The Lost Generation disillusionment is at the core of this group’s social and historical experience. It’s what most define them., their broken dreams and their broken relationship with the past and the previous generations.

In their twenties and thirties, when the war was over, these young people who should have been blooming, full of hopes and dreams for the future, planning their life, found themselves instead aimlessly gliding through life.
The massive loss of lives and the very way these lives were lost – in a senseless carnage where the individual action had no meaning – robbed them of the naturally youthful sense of purpose. The industrial scale of the war and the dominance of the power of the machines over the action of men had diminished their perception of the power of action and the sacredness of humanity. Therefore, they didn’t believe in these ideals anymore.

Gone were for them the value of a person’s action. Bravery was useless. Visions were only dreams, and they were all broken for them.
The old values on which their society had rested seemed useless to them. But they were unable to find their own.

This disconnect between past and present also created a divide between this generation and their parents, which was also something new.
Their parents had lived in a peaceful world and developed ideals of hopefulness that led them to seek change and drive it with their actions. Their fathers had believed in acts of braveness and even heroism, in the value of the individual action.

The Lost Generation had learned in the trenches that a single action makes no difference and, therefore, is useless. They held some grudge towards their elders, who had lived their prime in a peaceful world but then had thrown them into the carnage of WWI and afterwards asked them to go home and take up their broken lives as if nothing had happened.
As Frederick Lewis Allen said in his book Only Yesterday, “The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. …They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it…”

It used to be that the new generation learned from the old one. Slowly, a child would slip into adulthood by adhering to the norms and values of their elders.
But the divide created by the Great War made communication between generations extremely difficult, to the point that the old generation became incapable of understanding young people’s behaviours and desires and the new generation didn’t trust the old one to be a good leader.

Expressing the loss

When we talk about the Lost Generation, we usually think about the artist who expressed it. But the phenomenon of the Lost Generation was more complex and more diverse.

1. Although mainly an expression of the Western World, it touched the lives of people of the same age globally. The Great War had directly or indirectly affected nations across the globe. The same did its aftermath. The wind of change that invested America and Europe also blew in some nations of Asia, where young people adopted at least some of the Lost Generation’s behaviours (this was the case, for example, in Japan).
2. Even in the Western World, experiences were different on the two coasts of the Atlantic. The Lost Generation in Europe was basically the entirety of the younger generation. None of the people born between 1883 and 1910 remained untouched by the war, whether they were veterans, young women who could not get married, or young men who didn’t find their place in the world again. The Lost Generation in America was instead a group of intellectuals and artists who, having experienced war, tried to express its explosive changing power and its consequences.
3. Wherever they were, this generation was often unable to express themselves. The old vocabulary was useless for expressing their feelings, and often, they didn’t care to express themselves because they thought nobody could understand them. So they often remained silent and, therefore, misunderstood. In this environment, artists were indeed the ones who could shed the life of the Lost Generation’s feelings.

Whether they went to war or not, this generation experienced the inability to navigate a new world and even to express it. In their entirety, this generation felt rootless and uncertain, robbed of purpose and future. Lost.

RESOURCES

Robert Wohl, The Disillusionment of the Lost Generation and The Rejection of Traditional Values (PDF)

HTSchool – The Lost Generation: Who were they, actually?
ThoughtCo – The Lost Generation and the Writers Who Described Their World
The Atlantic – Germany’s Lost Generation