Lost Generation

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As Lost Generation ( Engl. For "Lost Generation") are adolescents referred to, during and after the First World War were growing up. The name was coined by Gertrude Stein .

Origin and distribution of the name

According to Ernest Hemingway's report in his book A Moveable Feast (Eng. Paris - a festival for life ), Gertrude Stein had complained about a car mechanic to the owner of a workshop in Paris, whereupon the boss confirmed to his young employee: “You are all a lost generation “( Génération perdue ). Gertrude Stein applied the term to Hemingway to all war participants ("You are all a lost generation ") who are disrespectful and drink too much. Hemingway countered this by stating that “the young man's patron was probably drunk at eleven o'clock in the morning”, which is why he used “such wonderful phrases”. Nevertheless, Hemingway chose the phrase as one of two mottos for his first novel The Sun Also Rises (Eng. Fiesta ), which promoted its spread. The novel takes place in the milieu that Gertrude Stein had in mind when she said it.

The historians William Strauss and Neil Howe arranged the Lost Generation in their book Generations in a larger historical and sociological structure. The term becomes the collective term for Americans born in 1883–1900. Their children were the GI generation , their grandchildren the baby boomers .

Many of the most important writers of American modernism spent some time in Europe and found an intellectual home, if only temporary, in Paris under Stein's aegis. Some of the most important expatriates , such as Henry James before , such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot , shared a culture-critical attitude that was directed against the alleged banality of American society and American literature. The locus classicus for the dominant mood of the time can be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald , who wrote that his generation had grown up only to find “all gods dead, all wars fought, all belief in humanity destroyed” (“Here was a generation ... grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken. ")

At the height of this wave of emigration in the mid-1920s, the American community in exile in Paris numbered over 30,000 people. The French referred to them as génération au feu ("generation on fire"). Malcolm Cowley recorded the disillusionment of those returning home in 1934 in Exile's Return .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lost Generation - American literature. In: britannica.com. Accessed January 2, 2017 .
  2. ^ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise , ISBN 978-1-593-08381-6 .
  3. ↑ Scott Fitzgerald: More Money . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1958 ( online ).