hen the German sociologist Karl Mannheim first drafted reflections on the so-called Generation Question – Generationsfrage – in the middle of the 1920s, the examination of age cohorts was still a relatively novel way to study society. Mannheim did not subscribe to the idea of generations as simple chronological slots. His generations were compound constructs, born out of the clash of a biological continuum with a sequential order of events, which meant that the entity in question had to share a cultural-political experience, not just a year of birth on a passport. ‘The sociological phenomenon of generational cohesion,’ Mannheim claimed, was undoubtedly ‘founded on the fact of the biological rhythm of births and deaths’. But he was careful to emphasize that the biological base needed a political-cultural superstructure: a generation ‘holds within itself an underivable superadditive’, a type of shared experience that catapults the group from natural into human history. Mannheim gave the example of French peasants at the time of Napoleon. Those who did not join Napoleon’s armies remained cloistered in the mental world of their parents and grandparents, where customs and traditions were passed down from father to son. By contrast, the young men who experienced the military campaigns, victories, and defeats of Napoleon, acquired a common generational experience that divided them from those who came before them and those who followed.