In their 1950s version of the patriarchal nuclear family West Germans were keen to recompense themselves for having deferred personal life for so long. It was not untypical that, having finally secured the economic foundations of their family idyll, parents did not know what to tell their children. They might continue to believe that what they had done was justified but in many families new barriers of silence were erected between generations. While the next generation began to ask why Germans had unleashed such a calamity on the world, the older one was still locked into the calamity they had
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