PARTISAN
REVIEW
567
country has created both the possibility of new alignments within this
now central generation, and the virtual certainty of a conflict between
it and most of the older generations. This has been especially the case
in the managerial strata, where many of the seniors are earlier political
appointees, while most of their juniors have come up through educa–
tion since. Thus while the central ge neration may itself be divided into
factions favoring different approaches to current problems, it is increas–
ingly united in a vision of most seniors as sclerotic, to be pensioned off
at the first opportunity.
This is why the Partisan faction in Poland, for example, tried almost
from its formation in the early sixties to present itself as the champion
of, among others, the technically trained intelligentsia against the political
fuddy-duddies. But they were only to be outflanked when, after the
events of March
1968
and the Partisan bid for power, younger men began
to be promoted by Gomulka in the Party and the managerial strata: "Look
at me, I 'm thirty-eight and the man I replaced was sixty and the one billed
to succeed him actually sixty-five," the new editor of a Warsaw weekly,
a none too likeable but basically realistic man, said to me in June
1970.
"What have I and people of my age to do with the Partisans? We can
thank them for having stirred things up, and created a chance for us to
come in. But as regards any ideas of what to do about Poland, they're
still in the woods where they were in the days of the resistance, and on
the platforms of
1945- 48,
demolishing the prewar regime.... That too
was important, I myself fou ght and then made propaganda, but now we
have quite different things to do. "
The main generation gap is usually considered to lie between the
two older and the two younger active age groups. In Eastern Europe,
this gap is in some respects narrower and in many other respects much
wider than in the West.
It
is narrower, first of all, due to the sense of shared vicissitudes:
"We\·e had a terrible life," a sixty-three-year-old stonemason whom
I was interviewing with his grown-up son told me in Transylvania. "But
sometimes when I think about it, I think I'd like it even less if I were
your age. Our life has been your childhood. And God knows what you
may be seeing yet." In debates about youth in the media, while national–
ists of all shades may call for 1l1Ore patriotic socialist education, members
of the central generation of the Left tend rather to talk of their own
duped heroism as a source of present sobriety.
The young themselves have often been more aggressive, partly in
self-defense: " It may be true there didn·t use to be such dancing crowds
as
ours," a student fan said in
1968
on a Hungarian TV program about
the pop craze. "But it happened that a pop singer named Adolf Hitler
