Rejuvenating Germany from the ground up: The discourse about youth in the early postwar period

Many studies of the early postwar period share a remarkable coincidence of analytical categories, including fascism, nation, collective guilt, reconstruction, and re-education. The dissertation aims to show how the discourse about youth overlaps with and even underpins this ubiquitous thematic. In the early postwar period, the discourse about youth becomes an important means with which to narrate the reconstruction of the nation. When the traditional bourgeois social constellation becomes labile, youth as "other" is invoked to reinscribe this threatened social and political order.;The introduction suggests that the discourse about youth and generation is an important site of analysis because it is central to the cultural, and social reproduction of any society. The discourse about youth helps adults imagine themselves as both individual subjects and larger collectives, especially the nation. The introduction also discusses the themes of youth crisis, youth as other, youth as border crossers, and as objects of the gaze.;Chapter Two discusses works by intellectuals prominent in the early postwar public sphere. Though they consider fascism and postwar guilt, many of these texts are centrally concerned with youth and education as a way to reformulate German nationhood and culture. A dual representation of youth, as both socially affirming and threatening, can be found in authors from a range of backgrounds and political positions, including Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Junger, and Ernst Wiechert.;Chapter Three considers the postwar "rubble-film," and how youth becomes central to the films' understanding of fascism as well as reconstruction. The chapter focuses on how the discourse about youth rehabilitates threatened masculinity: the films consistently shift the social crisis of the adult male to a crisis of delinquent youth.;Chapter Four takes up this kind of representation of youth and generation in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947), the most discussed literary work in the early postwar period. In Doktor Faustus, Mann has created an allegory of fascism that pivots on a dual representation of youth. This chapter argues that Mann reads fascism through the complicated, contradictory category of youth---a persisting category in his work that he consistently deploys to critique modernity.