Who were the forty-fivers? The precise boundaries of the generation are porous. The educationalist Rolf Schörken (b. 1928) identifies those born between 1921 and 1929, while the political scientist Hans-Joachim Arndt (1923–2004) casts his net a little more widely to include those born between 1920 and 1933. The Social Democratic intellectual Günter Gaus (1929–2004) and many others, however, insist that those born in the late 1920s and early 1930s constitute a generation distinct from those born in the early years of the Weimar Republic. A man born in the early 1920s was most likely a soldier in World War II, spending at least six years in uniform and then several years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Flakhelfer (the operators of antiaircraft canons, born between 1927 and 1929) or Pimpfe (the ten- to fourteen-year-olds), by contrast, had a far less militarized experience and would have spent little if any time in a POW camp. Gaus concluded that consequently slightly older men were more resigned and less optimistic after the war than the younger ones. The younger ones, he thinks, transferred their Nazi idealism to the hope for cultural and political renewal in the late 1940s, and became as disappointed with the West German “restoration” in the 1950s and Cold War (including the German military alliance with the West) as they were in National Socialism.