IIs this a non-fiction book, or is it more of a novel? The title “Great Expectations” quotes world literature by Charles Dickens, and Thomas E. Schmidt also often refers to literary models in the text, for example to state the difficulty of autobiographical writing and to claim that he considers his experiences to be neither typical nor symbolic. But it’s hard to believe when the book cover promises a “balance sheet of the baby boomers”.
The term “boomer”, which is now often used in a derogatory way by the youngest generation, also sounds dubious to Schmidt, like “perpetually red cheeks and thick trousers”. And yet he, born in 1959, somehow seems to love his boomers, even if he tries to stand out from the clichés known about them. Yes, he seems quite wistful that these boomers are going away: “We are beginning to fall silent and the first of us have already died.” Although Schmidt recognizes that to speak of we is presumptuous (“I close all those who grew up in the GDR at the same time as I did”), although he concedes that a woman might remember the boom times of the Federal Republic differently than he does, his book is of course an attempt and also a promise, despite everything for this We enter.
