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In his best-selling Generation Golf: Eine Inspektion (Generation Golf: An Inspection, 2000), supplemented by Generation GoIfII (2003), Florian lilies alternately chides and celebrates Germans born between 1965 and 1975 for their arrested state of development.1 Cheerfully recalling his own prepubescent comforts, lilies describes Saturday evening baths, preheated bathrobes, and watching Wetten, dass ... ? (Wanna Bet?} with a bowl of Erdnussflips (peanut curls).2 Generation Golfers' infantile indolence continues unabated today, he argues, in lives circumscribed by the poles of pleasure and boredom. By charting their consumer choices into young adulthood, lilies demonstrates that a selfhood off the rack not only fits but also becomes a manifest destiny determined by a particular brand name. Plastic Playmobil figurines, for instance, a toy devoid of Marcel Proust's sensory contours, make for a dull generation destined to take the wheel of its parents' Golf automobiles. Willful somnambulism thus paves the Golfers' way to a prosaic adulthood: "We were indeed directionless but nonetheless as sure as a sleepwalker that everything, even the big questions of humankind, could be solved in the end. . . . somebody out there, we guessed, knows the answer to everything."3 Reveling in imaginary unity with consumer products, in other words, not only creates automatons but also forestalls the disintegration of a self chafing within handed-down cultural forms.
Illies finds his sleepwalkers embodied in Tom Tykwer's 1997 film, Winterschläfer (Winter Sleepers), based on a novel by Anne-Françoise Pyszora about the tangled lives of four young adults in a Bavarian ski resort town. With his typical ironic insouciance, lilies imagines a German TV show with cool ski instructors and cute ski bunnies, or a colder climate Bay-watch. Winterschläfer, he blithely claims, parodies this made-up genre.4 Given Tykwer's birth date1965- and the stylistically hip look of his films, one could easily assume basic affinities between him and Generation Golfers. The way Generation Golf accelerates across a mostly German and sometimes American pop-culture landscape does vaguely recall Tykwer's most famous film to date, Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998). Intertextuality that borrows from high and low, German and American culture provides the very motor of the film. But if, as Margit Sinka has argued, Lola rennt embodies the jolt experienced by Helmut Kohl's sluggish, complacent Germany, then Tykwer's...