Is this a non-fiction book, or is it more of a novel?

The title "Great Expectations" quotes world literature by Charles Dickens, and Thomas E. Schmidt also often refers to literary models in the text, for example to state the difficulty of autobiographical writing and to claim that he considers his experiences to be neither typical nor symbolic.

But it's hard to believe when the book cover promises a "balance sheet of the baby boomers".

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The term “boomer”, which is now often used in a derogatory way by the youngest generation, also sounds dubious to Schmidt, like “perpetually red cheeks and thick trousers”.

And yet he, born in 1959, somehow seems to love his boomers, even if he tries to stand out from the clichés known about them.

Yes, he seems quite wistful that these boomers are going away: "We are beginning to fall silent and the first of us have already died." Although Schmidt recognizes that to speak of we is presumptuous ("I close all those who grew up in the GDR at the same time as I did"), although he concedes that a woman might remember the boom times of the Federal Republic differently than he does, his book is of course an attempt and also a promise, despite everything for this We enter.

Many contradictions

He differentiates it from the generation born around 1945.

He calls them the “Limbo generation”, and out of their misery, partly neglect, he explains both the phenomenon of the yobs and that of the RAF.

This example shows that the book is riddled with paradoxes: First, Schmidt analyzes that members of the RAF, even after they became murderers, still behaved like hooligans.

And a little later he criticized this statement: "The RAF people were also perceived exactly according to this pattern, as monstrous, almost recognizable incarnations of the idea of ​​the yob."

Another example is the intellectual awakening that Schmidt associates with the Suhrkamp culture: first he delivered a eulogy at Siegfried Unseld's receptions in Frankfurt's Klettenbergstrasse, which showed "how the mood in Frankfurt's intellectual circles was slowly relaxing ' - then the same place is suddenly reviled as a 'golf club' for younger columnists, an 'agency of belonging'.

The many contradictions may be Schmidt's form of self-criticism, but they make it difficult to derive theses from the book.

You can't blame a meandering novel for that, but rather a non-fiction book.

Overall, the author seems to recognize more achievements than deficits in the Federal Republic.

He does not see so much the "brown net" (Willi Winkler) of the continuity of National Socialism, nor any "FRG noir" (Philipp Felsch), but rather an initially gray and stuffy republic that is slowly becoming more colourful.

While he tends to devalue the hippies, sometimes using clichéd abbreviations, Schmidt nevertheless discovers a driving force of his generation in pop culture, which then also made politics better - culminating in Gerhard Schröder as the "hero in the last virile performance", as the king of Germany,

Under Angela Merkel, Schmidt then sees a policy of suppressing the crisis - until the rude awakening when it is realized that Putin's war has catapulted the world back to a "past before 1990".

The author attests that the boomers have phlegm and the younger ones have childlike expectations of security.


Since he recently also regretted the decline of quality journalism, one would have hoped for a more vehement advocacy of the merits of a critical feuilleton proudly described earlier in the book, which the publicist, who now works for Die Zeit, also takes into account himself.

In the meantime, however, you can also see boomers embracing journalism without a stomach ache, for which an agency report is more important than an author's piece if it brings more clicks.

Thomas E. Schmidt: "Great Expectations".

The boomers, the Federal Republic and me.

Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2022. 256 pages, hardcover, €23.