schumann

DFG- GRADUIERTENKOLLEG

GENERATIONEN-GESCHICHTE

History by GenerationsGenerational Dynamics

in M odern History

Edited byHartmut Berghoff, Uffa Jensen,

Christina Lubinski, and Bernd Weisbrod

Offprint

© Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2013www.wallstein-verlag.deVom Verlag gesetzt aus der Adobe GaramondUmschlaggestaltung: Susanne Gerhards, DüsseldorfObere Bildhälfte: © istockphoto; Jugendliche in New York CityUntere Bildhälfte: © ullstein bild – Mehner; protestierende Jugendliche auf dem Alexan-derplatz (aufgenommen am 7.10.1989)Druck und Verarbeitung: Hubert & Co, GöttingenISBN (Print) 978-3-8353-1162-6ISBN (E-Book, pdf ) 978-3-8353-2290-5

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Contents

Hartmut Berghoff, Uffa Jensen, Christina Lubinski, Bernd WeisbrodIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

The Great Picture

Elwood CarlsonGenerations as Demographic Category:Twentieth-Century U. S. Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The American Dream

Sarah E. Chinn“This Terrible American Freedom”:The Invention of the Generation Gap, 1890-1930 . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Gary CrossConsumption Patterns as Generational Markers:American Examples and Comparative Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Johanna A. BrumbergPreceding the Baby Boom Generation:The “Generation Gap” in American Intellectual Discourse During the 1960s and 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

The Youth Model

Uffa JensenThe Lure of Authenticity:Emotions and Generation in the German Youth Movement of the Early 20th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Dirk SchumannYouth Culture, Consumption, and Generational Dispositions in Twentieth-Century Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

The Family Model

María Fernández MoyaBooks and Family Matter:A Long-Term Analysis of Intergenerational Transmission Practices in Spanish Family Publishing Firms (1900-2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Olof Brunninge and Anders MelanderFamily-Firm Identity Across Generations:The Swedish Pulp and Paper Firms MoDo (1872-1990) and Korsnäs (1855-2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

The Political Transformation

Volker BenkertThe Last GDR Generation?The GDR and the Process of Transformation after 1989-1990 as Seen Through the Eyes of East Germans Born Between 1967 and 1973 . . . . 195

Astrid BaerwolfTransformative Motherhood in Eastern Germany:Generational Styles of Mothering Before and After the Wende . . . . . 216

Post-Communism

Judith SzaporThe Generation of “Bright Winds”:A Generation Denied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Ondřej MatějkaUses of a “Generation”:The Case of the Czech “68ers” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

Kirsten GerlandFuture Perspectives and Images of the Past:A “New, Young Generation” of the 1980s in the GDR and the People’s Republic of Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

Hartmut Berghoff, Uffa Jensen, Christina Lubinski, Bernd Weisbrod

Introduction

The concept of generations figures prominently in both popular culture and historical studies. New departures in politics, culture, and economics are often associated with a specific generational group. This usually applies to youthful (and male) activists who seem to share some extraordinary experience, as well as similar political ideas, social habits and cultural practices, and who manage to stand in for the cultural hegemony of their views. It also includes distinctions based on generational affiliations, which feature prominently in media, con-sumer culture, migration, and everyday-life. Much of post-war German history, for example, has been explained by the succession of the 45ers, the 68ers, and the 89ers. The concept of generations is similarly prominent in American public discourse, as evidenced by the prevalence of catchphrases like the “Greatest Generation”, “the Baby Boomer Generation”, and “Generation X”. As an ana-lytical category, the concept of generations has also played an important part in immigration studies; the distinction between first- and later generation immi-grants is central to the field. Now that the importance of the categories gender, race, and ethnicity has been clearly established in the social sciences and hu-manities, it is worth asking how far the concept of generations cuts across those categories.

The graduate program on “Generations in Modern History” at the Univer-sity of Göttingen has begun a critical investigation of the assumptions that lie behind the concept of generations and the definition of generational dynamics. It is giving particular attention to generation building and the mobilization of generational meaning, be it in political conflicts and culture wars or at critical historical junctures. It seems, however, that generational discourse owes much of its attractiveness to the national idiom in which it is couched. Significantly, the German debate has centred on political generations while in the United States a preponderance of consumer generations may be detected. These models are, however, less convincing on closer scrutiny, although they do highlight the political and cultural concerns regarding the way in which national histories are framed. By putting German and American readings of the generational para-digm side by side more can be learned, it is hoped, about the role assigned to youth in historical change in transatlantic perspective. Generational discourse is

8 hartmut berghoff, uffa jensen, christina lubinski, bernd weisbrod

usually informed by concerns about national renewal and social regeneration. Yet, it would be wrong to assume that history is being made by generations. History is being explained by and to generations. This is why the history of generation claims and generation building allows for a differentiated view on the processing of generational consciousness under changing historical condi-tions. It is neither a set-piece of fixed assumptions about national self-percep-tion on both sides of the Atlantic, nor is it fixed in time. As the resurging gen-erational discourse in post-communist systems shows, it also needs a public sphere for the claims and counter-claims to evolve which are typical for genera-tional dynamics in times of rapid historical change. At the same time, in the more private setting of family business the history of generations may serve the purposes of genealogical legitimacy, a fair reminder of the potential of failed or successful generational claims on a national level.

To explore theses issues the “Generations in Modern History” program at the University of Göttingen and the German Historical Institute in Washing-ton, D.C., jointly organized the conference “History by Generations: Genera-tional Dynamics in Modern History”, from December 9-11, 2010, in Washing-ton, D.C. Most of the contributions to this conference are arranged in this volume in such a way as to highlight the problematic aspects of generational assumptions. It begins with a piece by the demographer ELWOOD CARLSON who traces typical cohorts and their most likely experience in the course of twentieth-century American history. Filling in this “big picture” is especially rewarding since generational location, as such, hardly ever figures in the Ger-man debate about generational units (i.e. generation conscious activists in com-petition for political and cultural hegemony). Yet, as Carlson shows, much of the likelihood in personal life course and social advancement can actually be explained in terms of age-related opportunity structures as defined by cohort size and social demand. His “Lucky Few” are not the same as the “Greatest Gen-eration” which fought valiantly in America’s wars, but it is a welcome reminder that size matters in generational life chances and, maybe, for different reasons than in the never ending hype about the “Baby Boomers”.

The three pieces in the section on The American Dream deal with generation gaps and generational divides in the United States. SARAH E. CHINN focuses on the concept of “adolescence” and examines the generation gap that formed between immigrant parents and their American-born, teenage children — young women in particular — in the years between 1890 and 1960. She argues that the children of immigrants provided a bridge between their parents’ native cultures and the unfamiliar culture of the United States, while also creating a wall — adolescence — between themselves and their parents due to their growing famil-iarity with American popular culture. Adolescence, Chinn asserts, emerged out

9introduction

of the social upheavals in America’s urban centers in the late nineteenth century and helped to create new cultural associations that separated “Americanness” from Anglo-Saxon identity and instead associated it with a rejection of an “Old World” outlook and an embrace of American consumer society. Consumption is also at the heart of the essay by GARY CROSS who argues for patterns of consumption as markers of generational identity. Cross asserts that the chang-ing availability and meaning of consumer goods influenced the collective iden-tities of generations coming of age, but also notes that producers of consumer goods employed generational markers and intergenerational conflicts to market their goods explicitly to specific generational groups. Cross also looks at how the growing availability of consumer goods contributed to changes in childrear-ing practices among parents that emphasized a permissive and gift-oriented relationship with their children. He notes that early associations between consumption and generational identity remained important factors in the con-sumer behaviors of generational cohorts throughout their lives. As JOHANNA BRUMBERG shows in the last piece of this section the origins of the “Baby Boomer” concept need to be historicized. She emphasizes the relative newness of the term, which was originally used by demographers and social scientists to discuss postwar birthrates and their broader social and economic implications and did not appear in the public sphere until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Stud-ies of disaffected and activist youths during the 1960s by sociologists appeared to reveal a growing generation gap among those born to white, middle-class families in the immediate postwar era that seemed to explain a major break from previous generations. Later, journalists and other non-academics would give the Baby Boomer concept broader cultural significance by taking the nar-row concept of a generation gap and using it to characterize the actions and behaviors of the entire birth cohort born between 1945 and the mid-1960s.

Contrary to the youth consumer model which lies at the heart of much of the debate about the American Dream as perennial promise for the young, especially as immigrants, in Germany the debate has largely focussed on mani-festo generations, young male and bourgeois groups as self-appointed saviours in a political and cultural battle for national renewal. There is, however, as is argued in the section on The Youth Model a much wider youth focus in the German tradition of emotional bonding in the youth movement and, more broadly, in the promises held by a youthful world of self-exploration and au-thenticity. UFFA JENSEN identifies different emotional codes — permissive and restrictive — by looking at emotional styles in the case of Viennese (and Berlin) youth culture groups which were engaged in a close exercise of soul searching. Contrary to the austere “conduct code of the cool” detected by Helmut Lethen in the political mindset of Weimar intellectual activists, the

10 hartmut berghoff, uffa jensen, christina lubinski, bernd weisbrod

fervour of bonding in groups of the youth movement seems to have established a “conduct code of heat” in inter-personal relationships which may also have fed into the emotional community of the Hitler youth. When searching for the American consumerist model in the German case, DIRK SCHUMANN takes note of the well-known fact that especially in the long run of Weimar modern-ist culture, worlds of consumption and leisure time were in effect dressing up as youth cultures. This approach in many ways likens the German consumer cul-ture to the American model irrespective of the major political changes which are usually given more credit in the battle for generational opportunity structure and personal experience in the lived-in world. It is, however, a clear advantage of this consumerist model of youthful experience to cut across these great di-vides in German history and allow for long-term generational formations based on style and habitus which, at the same time, puts class and gender in new per-spective.

The contributions to the section on The Family Model use the concept of generation in a more private context by focusing on the construction of genera-tional identities in family businesses. The Spanish business historian MARÍA FERNÁNDEZ MOYA shows the development of generational identities in family firms in a long-term perspective through two in-depth case studies of Spanish publishing companies from c.1900 to the present. She argues that the generational roles constructed in these entrepreneurial families are closely re-lated to perceived generations in society. She then traces the strategies that indi-vidual family members pursued to transmit an agenda and meaning across generations, thereby offering an interpretative framework to younger family members, who accepted, adapted, or completely denied the proposition. The management scholars OLOF BRUNNINGE and ANDERS MELANDER pick up on the idea of generational identity in family firms, which they con-sider a socially contested interpretative framework for organization members. Looking at two companies from the Swedish pulp and paper industry, they show how these organizational identities were constructed and transferred across generations and distinguish between identities in relation to one specific family and those based on an abstract concept of family — a useful differentia-tion for questions related to generational and genealogical lines. By focusing on the process of identity making in firms, Brunninge and Melander show how individuals connect past, present, and future through the idea of family genera-tions and use these links to push a concrete — in this case management — agenda or highlight their relevance at different points in time.

More generally, private and public uses of the generational idiom may be firmly intertwined and played out in public as well as in private behavioural patterns, as can be seen in a close-up of The Political Transformation in the pro-

11introduction

cess of German Unification. Contrary to a unifying generational imprint, which could be expected at least for those coming of age in the process of German Unification, VOLKER BENKERT detects a variety of adaptations. In spite of a common and clear-cut narrative of “before and after”, it is hard to define a “Generation Exit” in hindsight. The opening of opportunity structures was considered to be a personal test case for political detachment and private ad-vancement, for shedding personal obligations and opening new horizons, just as the case may be. The victimhood of post-communism appears to be only one, and possibly not event the most important, of seven types of transforma-tion experience, at least in this last cohort of young GDR citizens. An equally diversified picture appears in the ethnographic study of the transformation of motherhood by ASTRID BAERWOLF. The East German tradition of public provisions for childcare may have survived the political transformation, but on closer scrutiny it seems that motherhood was not only redefined as a risk-busi-ness in sight of the collapsing labour market for full-time female employment but also re-valued as a form of private engagement. This “professionalization of motherhood” stands out as a generational and a status marker in this field study of East Berlin women who had to adapt to the Political Transformation in their private lives. In both papers of this section, close-up methodologies seem to emphasize the private negotiation of generational patterns which in public discourse tend to be more dependent on the political vagaries of acknowledg-ment or denial.

When opening the perspective on regime change more generally in formerly Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, the experience of new departures in Post-Communism clearly shaped the awareness of a specific place in time for youth cohorts available for mobilization. But, as the last three contributions show there was no easy pattern in the passage to a post-communist generation. Even in communist regimes which hoped to harness the enthusiasm of the young to their revolutionary project of a society without classes or, for that matter, generations, the acknowledgement of age-related experience is clearly depen-dent on the degree of pervasiveness in a contested public sphere. With regard to the post-war Hungarian National Association of People’s Colleges (NÉKOSZ), JUDITH SZAPOR finds a high degree of pride of belonging to these educa-tional institutions for children of the uneducated rural classes in spite of politi-cal suspicions about their future usefulness. Institutional networks did matter for community-based generational claims, but these new elites were up against a policy of repression in the constellation of the Cold War which stifled their hopes for post-Stalinist reforms. This “Generation of Bright Winds” was stalled and survives as a memory construct only. Compared to the Western European experience of 1968 as a youth revolt, the Prague spring meltdown of these hopes

12 hartmut berghoff, uffa jensen, christina lubinski, bernd weisbrod

is seen by ONDŘEJ MATĚJKA not as generational conflict but rather as a broad-based project for socialist reform. Nevertheless, from hindsight the gen-eration label was used by new contenders for political liberalization as well as by those last socialist reformers to settle the meaning of this conflict. Political fail-ure, not just political success, thus seems to attract the generational label in memory wars long after the fact. The reverse effect is brought out in the paper of KIRSTEN GERLAND, which compares the contributions of political youth groups in bringing about the final overthrow of the communist regimes in the GDR and Poland. In both cases there was clearly an element of generational dynamics at work. In Poland, especially, the Solidarnosz generation was marked out for criticism by the young activists who wanted to cut loose from the last generation of socialist reformers and establish their political claims on their own status as a second generation. But in spite of such parallels, the genera-tional reading of the final collapse of the communist regime hardly figured in the public discourse in the new Germany, which was reluctant to acknowledge the internal forces of change anyway and to offer career chances for those young activists from the East. On the other side, the ability to establish a gen-erational narrative for their own experience was part of the political success story in Poland. In all, it seems, generational formation even under extremely favourable conditions of political mobilization is no forgone conclusion but the result of a negotiated settlement in which generational claims must be acknowl-edged as part of the solution to the problem which they defined.

History by Generations, therefore, is far less obvious than it appears in some shorthand national histories on both sides of the Atlantic. What is remarkable, however, is the degree to which particular generational idioms are nationalized and frequently reinvented in modern history. They are part of the way in which national histories are being read and negotiated as cultural markers in histori-cal time, reconciling personal experience with public acknowledgement, and youthful expectations with political pragmatism.1

1 The editors would like to thank Ben Schwantes for his diligent copy-editing and Ursula Kömen for her skillful supervision of the publishing process. Anna von der Goltz, Jan Logemann, Lutz Niethammer, and Miriam Rürup gave insightful comments to one or several of the contributions. We also would like to thank the members of staff of the Ger-man Historical Institute Washington DC and the Göttingen Graduiertenkolleg, who supported the conference organization and made it a successful and enjoyable event.

The Great Picture

Elwood Carlson

Generations as Demographic Category:

Twentieth-Century U. S. Generations

What are generations? At its heart, this word with many meanings always indi-cates the creation of something. To generate is to create, to give birth, to invent, or to produce something that had no prior existence. Scholars generate ideas. Public utilities generate electricity. Parents generate children. In sociological terms, a generation is a group that has at least the potential to coalesce within society. Shared experiences (usually with a temporal focus) generate a group out of a collection of individual personalities. This collective property, this cohesive-ness that persists across a lifespan, is the most fundamental feature of gen-erations in society.1 A social generation can point forward as well as backward in time – not only sharing some common past, but with the collective potential to create consequences from their shared experience, to reshape the social world precisely because they constitute a generation.

Age and Time as Analytical Dimensions

Some people, however, use the generation label very loosely for social categories that are not generations at all. For example, the European Commission’s (EC) Directorate for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities desig-nated 2012 as the European Year on Active Ageing and Intergenerational Soli-darity, and established April 29, 2009, and subsequent years, as the annual Eu-ropean Day of Intergenerational Solidarity and Cooperation. In their agendas, publications, websites, and other materials related to these events, EC groups sometimes use the term “generation” to refer to genealogical generations in the same sense that Baerwolf, Brunninge, and Fernandez Moya use the term in this volume, as relations between parents and children over the life course. How-ever, EC officials also use the term interchangeably to refer to broad age groups in the population such as youthful dependents, working-age persons, or older

1 Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Die Idee der Generationen”, in: Das Wesen geschichtlicher Krisen (Stuttgart, 1951); Annie Kriegel, “Generational Difference: The History of an Idea”, in: Daedalus 107, 4 (1978), 23-38; David I. Kertzer, “Generation as a Sociological Problem”, in: Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983), 125-149; Hans Jaeger, “Generations in History: Reflections on a Controversial Concept”, in: History and Theory 24, 3 (1985), 273-292.

16 elwood carlson

pensioners. Age ranges discussed in these EC documents should be called age grades, not generations.2

Age grades are not at all the same thing as generations. Age grades compro-mise between our individual births, continuous aging, and deaths as transient mortals, and the comparatively stable organizational structure of our societies. Age grades break up the continuity of our aging process as individuals into the societal equivalent of what mathematicians call a discontinuous step-function, with sharp breaks or transitions separating homogenous segments in the life course.3 In contemporary urban societies, age grades identify appropriate roles for innocent and carefree children, confused and rebellious adolescents, ener-getic family and career formation in young adulthood, stable and serious de-pendability in mature adulthood, withdrawal from the labor force and retire-ment in late-mature adulthood, and eventually the encroachments of failing health in old age.

So long as a person remains within such an age grade, social conventions at-tempt to ignore continuous chronological aging, allowing age grade occupants at least temporarily to occupy stable, clearly defined roles and statuses. EC ef-forts to stimulate solidarity between people too young for the labor force, those in the working ages, and those who have retired from work explicitly recognize the discontinuities that occur at age-grade boundaries. When someone ages out of an age grade, that person must make the leap to a new age grade with differ-ent institutionalized identities and expectations. Anthropologist Robert Lowie observed that supportive rituals of passage often facilitate crossing these dif-ficult boundaries between age grades, since such identity shifts are the cultural equivalents of the discontinuities where mathematical step-functions are un-defined and have no derivatives.4 These abrupt shifts in normative activity and status when a person crosses the boundary of an age grade provide the clearest reminder that age grades are not generations. Age grades cannot provide their members with a permanent and distinctive shared identity.

The age grade concept offers one vantage point for considering the intersec-tion of age and time in the lives of individuals and societies. This age dimension is illustrated on the vertical axis in the Lexis diagram (Figure 1), a conceptual tool used widely by demographers. Age boundaries can serve as persistent fea-

2 Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, “Age Organization – Terminology”, in: Man 29, 13 (1929), 21; B. Bernardi, “The Age System of the Nilo-Hamitic Peoples”, in: Africa 22 (1952), 316-332.

3 Ann Foner and David Kertzer, “Transitions over the Life Course: Lessons from Age-set Societies”, in: American Journal of Sociology 83, 5 (1978), 1081-1104.

4 Robert H. Lowie, “Age Societies of the Plain Indians”, in: American Museum Journal 17 (1917), 495-496; Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Society (New York, 1920); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: 1934); Foner and Kertzer, Transitions.

17generations as demographic category

tures of society that define stages of life with distinctive roles, privileges, and responsibilities.

Figure 1: Social / historical change and age differentiaton

The Lexis diagram also depicts calendar time as orthogonal to the age dimen-sion, illustrated as columns rising along the horizontal axis in successive his-torical intervals. If historical events affect an entire society in essentially the same way, we still are not speaking of generations. To the extent that a society differentiates roles, responsibilities, and rewards into age-stratified life stages, however, historical events affect particular age groups in different ways. Age and period effects intersect. Statisticians would say they interact. Karl Mannheim put this succinctly:

The fact of belonging to the same class, and that of belonging to the same generation or age group, have this in common, that both endow the indi-viduals sharing in them with a common location in the social and historical process, and thereby limit them to a specific range of potential experience, predisposing them for a certain characteristic mode of thought and experi-ence, and a characteristic type of historically relevant action.5

5 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations”, in: Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Mannheim, (London, 1952, first published 1927), 291.

18 elwood carlson

Norman Ryder suggested that we call the intersection of age with historical pe-riod a cohort, a term widely used in demography in particular. When history and biography intersect, the potential arises for generating generations, but the con-cept of generation is something more than just a cohort defined by the intersec-tion of age with historical time.6 Figure 2 displays the conceptual sequence pre-sented below, relating different uses of the idea of “generation” to one another.

Figure 2

6 Norman Ryder, “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change”, in: American Sociological Review 30, 6 (1965), 843-861; Gosta Carlsson and Katharina Karlsson, “Age, Cohorts and the Generation of Generations”, in: American Sociological Review 35, 4 (1970), 710-718; Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure (Glencoe, 1956).

GenerationalConcepts

Age-Sets Genealogical

-birthcohortswithcollective -individualparent-childpairs

identities -definedbyreproduction

-groupnameandresponsibilities

-(nosenseofhistoricalvariation)

Immigrant

-genealogical+migrationevent

Phenomenological

-agedifferentiation+social/

historicalchange

Generation“initself”

-sharedsocial/historicalcontext

-constraints&advantages

(size,composition)

-mechanicalsolidarity(Durkheim)

Generation“foritself”

-consciouslysharedidentity

(ascribed?achieved?)

-agendasof“generationalunits”

(Mannheim)

-conditionsforemergence?

19generations as demographic category

Age Sets and Phenomenological Generations

In a few rare societies this age/period interaction takes on a concrete social form in publicly identified, collectively meaningful groups called age sets. These age sets bear many similarities to what we mean by phenomenological or historical generations.7 An age set unites persons in a certain age range, often giving them a collective group name of their own and specific collective responsibilities within their society.8 Individuals assigned to an age set share a stable collective identity that follows them throughout life. These coherent, named age sets only appear, however, in a few small-scale traditional cultures observed by anthropologists.

Ritter concludes that such age sets are generated in societies where men do not live together in permanent settlements, or do not stay in the same place throughout the year, as a way of responding to endemic threats of warfare with outside groups.9 Hanson questioned the empirical power of this view for ex-plaining why some Plains tribes of Native Americans created age sets while oth-ers did not, but also concludes that these groupings are mainly for military purposes.10 The fact that few societies systematically organize themselves into self-conscious, cohesive age sets and give such groups unique names and salient social roles reflects Mannheim’s observation that “… location as such only con-tains potentialities which may materialize, or be suppressed, or become embed-ded in other social forces and manifest themselves in modified form”.11

Although this group identity as an age set persists for its members across suc-cessive age grades as they all grow older together, age-set societies intend succes-sive age sets of people to replicate the same stable cultural pattern when occupy-ing a particular age grade. The age-set concept arose and has been used to analyze relatively stable, long-term cultural patterns. In the age-set concept we have all the ingredients for generations, except that there is no sense of history. Mannheim noted that without social change, generations do not appear. By adding history, and in particular the fact of social change, we will arrive at the full sense of generation usually intended by historians and social scientists.12

7 Björn Bohnenkamp, “Generationen – Vom Antwortbegriff zum Fragebegriff”, Vortrag beim Vernetzungstreffen des Graduiertenkollegs Generationengeschichte (Göttingen) mit dem Graduiertenkolleg Generationenbewusstsein und Generationenkonflikte (Bamberg); William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York, 1991).

8 Foner and Kertzer, Transitions. 9 Madeline Lattman Ritter, “The Conditions Favoring Age-set Organization”, in: Journal

of Anthropological Research 36, 1 (1980), 87-104, here 98.10 Jeffery R. Hanson. “Age-Set Theory and Plains Indian Age-Grading: A Critical Review

and Revision” in American Ethnologist 15, 2 (1988): 349-364.11 Mannheim, Problem of Generations, 303.12 Ibid., 309.

20 elwood carlson

Genealogical Generations

Before examining phenomenological or historical generations in their fullest sense, however, we must distinguish one more variant definition of generations. In anthropological studies of kinship and in genealogical research, generations are individualized relationships centered on biological reproduction. Such a genealogical generation is completely defined by a single act of biological repro-duction involving parent and child.13

This self-sufficiency of the genealogical generation, its definition by an indi-vidual reproductive act, renders it generally irrelevant for social theory. Genea-logical generations rarely translate into meaningful collective groups. Consider all of the people born in the United States in a particular year, say 1940, or 1960, or 1980, or 2000. In each year we observe millions of individuals who all share a fundamental common event, birth itself. Yet the ages of their parents, which give the lengths of their individual genealogical generations, form predictably diffuse distributions. Some genealogical generations in each of these birth co-horts span little more than a single decade, while others may be two or three times longer.14

Figure 3: Distribution of U. S. Births by Year and Ages of Parents15

13 Bohnenkamp, Generationen.14 Bennett M. Berger, “How Long Is a Generation?”, in: British Journal of Sociology 11

(1960), 557-568.15 Source: National Center for Health Statistics: Vital Statistics of the United States (se-

lected years).

21generations as demographic category

The distribution of parental ages from these four birth cohorts can be used to predict the approximate distribution of years in which subsequent genealogical generations will be born to them. Eventually, we find the last few births in the first generation of children taking place at about the same time as the births of many grandchildren, and perhaps even great-grandchildren for families where the genealogical generations are particularly short. If one imagines these over-lapping and increasingly diffuse waves of descendents from people born in one year after another, we can readily understand demographer Norman Ryder’s observation that “… a society reproduces itself continuously. The age gap be-tween father and son disappears in the population at large, through the compre-hensive overlapping of life cycles.”16

Figure 4: Overlapping Generations of Descendents from U. S. Birth Cohort17

Since the human species requires two parents of opposite sexes, each act of re-production creates two generations in the same way that Jessie Bernard insisted that a wedding creates two marriages – his marriage and her marriage.18 The length of a genealogical generation, measured as the time between birth of par-

16 Ryder, Cohort, 853.17 Source: Calculated from averages of parental ages in Figure 3.18 Jessie Bernard, The Future of Marriage (New Haven, 1972).

22 elwood carlson

ent and birth of child, depends on whether we measure age of father or age of mother. For example, in the royal family of Sweden, male members of the lin-eage typically are at least a decade older at the births of their children than is the case for female members of the lineage. In fact, fathers in almost all societies are several years older on average than mothers, and this pattern has persisted for as long as we have any historical records of civilizations.

Thus there must have been many more maternal than paternal generations in the human past. For example, if we take the average age of fathers at the birth of any of their children (not just their first child) as 30.0 and the average age of mothers as 26.5 (averages widely observed in many societies) the conclusion fol-lows that every thousand years would produce about four-and-a-half more gen-erations for women than for men. If the human species has existed for a couple of million years, we have cycled through nearly nine thousand more generations of women than men, and women are about a quarter of a million years more evolved than men as a result of the gender difference in length of genealogical generations. However, the societal invisibility of genealogical generations guar-antees that most people have never even considered such an idea.

When combined with other events, a genealogical generation can take on sociological significance in special circumstances. For example, research pre-sented by Chinn in this volume on immigrants and their children in the United States links genealogical generations to migration events to create meaningful social groups. We also know that first-generation Japanese immigrants to Aus-tralia and the Americas are known as Issei. Their second-generation, native-born children in these countries are Nisei. The children of those children are called Sansei, since in Japanese counting, “one, two, three” is “ichi, ni, san”. The Nisei generation (defined genealogically and restricted to those with immigrant parents) combines people born in widely different years to parents who immi-grated in a similarly wide range of years. Despite such variations in historical time and age, the shared experience growing up with immigrant parents creates common circumstances, making Nisei a meaningful and even a self-consciously organized social group. When genealogical generations do have social meaning, then, that meaning differs fundamentally from the other main concept of gen-erations, which generally disregards genealogical position entirely in favor of unifying temporal commonalities.

Generation Locations, Mechanical Solidarity, and Generational Units

As already noted, emergence of a phenomenological or historical generation requires more than the simple intersection of age and time. Age grades and age sets in a society may structure complex role changes over the life course, but this

23generations as demographic category

one-dimensional variation in social experiences with increasing age can remain unperturbed over time. Without historical change, social experiences within age grades can remain essentially constant. The life cycle of each birth cohort is a faithful copy of those that came before and a template for those that follow after. To get distinct generations we must add historical variations over time. People with unique historical experiences make important decisions differently at critical stages in their lives. Simultaneous variation along both dimensions of age and time create what Mannheim called different generation locations, although to be more accurate we should perhaps refer to them as generation paths since a generation does not exist only at a single intersection of time and age. These generation locations can give rise to social cohesiveness in two very different senses.

First, shared historical experience can create solidarity at a generation loca-tion in a purely mechanical sense, as Durkheim used that term. This is the sense of generational distinctiveness that prompted the massive effort of William Strauss and Neil Howe to define several centuries of historical generations in American society.19 At this mechanical level the distinctive character of each generation is not worked out consciously by intellectuals or anyone else within that generation. Rather, this distinctive character emerges spontaneously, auto-poietically from the structural context experienced by the aggregate of individu-als who compose the generation.20 The crucial point about such mechanical solidarity is that distinctive generational outcomes can follow such a group throughout their entire lives without any requirement that they be conscious of these facts; without any requirement that they self-consciously think of them-selves as members of a generation; and without any requirement that they de-liberately organize themselves into cohort-based groups with action agendas. At this level, generations exist and have dramatic social consequences whether their members are aware of them or not.

Second, shared historical experience may actually prompt people to go be-yond the mechanical solidarity of similar reactions to similar circumstances. Shared experience may precipitate self-conscious sub-groups of people who de-fine themselves or others at least partly in terms of generational identity. This more deliberate, conscious use of generational identity in the agenda of an or-

19 Emile Durkheim, De la Division du Travail Social (Paris, 1967, first published 1897); Strauss and Howe, Generations.

20 Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and R. Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model”, in: Biosystems 5 (1974), 187-196; Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (Dordrecht, 1980).

24 elwood carlson

ganized group was captured by Mannheim when he spoke of generational units, which he regarded as component parts of a generation in the broader sense.21

Most historical research about generations, including much of the research to be presented here, centers on this self-conscious aspect of generational unit identity. Research by Morat, Jensen, Brumberg, Matějka, Szapor, and others examines the historical and social foundations, the process of emergence, and the consequences of such self-conscious discourse, and points out deliberate efforts (some more successful than others) to construct generation-based social consciousness. The interplay of these generational units, both within their own generation and in interaction with analogous groups in older or younger gen-erations, has fascinated scholars for decades and forms one of the foundational subjects for the Graduate Program on Generations at Göttingen.

Since Mannheim, however, we also have recognized that “… not every gen-eration location … creates new collective impulses and formative principles original to itself and adequate to its particular situation. Where this does hap-pen, we shall speak of a realization of potentialities inherent in the location …”22

The scale and complexity of many societies create cross-cutting social identi-ties based on ethnicity, social class, gender, and other dimensions of collective identity that compete with (and frequently overshadow) age and cohort.23 In the shadow of these other social dimensions, generational differences can go unremarked, either by the persons who compose the generations or by scholars who interpret social trends and patterns. The central question of interest to many researchers today concerns the conditions that precipitate more or less conscious identification of generational units at some generation locations, but not at others. As Weisbrod frequently reiterates in his work, and as Matějka points out in this volume regarding the Czech 68ers, generational consciousness forms a resource which can be mobilized in support of a self-conscious social group and its action agendas. This resource-mobilization perspective, well known to scholars of social movements generally, applies to any sort of group identity as a form of potential social capital.24 As such, mobilizing generational consciousness is just one strategy for utilizing the potential inherent in social networks, a strategy to be weighed by social actors against alternatives such as

21 Mannheim, Problem of Generations, 307; J. Pilcher, “Mannheim’s Sociology of Genera-tions: An Undervalued Legacy”, in: British Journal of Sociology 45 (1994), 481-495.

22 Mannheim, Problem of Generations, 309.23 Peter M. Blau and Joseph E. Schwarz, Cross-Cutting Social Circles: Testing a Macrosocial

Theory of Intergroup Relations (Orlando, 1984).24 R. G. Braungart, “Historical Generations and Youth Movements: A Theoretical Perspec-

tive”, in: Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 6 (1984), 95-142.

25generations as demographic category

mobilizing consciousness of gender, ethnicity, social class, or other structural elements of societal differentiation.

It is important to recognize that groups making such conscious choices can be outside the generations they seek to mobilize or label, as well as inside them in the demographic sense of chronological ages.25 Thus Brumberg’s discussion in this volume of the U. S. 68ers shows us that while the Baby Boom generation furnished an advantageous resource (huge numbers of young people having a difficult time fitting into previous social contexts but possessing enormous res-ervoirs of financial and libidinal energy) this generation location in itself never played a leading role in its own gradual definition, over subsequent decades, as a self-conscious generation for itself. Most of the people who initially mobilized the Boomers were not themselves Boomers. Many of the people today most stridently labeling them as a generation are in other generation locations.

We also must recognize that generation locations as social resources can be mobilized in either an internal or a relational sense, and that most studies of generational units to date focus almost exclusively on the internal sense, that is, on the people within a specific generation as resources to be linked in social networks by labeling them as parts of the whole. In contrast to this narrow view, there is also a relational side to the agenda of creating generations which aims at creating boundaries between generations rather than stressing the specific con-tent of generation locations. By labeling and emphasizing generational differ-ences, social actors can distract attention and social action away from other types of social divides. Just as some analysts of persistent class-based hegemony suggest that emphasizing ethnic differences and gender gaps can draw attention away from persistent, inherited stratification of life-chances based on property, wealth, and power, generational labels can be used in the same long-standing game of divide and conquer, keeping generational units and other social move-ments busy with other issues.26 Ethnicity has not proven to be an ideal focus for distracting a society from class-based issues, because ethnic groups often be-come stratified by class position. Attention focused on ethnic differences thus also can highlight class differences automatically. However, both gender and generation provide ideal dimensions of distraction from class-based differences because gendered and generational divisions, once they are brought to public attention in almost any society, both cut across social class differences in an al-most perfectly orthogonal way. Battles based on gendered and generational di-visions can leave the class structure of a society virtually untouched. Van der

25 H. Schumann and J. Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories”, in: American So-ciological Review 54 (1989), 359-381.

26 The Myth of Generational Conflict, the Family and the State in Ageing Societies, ed. S. Ar-ber and C. Attias-Donfut (London, 2000).

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Goltz has given us the excellent example of a recent book published in the United Kingdom, which attempts to cast prospective national budget problems in terms of generational contests (specifically involving Boomers). More such distracting rhetoric will doubtless follow as the massive Boomer generation en-ters retirement in country after country.

To balance the interest in, and attention to, such events taking place on this stage occupied by generational units, my task here is to stress that even in the historical gaps where self-conscious generational units do not rise to promi-nence, the underlying mechanical solidarity produced by contrasting genera-tion locations can shape lifelong patterns for a generation in itself.27 These lifelong generational contrasts can have major social significance, even when the members of generations remain largely unaware of their source. Indeed, the extent to which the social order of any age actually falls within conscious con-trol of self-identified generational units (or within the control of any deliberate human agendas, individual or collective) probably is dwarfed by the impact of deeper structural currents flowing through the world, including currents of generational change at the more basic, mechanical level. Even when intellectual elites develop coherent generational (or other) identities in some situations, such identities may not percolate very far into the culture at large or have much impact outside the circles where they arise and are recorded. Until recent de-cades, historians had to be content with the written records left by such elites and so tended to construct histories focused through the lens created by con-tending generational units and other conscious actors and groups of elites. It was historians, however, who also pioneered a new way of studying the past, reconstructing the lives of common people from the limited but revealing data they left behind in parish records and other official documents. Each of us al-ready has left footprints in history – a birth registration, perhaps a marriage registration, and other administrative records. Particularly for demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists, parish reconstitution research pioneered by historians a generation ago struck like a thunderclap, overturning old theoreti-cal paradigms and opening vast new research possibilities into the everyday lives of the great mass of populations in the past. The echo of this thunderclap still reverberates in our work.28

The surest way for special generation locations to create lifelong effects is for them to be built right into the facts of life of the generation itself, in other words, facts and forces that arise out of the very existence of the people who compose the generation. Chief among these are the most fundamental demo-

27 Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (London, 2007).28 Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1972).

27generations as demographic category

graphic facts: sheer numbers of people, proportions of immigrants, ethnic bal-ances, and the like.29 Ordinarily these stubborn facts that frame the lives of scores of millions of people do not show violent historical fluctuations. When they do, however, as during immigration waves, or baby booms, or plagues, they permanently alter the basic facts of life.30 When such demographic fluc-tuations concentrate in certain age groups, the people in these specific genera-tion locations are marked and set apart from those around them. Lifelong per-sistence of what Mannheim called “a certain characteristic mode of thought and experience” forms the bedrock assumption on which economist Richard East-erlin based his concepts of relative generation size, relative deprivation, and re-sulting fluctuations in everything from inflation and unemployment rates to suicide and juvenile delinquency.31 Easterlin studied the crucial impact of sim-ple fluctuations in cohort size on the collective fates of successive generations of Americans. He provided examples of such contrasts in social-historical loca-tion, and in resulting characteristic modes of thought and experience. These distinctions in generational location, and the sometimes-dramatic swings in at-titudes and behavior that they can produce across cohorts, can profitably be studied as generational differences, whether or not specific sub-groups within these cohorts of people go on consciously to define themselves (or to be defined by others) as a generational unit with a distinctive label and a coherent public image.

The Question of Generational Boundaries

Some examples of conditioning demographic, economic, and political circum-stances from my own research on the United States in the twentieth century can illustrate specific ways that mechanical solidarity based on shared experience creates contrasting generational outcomes. In what follows, I confess to follow-ing the widespread tendency to describe generations as segments of a popula-tion set off from each other by identifiable boundaries, internally similar among their members in crucial ways, and collectively distinct from other generations. This generations-as-segments perspective also usually assumes that generations

29 Joseph R. Gusfield, “The Problem of Generations in an Organizational Structure”, in: Social Forces 35 (1957), 325-330; Richard A. Easterlin, “The American Baby Boom in His-torical Perspective”, in: American Economic Review 51, 5 (1961), 869-911.

30 Elwood Carlson, The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom (New York, 2008); Richard A. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (Chicago, 1980); William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe (New York, 2007).

31 Easterlin, American Baby Boom; Easterlin, Birth and Fortune.

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are exhaustive and mutually exclusive, that is, everyone belongs to exactly one generation. Of course, the difficulty is that specifying boundaries between gen-erations in the end is a somewhat arbitrary choice.

Interestingly, these sharp temporal boundaries for generations bear a remark-able resemblance to the political boundaries that we often take for granted as dividing the contemporary world into discrete, mutually exclusive territorial states. Over the course of recent centuries, conceptions of political authority have evolved to stress clearly defined, sharp boundaries between countries. The other side of the same coin is a tendency to view the people and places con-tained within these boundaries as homogenous political units. Much of the unrest and violence in the world stems from discrepancies between this ten-dency to see the globe as a jigsaw puzzle of pieces, each clearly identified by its own evenly spread primary color, and the messy facts of ethnic, religious, and class diversity. Our tendency to identify discrete, coherent generations ex-presses the same world-view as our political maps that divide the planet among na tion-states, or our rhetoric of social class divisions that draw equally sharp boun daries between assumed groups based on ownership of the means of pro-duction. One might be tempted to say that the habit of drawing such clear, sharp generational and other social boundaries is itself a generational pheno-menon.

Some generation scholars, however, take an alternative approach. Rather than trying to define a boundary between contrasting generations to which we then assign internal consistency and coherence, we will see Brumberg, Matějka, and others in this volume speaking of the 45ers or the 68ers, seeking the focal point of each generation, a generational measure of central tendency analogous to the mode of a statistical distribution. The heart of generational meaning clus-ters around such a historical point, and fades gradually into the next generation as we move away from it in the stream of time and birth cohorts. According to this perspective, some people should be more “generational” than others. Inten-sity of generational identity should vary along some continuous distribution, from strong to weak or non-existent, based on proximity to a critical genera-tional location. However, choosing the historical events or moments that con-stitute such a focal point for generational identity then automatically becomes the most difficult problem facing this perspective. In order to find such a focal point, we must privilege some historical events over others. We also must priv-ilege some ages (usually young adulthood in existing theories) over others in order to achieve the intersection of biography and history needed to identify the center of gravity of a generation. Previous research choosing this approach, as Weisbrod has shown, tends to focus on young adulthood as the crucial age range, privileging a specific age grade within society as the generator of genera-

29generations as demographic category

tional identities.32 People reaching the most susceptible ages at the right his-torical moments would be most strongly affected in ways that would lead to “new collective impulses” to create identities rooted in the concept of genera-tion. People of the wrong ages (or put another way, reaching the right ages at the wrong time) would not realize their generational potential. They would not be as likely to see themselves in generational descriptions. They might be prone to place more emphasis, instead, on concepts like social class or ethnic identity as common denominators.

Mannheim clearly anticipated this question three generations ago, when he wrote: “… generations … tend to attach themselves, where possible, to an earlier generation which may have achieved a satisfactory form, or to a younger gen-eration which is capable of evolving a newer form. Crucial group experiences can act in this way as crystallizing agents, and it is characteristic of cultural life that unattached elements are always attracted to perfected configurations …”33

This image of nearby birth cohorts gravitating toward a focal point in his-tory and biography, together with Mannheim’s use of “crystallizing” to describe the processes forming a generation, suggest that it may be a valid idea, after all, to attempt to sort out coherent, internally similar, and externally differentiated generations as age segments of a population. Just as cosmic clouds can condense into planets circling a star, a population differentiated by age grades and the experience of social change can condense into generations.

Twentieth-Century U. S. Generations

The generation of Americans born from 1871 through 1889 (see Figure 5) have been described as the New Worlders because by the time their generation reached its maximum size (about the time of the 1920 Census) nearly one of ev-ery four of them had immigrated to the New World.34 This did not happen again for any generation of Americans for the rest of the twentieth century. This great wave of immigrants may never have thought of themselves as a generation. However, the simple fact of foreign birth for so many affected their ability to organize into political parties, their chances to find marriage partners and jobs, and many other features of their lives. The adult survivors counted in this gen-eration (see Figure 5) also represent only about four-fifths of their original birth cohorts, because at the beginning of the century higher death rates (particularly

32 Bernd Weisbrod, “Cultures of Change: Generations in the Politics and Memory of Modern Germany”, in: Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (London, 2007), 19-35.

33 Mannheim, Problem of Generations, 310.34 Carlson, Lucky Few.