Why adopt a generational perspective on modern German history? One obvious reason is the striking persistence of youthful rebellion in Germany. From the 1770s onwards, German society found its values and norms subjected to recurrent and intense challenge by rebellious youth, initially by the young writers of the Sturm und Drang in the late eighteenth century, then by the youthful enthusiasts of the Young Germany movement in the 1830s and 1840s, later by the thousands of youngsters who climbed the Hohe Meiβner mountain, turning their backs on Wilhelmine Germany. In the post-1918 era youthful separatism reached its zenith, with almost half of all German youth organised in some group or other. The Weimar Republic's short life was punctuated by the regular spectacle of youngsters taking to the streets and its demise was heralded by young protesters in brown shirts, carrying their torchlit zealotry through the length and breadth of Germany. And more recently, few voices of the international youth movement in the 1960s attained the self-confident, iconoclastic authority of a Rudi Dutschke or rejected the system with quite such uncompromising ruthlessness as did an Ulrike Meinhof.

A second reason is that few other nations have experienced such a succession of dramatic breaks in their historical narrative. Germany emerged as a nation only in 1871, industrialising at breakneck pace to become one of the world's leading powers by the end of the century. Then in 1914 came an increasingly total war, followed after four years by defeat, upheaval, the violent overthrow of the old regime and the creation of Germany's first democracy.