568
PAUL NEUBU RG
did this thing, not so long ago, and the people who are now adults went
even crazier about him than we go about pop, and with much uglier
results."
They h ave a lso a t times gone on the a ttack, more especially at the
start of major de-Sta linization in any country, when the lies and horrors
of a whole period suddenly began to be revealed . In Czechoslo\'akia,
for instance, a poet, twenty-four years old in 1962. published a virtual
manifesto en titled "Poems for the Cat" ("No-good Poems") in which
he denounced a ll those who had subscribed to the cult of Stalin as
undeserving of the trust of anyone, but especially his own generation.
Some young people demurred from his wholesale attack, but clearly he
had expressed the thoughts of many others, as one of those a ttacked
recounted in his long and earnest "Attempt at a Reply" (published in
the writers' weekly in
1964 ) .
The young have never quite understood the blind enthusiasms of
their elders, but they hm'e become much less aggressive. The shock of
revelations has worn off. Just as important is the effect of the Party's rule
on young and old, enthusiasts and skeptics alike. In fact, the main
reason why politics is unlikely to become the kind of generational
issue it has at times been in the West is that no East European Party
has a stronger mandate [rom one age group tha n from any other.
The gap is a lso narrow in general standards of behavior. On the
whole any western visitor would find the majority of young East Eu–
ropeans, both in their looks and in many of their ideas, almost as con–
servative as their parents.
Where the ga p between the generations is considerably wider than
in the West, the difference has to do mostly with a concentration of
effects. Many of the cultural and subcultural influences which have
widened the traditional gap in the West have been spreading to Eastern
Europe at the same time as its own rapid development has been chang–
ing life there. And this has coincided with a propaganda barrage aimed
at the young and dismissing the old as doomed .
The resulting cleavage has been deepest between peasant parents
and their newly educated and now town-dwelling children . Bad enough
if the young have become workers in distant fac tories from which they
rarely return; it is even worse if they have risen on the social scale and
feel they have to reject their origins. This has been most common in
Poland, where distances are among the la rgest in Eastern Europe ;
movement to the towns has been the greatest, and respect for social
status always was and has remained the strongest : "Peasant parents
with children away at secondary schools and universities will quite
