I’m so excited to be back for this challenge! I had to give it up last year due to various problems with the site and time management – and it pained me. I had taken part in the AtoZ Challenge every year since 2015 and it was a tough decision to renounce it. But at the end of 2022 my site stopped working. For some reason (I believe it was due to the obsolete WordPress theme), it wouldn’t allow me to create new posts. It took me some time to find someone who could help, and when I did, it was too late to start writing. Also, I was very busy with another project – all the start was against me. 

So I decided to give it up. It was better that way than writing a subpar challenge that wouldn’t satisfy me or my readers. 

But that meant I needed to do everything I could to be able to participate this year. 

Well. Here I am and it feels amazing!

I slowly started to write on my blog again at the beginning of the year, after more than a year of hiatus. And you know? Blogging feels like a different world.

It’s been so long, and I’ve learned so many things in the meantime, that even this challenge, which is some kind of tradition on my blog, feels like something I have to relearn from scratch. 

I’m happy that the AtoZ Challenge should be the first commitment of this ‘new era’. It was on the challenge that I learned how to write a blog. How to organise my topics and manage my time. It was on the challenge that I learned blogging good manners. The AtoZ Challenge shaped me as a blogger, and it just fits that I should get back to it after such a long break. 

I’m so freaking excited to be on this new path!

So, whether you’re new to my blog or you are an old friend, I’m so happy you are here. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride!

What is the AtoZ Challenge

I started my blog in 2014 and stumbled upon the AtoZ Challenge right away. Too late to take part, but I was blown away by the concept: blogging every day of April (except Sundays) following the letters of the alphabet, possibly (or preferably?) also following a theme.

I loved it the moment I heard about it! Immediatly, I decided I would take part the following year.

The challenge had been created only a few years earlier, in 2009, by Arlee Bird. When I joined the first time, it was probably at the apex of its popularity (at least so far). That first year, hundreds and hundreds of people (and blogs) participated, and it was a blast. I don’t think I ever managed to read all of the blogs, so many they were (I think that yeat the number of participants brushed 2000)

I basically winged it that first year (somehow, the challenge crept on me), but then I learned how to organise the work leading up to the challenge, and I soon discovered it was an excellent tool for research. I’ve always used the challenge not only to share what I’ve learned about the 1920s (my favourite decade), but also to do actual research for my other writing. 

Here are the topics (themes) I’ve written about so far:

2015 – The Roaring Twenties
2016 – Jazz Age Jazz (1920s Jazz as a Social Phenomenon)
2017 – Film Noir
2018 – Weimar Germany
2019 – Berliner Cabaret
2020 – Living the Twenties (1920s Global Change)
2021 – World War I
2022 – Enter the New Woman

As you can see from my past themes, I’ve often touched on WWI as well as the 1920s. This year, I want to explore a topic that really brings the two matters together. 

THE LOST GENERATION

The 1920s were very complex times. Very contradicting times. 

They were about everything and the contrary of everything: projected to the future but still grounded in the past, full of life but also marked by death, a new space for minorities and women but also the playground of nationalism, the birthplace of so many things we now take for granted and still so new to this that sometimes people didn’t know how to handle all the novelties. 

When we say that the Twenties were wild, we are saying the truth.

One of the 1920s most fascinating contradictions was their youths. 

When we think of the young people of the Roaring Twenties or the Goldene Zwanziger, when we think of the Young Bright Things or the Mogas, of the Blueswomen or flappers, we look at the bright side of the Twenties. That site that wanted to have fun was full of people who enjoyed a new way to express themselves with more freedom. But there was another face to it. The Twenties was still a time marked by death and struggle. The destruction of WWI and the death of the pandemic were still very much alive in the minds and, especially, the hearts of the people. 

The two experiences lived together, influencing each other and finding a very precarious balance that only lasted a decade. 

The symbol of this delicate balance is – in my opinion – The Lost Generation. Those youths knew the destruction of the war and could not shake it off. And yet they enjoyed themselves and wanted something different. They thought differently and felt differently, and spoke differently and demanded. Even if they didn’t have the strength to create something lasting, nonetheless, they lived the change and marked the way for other young people who would come later. 

This was a generation who lived through huge relief, but in a very dark shadow. 

Let’s get to know them a bit better.

Who was the Lost Generation?

The Lost Generation is that generation of people who, born between 1883 and 1900, came of age in the years of the Great War and were, therefore, young in the 1920s. 

Gertrude Stein famously ‘coined’ this term. In the 1920s, Stein, an American expat in Paris, lived at the Hotel Pernollet. Monsieur Pernollet, himself a veteran of the Great War, observed the coming of age of the young generation who also fought in the war, finding that they had lost all interest in life and seemed to float through their days without a purpose. Adopting the remark of a young car mechanic who was fixing Stein’s car, Monsieur Pernollet would often call the young people in their twenties une génération perdue.

Stein recounted this to Ernest Hemingway, another expat in Paris and a member of that generation of veterans, who used the term ‘Lost generation’ in the epitaph of his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. That’s where the name became widely known.’

Americans and Europeans mean different things when using this term. Yet the name describes people with similar characteristics and history. 

Having lived through the war – many of these young people were veterans, both men and women – this generation had lost all hopes and illusions regarding the future and glided through life trying to gain as much as possible without any concern – so it seemed – for what the future may bring to them. 

And yet, this was also the generation who lived life in a new way. Women were freer to express themselves through new outfits, looks and behaviours. Many minorities also found new spaces in mainstream society and ways to express themselves. 

After the destruction of war, these young people wanted to enjoy the now and here. They wanted to live and experiment without waiting for tomorrow. They wanted the change now because they deserved it. 

Characteristics of 1920s young people

What are then the characteristics of these young people that made them lost but also optimistic?

They were rebels

Definitely, they were. The Lost Generation didn’t care to listen to their elders. Those were the people who, after having lived in a world of peace, sent them to the front to suffer and die. The Lost Generation no longer trusted them or their values. 

So they simply rejected them and strove to live by different values. 

While it’s true that the Lost Generation struggled to find their own values, they lived in a markedly distinct manner: the individual and their free choices were at the centre of their value system. This generation did and thought things their parents never even dreamed of doing or thinking. These youths experimented a lot and were not afraid to try, however controversial what they did would be. 

They lived in the present

The Great War and the pandemic on its tail had made tabula rasa of the world these young people had glimpsed before it disappeared forever. 

They were not ignorant of the ‘world before’. The older among them had been educated for that world. But they were acutely aware it didn’t exist anymore. 

Did they regret it? They acted as if they didn’t. 

It was a world whose values and beliefs were no longer true and, therefore, useless to them. Though unknown and scary, the world they lived in now was a blank canvas on which they could depict a new world if they wanted. 

They did not always manage to do it, but they certainly tried. 

They were creators

Artistic expression in all its forms was very important for the Lost Generation. In many ways, the new fashion trends and appearances were a manifestation of art, drawing inspiration from various artistic mediums such as cinema, music, and different artistic styles.

For some, this lifestyle evolved into hedonism, but for many others, it offered an exhilarating avenue for self-expression.

Arts were actually very much present in the lives of these young people. The post-war years were full of new artistic movements, including Expressionism (that touched many other arts), modernism (that also was a philosophy of life), and Art Deco (that gave shape to things people used and wore every day). 

In the United States, the Lost Generation was mostly a literary movement (whereas in Europe, the term referred to the whole generation who fought through the Great War). Although they mostly didn’t believe in a bright future, much of what they created shaped the future and would be remembered long after their time. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m very excited to delve into this topic. 

Let’s dive in!

THE LOST GENERATION

RESOURCES

Interesting Literature – Who Really Coined the Phrase ‘Lost Generation’?
Encyclopedia 1914-1918 – Post-war Societies
Kingston upon Hull War Memorial 1914-1918 – The Legacy of WW1
ThoughtCo – The Lost Generation and the Writers Who Described Their World
Anti-Materialism – What was the Lost Generation?
University of Oxford – The Lost Generation