A German Generation: An Experiential History of the 20th Century

By Thomas A. Kohut, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History. Yale Press, 2011. On the basis of 62 oral-history interviews, this book shows how the generation of Germans born just before the outbreak of World War I was shaped psychologically by a series of historically engendered losses over the course of the century. In response, this generation turned to the collective to repair the losses it had suffered, most fatefully to the community of the “Volk” during the Third Reich, a racial collective to which this generation was passionately committed and which was at the heart of National Socialism and its popular appeal.