A sequence of generations can only exist in the presence of history. In a state which is designed for eternity (stasis), which necessitated and created an unassailable value system, and which had the last word, according to its own peculiar Cartesian logic, in all matters of good and evil, us and them, body and soul – in such a state, the possibility for change and the continuity of history came to a halt – that is to say time stood still. Central and Eastern European prose written in the 70s and the 80s (and it is instructive to read them with today’s eyes) expresses this complete absence of time – it attempts to grasp and a kind of absolute spatiality and make it perceptible.
Of course, an absence of history doesn’t mean an absence of events. Events and the personalities who participate in them – shared experience – are an essential requirement for the formation of a generation. A second reason that generations failed to appear in the region is that events themselves are in vain if the absence of a public arena neutralises their transformation into history. Arthur Danto tells us that “to exist historically is to perceive the events one lives through as part of a story later to be told” (Danto, 1985, 342). Events remained unutterable up to the mid-80s and so the discourse necessary for their assimilation failed to appear – the various groups and generations who would finally constitute history had no interpretation of the events that led them there. The best example of this repression surrounds the Hungarian revolution of 1956: up to the mid-80s the idea of a ’56 generation was believable, and then it suddenly transpired that only individual interpretations and experiences, with virtually no points of contact between them, had survived all those years of silence. The “great generation” of ‘68 remained a fiction for the same reason – for a decade there was no open discourse within the country about the events. In Hungary, the reconstruction of events and the “generational memory” picked up from the end of the ‘eighties: documents believed to be lost were published, annotated and interpreted; eye-witnesses were interviewed and memoirs sought.
The third reason why there were no generations in our part of the world is that ideas, fads and events which defined generations in the West appeared here merely as imported copies, rather than as end products of organic processes. Ferenc Fehér and Ágnes Heller refer to this as an absence of the “dynamism of modernity” (Fehér-Heller, 1993, 13). In the ‘60s, the first inter-generational conflicts erupted in Western Europe – this period is now known as the third stage of modernity, the age of the disintegration of modernity – the beginning of the postmodern era. According to Richard Toulmin, an ideal of stability and unity was replaced by an ideal of diversity and adaptability: art movements and fashion trends came to exist in parallel rather than in series, and the convergence of left and right robbed classical politics of meaning. Toulmin considers the term “generation gap” dubious because it conceals the real issue – “It is painfully clear that youth culture was not the essential dynamic of ‘60s counter-culture: the intellectual, psychological and artistic conditions for the advent of a new movement had been in existence for over 50 years, and were just waiting for a generation which could grasp their essence and make them their own” (Toulmin, 1990, 161). There was none of this continuity, this inheritance, in Central and Eastern Europe (although in this regard too Hungary and Poland were exceptional to some extent). Rock and roll, punk, neo-avantgardist performers, experimental filmmakers, alternative communities – hippies and hobos – all came and went, but as mere copies modelled on Western forms. They were barely publicised – in most countries they ended up in mental asylums or isolated communities – since the whole point of the regime was the creation of a homogeneous, well-ordered society in which any kind of group identity could only be conceived of as deviance from the norm. A certain amount of diversity did exist between those of the same rank, but no generations arose: the relatively tolerant social atmosphere, achieved in the west through the internal dynamics of modernity, could not take root.
In History We Dwell
In his outstanding meditation on cosmopolitanism, there is one plaintive sentence that Pascal Bruckner neglected to omit – he says that the disappearance of Jewish communities from Central and Eastern Europe remains an unprecedented spiritual disaster, because they took with them the unblinkered perspective of the outsider, an indispensable weapon in exposing societal lies (Bruckner, 1996, 3). The general sense is of course right, except that Jews have not disappeared from the region. A few years ago I visited Cernovic, Ukraine, a former spiritual centre for Central and Eastern European Jewry. It happened to be Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – and I was amazed to see that several hundred of the celebrants were under 30. Ira Boyka, the headmistress of the local Jewish school told me that she wasn’t quite sure herself what all this meant, since as far as everybody in town knew the Jews had all emigrated. Since 1990 several thousand had appeared, as though they were multiplying by cell-division – it is always possible to dig up an “ancestor”, or at least a distant uncle – and that is sufficient to justify the “revival” of an identity.
I find this story emblematic for the Jewry of the whole region. Not only have the Jews, who were believed to have disappeared, “reproduced” themselves, they were even obliged to preserve their generational consciousness. The Jewish consciousness of some of the young writers was first awakened when they perceived the possibility of disappearance. “How is it possible? I always believed there were no Jews in these parts” – David Albahari remembers his old teacher’s incomprehension when he realised his pupil’s surname was unmistakably Jewish. Victor Neumann determined to stay Jewish and “stave off the extinction of Jewishness”, when his parents advised him as a child that he could better pursue a career with a Christian name. Miloí û iak compared the trauma of violent assimilation he lived through in Slovakia in the ‘60s and ‘70s directly to the holocaust: the possibility of disappearance awoke in him a consciousness of being Jewish. Konstanty Gebert of Warsaw reckons that Jewish consciousness arose in his generation as a response to the dread aroused by the anti-Semitic propaganda campaign of ’68 which resulted in the emigration of 20,000 Jews: “O, I always knew I was ‘of Jewish stock’, but it didn’t mean anything to me – sure they never stopped talking about how Poland was an internationalist socialist country, in which race, religion and nationality no longer had any significance. All that changed in 1968. ”
The community of the disappeared and the emigrated, the individuals of the “ebrei invisibli” gradually began to turn up and club together, like the assembly of survivors at the dedication of a monument in Mihaly Korniss’s Daybook: “You guys are Jews too, aren’t you? It doesn’t mean a thing – your children will grow out of it. What is it you want – you’re the lucky ones! [Our number can barely be seen on the umberuf], but let’s stop looking at one another, they’re watching!” Only the children didn’t grow out of it, in fact if anything they grew into it, into a very different generation than their parent’s.