Four More Important Points on Loewenberg

Dear Editor,

Regrettably, four important points were inadvertently deleted from my essay in Clio’s Psyche (June, 2012, pp. 108-112), on Peter Loewenberg’s important 1971 American Historical Review (AHR) study, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort” as a result of my need to very quickly shorten the article.

What didn’t make the cut was Loewenberg’s reminder to historians of the cohort notion’s original conceptualization, that it was broader than what it became later as it took on a more narrowly demographic age-related definition of a group linked together by birth decade. Originally as Loewenberg writes, “a cohort is the aggregate of individuals within a population who have shared a significant common experience of a personal or historical event at the same time.” This includes all those experiencing a collective emotional crisis, or series of crises, thus sharing, as Loewenberg puts it, “intensive experiences in later life, [which] if they are of a massive traumatic nature, can supersede both earlier influences and individual predispositions.” This

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connects importantly to his pioneering emphasis on the inclination of groups to repeat collective trauma, which is mentioned in my essay but needs constant stressing.

A second point is Loewenberg’s call for attention to the dehumanizing consequences of statistical data, which he considers “itself a subject requiring psychohistorical analysis.” It is worth noting he was one of the first to observe in the AHR what many have subsequently noted, how: “The high degree of isolation of feelings permitted by the use of statistics gives them an attractiveness to social scientists who wish to avoid their own painful emotions.”

Another point that was deleted relates to the many significant psychological consequences of father-loss, which Loewenberg elaborates for historians in several incisive pages, including the tendency to idealize father-figures so important to understanding why Hitler came to power.

One last point needs to be noted, how deftly and courageously Loewenberg includes as part of his evidence examples from the German fiction of the 1920s that deal specifically with the psychological themes presented analytically in his essay that show how much and how intensively the traumas suffered by the youth cohort of the First World War still pressed on their minds.

Sincerely yours,

David Beisel

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