Volume 27, Number 5 · April 3, 1980
Grand Disillusions
By Noel Annan
The Generation of 1914
by Robert Wohl
Harvard University Press, 307 pp., $17.50
Are there such things as generations? Are they political, or literary, or an expression of youth, and how does one separate one cohort from another? It is typical of the good judgment, well-informed scholarship, and liveliness of mind which characterize Robert Wohl's work that he wisely consigns such questions to the footnotes of his book, where they belong, before beginning his inquiry into the young men of France, England, Germany, Italy, and Spain before 1914. However much scholars insist that the historical process is a seamless garment and that at no one minute can the babies born before it be separated from those after it, men and women remain convinced that they belong to a generation. They talk of the way things were done 'in their day.' Whether it is the Psalmist or Homer's Glaucus reminding Diomede that, as the generation of leaves, so that of men, people accept that they follow and are followed by others who lived, or will live, in other times. And sometimes they see themselves with gargantuan self-consciousness as generically totally distinct from their seniors.
Review, 4434 words
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