In this conversation, Lucija Balikić, a researcher affiliated with the CEU Democracy Institute and a PhD candidate at the History department of the same university, discusses Forging Germans: Youth, Nation and the National Socialist Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia (1918-1944) (Oxford University Press, 2020) with the author, Caroline Mezger. The conversation touches upon issues related to researching children and youth as historical actors in their own right, complex avenues of negotiating “Germanness” in historical perspective, as well as the dynamics of the National Socialist takeover of youth organizations in the regions of Bačka and Western Banat during the interwar and World War II periods.