Emotions, Subjectivities, and Memories of the Hitler Youth Generation: Between Reality and Fantasy, 1945–2015 . By Sahrakorpi, Tiia

This book explores Nazism by focusing on children and adolescents within the Nazi state. It centres on memoirs written in the decades since 1945, interrogating how individuals engage with their own past and their relationship to Nazism. In doing so, Tiia Sahrakorpi demonstrates the varied ways in which men and women narrate their lives. This narration, she argues, reflects subjective emotions as well as the time of writing and intended audience. Her study analyses both memoirs as a source and the narratives produced by this cohort. Sahrakorpi utilizes an impressive range of memoirs, written in both German and English. This distinction, she claims, not only widens the source base. Sahrakorpi suggests that works authored in English also constitute a different type of memoir that allows for ‘more flexibility in constructing [the writer's] identity’ (p. 32). Rather than rooting her analysis in single individuals, Sahrakorpi argues that they should be explored through the ‘collected memoryscape’ (p. 190), which is reflected in the book’s structure. The five chapters reflect the different stages of the collective experience found in the memoirs (p. 27), from early childhood to joining the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls (BDM), to war and postwar narratives. The analysis frequently centres on the expressed feelings of the memoirists, which proves to be the most challenging aspect of Sahrakorpi’s methodological approach. She acknowledges this, pointing to the difficulty in discerning whether emotions are ‘an indicator of the past or the present’ (p. 191). At times, the analysis moves from critical readings of the sources to broader claims that are not always fully substantiated by the available evidence. Here, the interpretation of emotional expressions assumes a level of intentionality that the memoirs themselves cannot conclusively support. While Sahrakorpi is attentive to these methodological challenges, the distinction between emotions as retrospective constructions and as reflections of past experience occasionally recedes from the analysis. Nonetheless, her interrogation of memoirs on Nazi childhoods highlights their importance as sources in remembering Nazism. Rather than treating their subjectivity as a flaw that needs to be remedied, Sahrakorpi demonstrates how private memoirs shape, and are shaped, by public memory and therefore change over time (p. 182). By showing how contingent, and frequently contested, memories of the Hitler Youth generation are, Sahrakorpi’s work is a valuable addition to the scholarship on how individuals narrated their lives and how categories of perpetrator, bystander, witness and victim prove particularly challenging when looking at the narratives of childhood and adolescence.