A New Cross-Front
On a generational dispute in which both sides are right and the most important point is kept silent
Some say the old live at the expense of the young. Others say the young are better off than any generation before them. Both are right, and both are silent about the same thing.
I. Two texts, one newspaper
On 30 October 2026 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung published an interview with the youth researcher Mathias Albert, who leads the team of authors of the Shell Youth Study. The headline read: “The answer cannot be to pamper the young even more.” As far as living conditions are concerned, Albert said, this generation is by no means worse off than earlier ones; “the opposite is the case”. A new thousand-euro iPhone every two years at fifteen, he said, was absurd.
A day later five business journalists of the same newspaper checked the demands of the demonstrators taking to the streets this weekend. Their finding: “What is astonishing is not that there is a youth protest, but that there is one only now.” The coalition’s pension decisions will burden the federal budget with an additional 200 billion euros by 2040, by the end of the decade the federal government will owe around three trillion euros, and interest payments will almost double by 2030. “This burden is borne by the young.”
Two texts in two days, in the same newspaper, with opposite messages. That is not an editorial oversight. It is a picture of the situation.
II. Two camps, cutting across the generations
In public two attitudes confront each other, and they are hardening. The first says: the old have taken their pensions, their houses and their security and left the young debts, broken schools and unaffordable rents. In June Der Spiegel called this “the tyranny of the old”. The second says: no generation has ever had it so good, none has been so cared for, and whoever complains now is confusing entitlement with need.
What is remarkable is who holds which attitude. The fronts do not run between the generations but right across them. Albert, born in 1967, says “don’t pamper”. The journalists who side with the young write in the same building. Among pensioners there are those who would pay for their grandchildren’s trip to the demonstration and those who write letters to the editor about spoiled truants. Among the young there are those on the streets today and those who think them ungrateful. Albert himself says that large parts of the young are not on the streets at all.
So each of the two camps is a cross-front: an alliance of old and young, cutting across the very line that is supposedly being fought over.
III. Where both are right
The first camp has the figures of the future on its side. Next year 132 billion euros will flow from the federal budget into the pension system alone. Whoever looks for a flat today pays not an existing rent but a new-contract rent, and according to the property institute Empirica a room in a shared flat in a university town costs 80 per cent more than in 2012. The debts taken on today for pensions, fuel discounts and lower restaurant taxes will be paid by those now at school.
The second camp has the figures of the present on its side. Real wages are higher today than before the pandemic. Youth unemployment in Germany is just over seven per cent; in France it is well over twenty. Net rents have on average risen more slowly than prices since 2020. And no generation has been drawn so early and so deeply into consumer markets.
Both camps are right, and both argue with averages. That is their common mistake.
IV. The split within the generation
An average describes a group well when the group is uniform. The young generation is not. It is divided, and its deepest line runs not between the more and the less educated, not between town and country, but between those who inherit and those who do not.
According to a 2021 study by the German Institute for Economic Research, those who inherit receive on average 85,000 euros, those who receive a larger gift 89,000. Half of all inheritances and gifts go to the top ten per cent of recipients. Between people who have inherited and those who received nothing there is on average a difference in wealth of 142,000 euros. That is more than the average inheritance itself, because those who already have a lot inherit more often and more. In the east the average inheritance is 52,000 euros, in the west 92,000.
Imagine two students, equally gifted, equally hard-working, in the same semester in the same city. One moves into the flat her parents bought and knows that one day a house awaits her. The other signs a shared-flat contract at the new-contract price, works twenty hours a week and knows that everything she will ever own she must earn herself. For the first, the sentence that this generation is better off than any before is true. For the second, the sentence that she lives precariously is true. The average of the two describes neither.
The second camp talks about the first student, the first camp about the second. Each takes its slice for the whole.
V. The point kept silent
What is missing from this dispute is inheritance. The F.A.Z. fact check calculates pensions, debts, interest and corporate taxes. Inheritance tax does not appear, although the Federal Constitutional Court heard arguments on it for two days just two weeks earlier. Albert calls for the privileges of the old to be reduced, and he means pensions. The Spiegel editorial on the “tyranny of the old”, as we showed in “The Swapped Conflict”, does not mention capital at all.
Yet inheritance is the largest flow between the generations. The German Institute for Economic Research estimates that up to 400 billion euros are inherited or given away in Germany every year. In 2025 the tax offices assessed 21.4 billion euros of tax on it. In 2025 more than four fifths of business assets passed on as gifts rather than inheritances, as we described in “The Calendar Bequeaths”. This flow does not run from the old to the young. It runs from some of the old to some of the young, and it deepens the divide within every generation.
VI. The new cross-front
The term “Querfront”, cross-front, comes from the Weimar Republic. In 1932 Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher tried to bring the trade unions and the wing of the Nazi party around Gregor Strasser together in an alliance cutting across the political camps. Since then the word has denoted alliances of those who do not belong together.
The new cross-front has no Schleicher and no plan. It consists of the two camps themselves. However bitterly they argue about “the old” and “the young”, on one point they agree: they do not talk about inheritance. The reason is simple. In both camps there are people who will inherit or want to bequeath. The little house one wants to leave to one’s children connects the pensioner who says “don’t pamper” with the mother who demonstrates alongside her daughter. That is what makes this cross-front so stable. It needs no agreement.
A dispute between generations cannot be won. The old do not get younger, and the young grow old. But it can be waged endlessly, and as long as it is waged, nobody has to answer the question both camps avoid: why is the future of a young person in Germany decided more and more often not by what she can do, but by who her parents are?
Further reading: The Swapped Conflict · The Calendar Bequeaths · Youth Is Our Future · Which Boomers? · The Structural Redistribution Between Generations