Introduction: Historical Semantics of Generation

The term “generation” has had a doubled meaning since Hieronymous's Latin translation of the Bible in the fourth century. On the one hand, it denotes procreation or reproduction. On the other, “generation” describes an age or peer group. This double conception of the term has persisted to the present and exists in both English and German (as Zeugung and Menschenalter, respectively). As a consequence of this duality, “generation” as a concept plays out on both horizontal and vertical axes, marked by a distinct semantic openness. Especially at the end of the eighteenth century, as the term was entering the German lexicon, the concept of “generation” was highly susceptible to cultural influences as a range of disciplines from pedagogy to biology explored its meanings and connotations. Around 1800, the nascent genre of the novel investigates the semantic richness of “generation” and actively participates in the formation of the various implications of both sides of the term. Particularly in its treatment of the family as a social and educating entity, the novel explores the ways in which the family functions as a unit that generates (in the sense of procreation) generations (in the sense of peer groups).

In German, “generation” does not appear in standard dictionaries until the mid-nineteenth century. This does not, however, mean that the term was itself unheard of; rather, it was regarded as a foreign word and included in dictionaries intended to introduce these borrowed words to German readers and to distinguish foreign words from German ones. Thus Johann Ernst Stutz writes in the second volume of the Grammatisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Grammatical Dictionary of the German Language) that “die von einem Stamme zunächst entsprungenen Menschen, auch die Zeit, durch welche sie dauern, nennt man eine Generation” (the people most proximately arisen from one stock, also the time through which they endure, is called a generation).