Orel Beilinson

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is a tale of broken promises and frustrated aspirations, of a radical transformation in how adolescents became adults since the Enlightenment. Land reforms and mass education, ideologies of meritocracy and individualism, new oceanic routes, and shattering empires freed adolescents from becoming their parents. Choice was not necessarily freeing; as the dissertation shows, it was tormenting. The resulting crisis – the necessity, liberty, and risk of designing one’s adulthood – is a hallmark of modernity. 

In the heart of the story is an intergenerational pact. In traditional society, children were limited in designing their own lives. Apprenticeships, university education, and hands-on agricultural training at home began early, leaving little room for alternatives. An intricate range of mechanisms – both formal like guilds and informal like oral examinations – made it difficult to move freely between life courses. But they also virtually guaranteed success. The intergenerational pact of traditional society offered children a safe path to stable life in exchange for robbing them of the right to choose.

This pact broke down in the nineteenth century. The concentration of capital and the rise of industry made it difficult to follow the parental footsteps. States grew unwilling to protect exclusionary privileges, promising to open schools and careers to talent instead. Now school grades could ruin even the most strategic family plan. The book shows how families coped with the crisis, not least by forging new aspirations. Instead of stability, the public sphere was filled with a dynamic plethora of prospects: colonial exploits, industrial jackpots, but also the popular if unexciting career of the civil servant, shielded from the free market by a permanent contract and pension. Modernity freed and doomed the young to traverse its many unstable choices.

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” narrates Europe’s modernization through its young adults. While histories of modern Europe and youth have both focused on Western Europe (and its urban and industrial core), this book reaches from Austria-Hungary toward the rest of the continent. Extended comparisons include the Ottoman Empire, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Nordic countries. Thus, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” explores modernization as a lived experience across social strata and throughout the continent. 

In popular memory, young people in uniform are the symbols of regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Long after they fell, there remain squares, streets, parks, and neighborhoods named after youth as well as ministries dedicated to youth affairs. A certain suspicion of youth movements also lingers on. “Poets of Betrayal” shows how the century of the youth was the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It narrates the rise of youth politics twice: the first time as a political history, the second as a literary history. Some the most significant political movements of the nineteenth century – a line of movements descending from Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy – called themselves “Young.” Like Mazzini, many of these politicians harbored literary ambitions. Romantic bards, including Adam Mickiewicz and Sándor Petőfi, wrote odes to youth. The book follows the changing representations of youth and the development of organizations for youth.

While familiar narratives often replicate the post-Napoleonic myth of the student as a war hero, the political story focuses on organizational traditions and the role of adults. This role only strengthened as the century progressed. The book traces the shift from organizations that young adults founded on the margins of the adult world to organizations run by adults to inculcate children with a group identity. These organizations increasingly looked the same, offering a recognizable combination of sports, lectures, libraries, and field trips. Young adults, therefore, were increasingly pushed out of politics. This was also reflected in their literature. In the height of youth politics, realist writers depicted youthful protagonists as saviors of peasants, workers, and nations. But disenchantment eventually followed. Late realism and early modernism allowed these protagonists to commit suicide. Others retreated from the political sphere, writing about adolescents and their sexual awakening, not about young adults changing the world. Young adults spent the nineteenth century searching for their political voice, but this voice was muffled by 1914.

I wrote a very short article linking this project to current development – “Inventing Youth Politics in the 1820s and the 2020s” –for the IWMPost.