News Flash: we follow in our parents’ footsteps, often even in the way we reject our parents.

I really want to read this book: Unser Kampf: 1968—Ein Irritierter Blick Zurück, by German historian Götz Aly, but I can’t access it, because I don’t want to fork over € 40 to buy it from Europe. But it seems to be a particularly juicy book of recent history, one that has triggered quite the brouhaha in Germany (link in German-sorry).

Unser Kampf means “our struggle” and refers to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“my struggle”). The title alone is the first punch: it’s hard for North Americans to understand the feelings such a title can arouse. Germany is a modern liberal democracy, yet one which has made exceptions to freedom of speech in matters of the Nazi past: Mein Kampf is banned; holocaust denial is illegal; the Neo-Nazi party is illegal, and so on.

A major public debate in recent decades has focused on situating the Nazi moment in German History. Put crudely, the question is: was Hitler the exception or the rule? With “our struggle”, (again, which I haven’t yet read), Aly seems to be pushing those buttons and more.

The book is about the “68 Generation,” or those young people involved in revolutionary (leftist) movements of 1968. Aly, as a young man, was a leading participant at the time. Forty years later, as a scholar of the Nazi period, he looks back to his own youth and concludes: we too had totalitarian tendencies.

As the 1968 protests were part political rebellion and part generational struggle between those born before and after World War 2, it is particularly belligerent of Aly to highlight the similarities between the camps. As one reviewer has put it, Aly is far from disinterested here; with many of his fellow 68ers, he’s writing through a bullhorn.

And, writing forty years later, this bullhorn says: the seduction of belonging to mass movements; the thrill of believing that the solution to most of the world’s problems may be at hand; the intoxicating feeling of being on the correct side of progress—all these are shared by both the 68er youth and their Nazi youth parents.

What does all this mean for North America? 1968 here was more fragmented. After Martin Luther King’s murder that spring, all hope for a revolutionary coalition between black and white youth withered away; plus the anti-Vietnam element here drew attention away from a leftist social transformation as envisioned by the Port Huron crowd.

But generational battles are always new, and full of mutual incriminations. It’s tempting to Monday-morning quarterback the mistakes of one’s parents’ youth. It’s a lot harder to admit we were wrong.

Many readers of this blog, I assume, are of student age. We too will one day have to swallow withering critique from our children. Some of it will be ignorant; some of it deserved. How will we face that moment? More importantly, how will we handle the bullhorn of our own youth, as we speak to our own parents?