Given the apparent moral bankruptcy of several generations of German leaders culminating in the cultural, political, military, and economic disaster of the Third Reich, it was only natural that the end of the Second World War saw a widespread interest in the search for a younger generation untainted by association with Nazi crimes. As Rudolf Schneider-Schelde, a Munich writer and the editor of a 1946 collection of essays devoted to the problem of youth, put it, “the world is worried about the subject of youth.” The supposed historical superiority of the younger generation in Germany in 1945 found expression two generations after the end of the war in a scene from Serbian author Milorad Pavic's novel Landscape Painted With Tea. One of the novel's characters describes a uniquely positive position for young people in Germany in the wake of the lost war, suggesting that, because of the older generation's failure, German youth are in a position to dominate national culture for many decades to come. In Germany, according to Pavic's character, “they'll be looking for younger people, who bear no responsibility for the defeat; the generation of fathers has lost the game there; there it's your generation's move.” The defeated nation, in other words, may have been a good country in which to be young after 1945.

On the surface this evaluation of the post-1945 situation might seem to have validity; it certainly corresponds to the idea of a zero hour in which there must be a radical new beginning that sweeps aside all associations with an unpleasant past.