Emotions, Subjectivities, and Memories of the Hitler Youth Generation: Between Reality and Fantasy, 1945-2015

This book examines the ways in which Germany’s Hitler Youth generation has attempted to untangle its emotions and deal with questions relating to individual complicity and innocence. As the world is currently facing a new wave of fascism and misinformation, there is much to be gained from improving our understanding of how and why young people who believed far-right ideologies transitioned to a new system governed by democratic values. Tiia Sahrakorpi explores how individuals not only remember, but represent and negotiate contentious pasts.

Drawing on an unprecedentedly large corpus of life narrative writings by the Hitler Youth Generation - comprising some 50 published and 65 unpublished memoirs - from North America and Germany, Emotions, Subjectivities and Memories of the Hitler Youth Generation addresses a range of themes that lie at the intersection of memory, emotion, tactical agency, and social and political change. Whilst the book focuses on the Hitler Youth generation’s writings and modern Germany in particular, its overarching goal is to provide readers with an understanding of how applying a history of emotions analysis to representations of childhood memories can offer novel insights into the histories of fascism and the Second World War.

Tiia Sahrakorpi is Research Council of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow at Aalto University, Finland.