The ‘breakthrough generation’ as the bearer of the idea of a European federation

Abstract The term ‘breakthrough generation’ was coined by the German philosopher Hugo Fischer (1897–1975) in 1930, at the very beginning of the Great Depression. This structural notion represents a timeless, emancipation oriented ideal that effectively integrates the relevant positive qualities and abilities of modern and critically thinking man, which he has potentially picked up in the course of his historical development towards a higher humanity as a European and realist, and which he actually possesses as qualities and norms. This complex ethos is intended to form the initial basis on which the modern idea of a European federation is consciously realised. The purpose of this paper is not only to creatively point to these concrete and supporting motivational starting points and qualitative-historical assumptions of the modern European and to place them in a functional framework of intelligibility, but also to recall the important historical-philosophical fact that Fischer’s specifically grasped and developed idea of the formation of post-war Europe is very closely linked to the thinking of T. G. Masaryk, whom Fischer admired and respected as a philosopher and statesman and whose democratizing idea of a ‘new’ Central European space fundamentally inspired him in many ways.