Drawing on oral narratives and archival sources gathered in Berlin, this study explores how some 35 Berliners have woven personal memories, their city's divided past, and their nation's complex historical legacy into cohesive life narratives and collective identities. Redding argues that daily experience during the final years of World War II inadvertently prepared German youth for defeat and occupation. While postwar officials lamented youth's apparent apathy, young Berliners were in fact applying lessons in pragmatism and self-reliance learned as National Socialist society crumbled in...