There are a lot of us, we’re not particularly grandiose, but we’ve gotten along quite well so far, that’s roughly how Thomas E. Schmidt characterizes the huge age cohort of his own western-socialized generation. For a long time people simply talked about the “baby boomers”, until the children of the large displacement generation turned the tables and forged the English term “boomer” into a polemical weapon.
“OK Boomer” has become something of an ironic general replica of the younger generation versus the older know-it-alls, especially when they accuse them of laziness, a lavish lifestyle, or being overly sensitive.
The generation of those born between 1955 and 1969, as the boomers are usually defined in the Federal Republic, actually allows themselves a “historically incomparable lifestyle” and “strains the earth’s resources in a terrible way”. The author, born in 1959, freely admits this. “Great Expectations” is evidently written in a defensive stance. The first are retiring, some have already died – a touch of old age melancholy blows through the considerations of the features editor of “Zeit”. As is so often the case, the concept of generations is a makeshift tool to “mark a historical turning point”. Which is it?
In global politically disruptive times like today, in which geopolitical power shifts are taking place, in which the apparent strength of yesterday is already announcing the collapse of tomorrow, in times in which the global economy seems to be catching its breath before the next financial-economic tsunami, in which China possibly against all reason actually annexing Taiwan and putting a new fuse on the atomic and climatic powder kegs of this world, in times of the polycrisis, as the French complexity theorist Edgar Morin called the overlapping of several crises, a book like Thomas E. Schmidt’s “Great expectations” in an almost magical way.
The author doesn’t necessarily sing the song of the good old days. But what he describes rests so well on the stability pillars of the old Federal Republic that “Great Expectations” becomes a history of West Germany’s mentality.
Generation mates will recognize many things, even generation mates will discover some things that are familiar to them. First of all, realizing at some point in middle age how short World War II had passed when you were born. In childhood and still in young adulthood it seemed to lie in the dim past. After our own life experience of historical cuts, the standards shifted. Experiences pop up in the memory, which now have the aura of ancient times. How self-evident the expression “war invalids” was and people with missing limbs.
Thomas E. Schmidt describes the childish shudder at the sight of a man sitting in the primitive wheelchair of the time, whose missing leg is covered by a dark woolen blanket. In the horror of seeing something missing, one recognizes the structuralist and deconstructivist schooled author that he has become.
The description of a childhood in which the social mixing of the neighborhoods was part of the unquestioned normality is just as convincing as the time of study as an extended adolescence that postponed all obligations indefinitely. Schmidt is surprised at the tolerance of his parents at the time. The father was an engineer and traveled a lot around the world, but the journeys “outside” were not integrated into the family’s self-image in the Federal Republic of Germany.
While the narrative episodes of childhood and adolescence are dense and coherent, the style is later occasionally crushed between the different demands. Then suddenly it is said that fortunately it is not about one’s own life story. One would have liked to hear more from a journalist who had to leave the “Frankfurter Rundschau” because he was involved in politics in the arts section and his style was too “gnarly”, as he writes, than that his lawyer laughed about the conditions there.
Thomas E. Schmidt worked as a ghostwriter for Frank-Walter Steinmeier, he positions himself in the SPD, managed the features section of “Welt” and has undertaken “excursions into pop music and neoconservatism”.
In addition to pointed formulations, for example about Helmut Schmidt, who met the “German desire to reduce problem areas”, or Gerhard Schröder as the “hero in the last virile performance”, as well as plausible summaries, for example the historians’ dispute, one would have needed more self-reflection with regard to desired male dominance, which also shaped the supposedly plural debate feuilleton of the late 1990s and 2000s.
Thomas E. Schmidt describes the individualization and differentiation of the finest stylistic differences with regard to pop, wine, travel, etc., as a counter-movement of a generation that grew up being led by constant educational reforms. The cultivation of peculiarities, as the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz aptly analyzes in “The Society of Singularities”, is not a generational phenomenon, but a consequence of late capitalist economy.
Schmidt engages in mirror fencing when he polemicizes against the “rebellious kids in the name of climate protection and anti-racism”, they want “a zero-emission life without capitalism and old white men”, but have “never experienced any other Federal Republic than this Merkel’s”.
His replica stages a generational conflict that downplays the issue at hand – a global reversal in climate policy – too much.
In the end he comes up with a good idea. How about getting back to “hanging out” when you get older? To that “ascetic way of life” that meets the turning point of having arrived at the edge of the carbon age with those resource-saving “behaviors of rebelliousness” as practiced in the 1970s: “Squatting, lying, hanging, silent, dead laughing .”
