Thus Heinrich Brüning looked back, in his memoirs, at the impact of the front generation on the politics of the Weimar Republic. Brüning was deeply influenced by his experiences in uniform during the First World War, in particular by his membership in an elite machine-gun unit and by the scenes he had witnessed as the war came to an end. Indeed, this provided the starting-point for his memoirs, which open with comments about his position vis-à-vis ‘my generation’. While Brüning reflected the widely held conviction that the men who had fought in the war formed a special generation, his understanding of their role in public life was in some respects remarkably perceptive. True, he reproduced the contemporary rhetoric about the ‘volunteers of 1914’ who ‘lay for the most part under cold earth all over Europe and could not be replaced’ yet he displayed an appreciation that it was not the generation ‘decimated in the First World War’ but the post-war generation which proved most difficult for Weimar democracy to accommodate. In this way Brüning's observations, written down half a century after the Armistice of November 1918, neatly frame a discussion of the front generation and the politics of Weimar Germany.