ABSTRACT
Protestant participation in postwar West German peace movements has markedly outstripped Catholic participation, suggesting that age is not the only important cleavage separating participants and nonparticipants. It is argued that because churches interpret collective experience, they have helped shape individual attitudes and political protest across generations throughout the postwar period. In West Germany, church interpretations of fascism, World War Two, and postwar developments have offered interpretive frameworks and defined the parameters of defense issues for their members. In doing so, churches have provided or restricted ideological, as well as organizational, resources to peace protest within their midst. Similar processes are at work in institutions like parties and unions as well. Although younger generations have sometimes adopted more radical views than their elders, the interplay between generations has taken place in the context of a previous institutional framing of issues.
