Taking stock of the baby boomers and their historic role.
The baby boomers are retiring. The great generation that shaped the Federal Republic like no other before it – in an unspectacular but commanding way – is stepping down. Those born between 1955 and 1969 were a blessing that rocketed the statistics, and they were always there: among the ruins of the war, with Adenauer and Brandt, the RAF and pop, with Habermas and Kohl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Chancellors Schröder and Merkel.
Thomas E. Schmidt is one of them, and always in the thick of it. He playfully follows the progress of this age group, which represented a bump in the birth rate and writes a Bildungsroman about the Federal Republic. “Essentially we have fulfilled our mandate,” Schmidt says. “We kept democracy stable in Germany, we never relapsed historically and we repelled nationalist temptations.” But along the way this generation also carved out careers, they lived well and exhausted the earth’s resources. They now have to recognise that the next generation is at odds with their legacy: in the face of the climate crisis, they can hardly expect gratitude.
The old Federal Republic is also vanishing with the boomers, and Thomas E. Schmidt examines the new present from his own experience: an autobiographical essay for the new generation’s reading public, as astute as it is ironic.
"When I was a little boy, cars had three wheels and men had only one leg. I was born in the very last days of the 1950s, a good fourteen years after the end of the Second War, that big bang of West German society." Thomas E. Schmidt
