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PAU L NEU B U RG
sometimes watching an improvised play or an amateur pop group. I
know we'd have hooted the same people off the stage. But not them.
If
it's not professional, that doesn't matter; what matters is that some–
body is trying to do \\·hat he wants to do without posing. I think,
basically, they're much less self-conscious than we were." This must
cut both ways, ma king them both more cruel toward what is sham,
even if it appears rebellious, and more tolerant of the unrehearsed,
provided it is authentic.
"I think it's tha t they have ma ny fewer fea rs, in general ," a
twenty-nine-year-old raw materials buyer said in Hungary. "We've
nervousness in our bones. Often we're much more afraid now than
we need be.
If
we were given power tomorrow, I doubt if many of us
would know what to do with it. I think they would, or at least they
would tr)' ." Whi ch aga in would be an aspect of being less self-conscious,
less cO\\'ed by precedents and possible consequences.
"They have a much closer contact with life," a thirty-four-year-old
artist said in Roma nia. "They believe, or a t least some of them, in
action , much more than \\'e can. It's not just a matter of still fresh
nerves. They'll look at a si tuation just as it's there, in front of them,
and then find ways to go to work on it, ways we might never think of
trying. That's courage."
"I rather think they're more fa ctua l, less melodrama tic about
things," a thirty-one-year-old sociologist said in Slovakia in
1969.
"They
have many fewer problems about religion, for instance. I don't mean
there aren't any who are religious among them. But just as the business
between the Church and the State is different from what it was in the
fifties , so inside them too there's not the same intense stru,e;,e;le between
Communism and religion, or between sexua lity and religion. there
was in quite a few of us. " Less than a year la ter, a sur\'ey published in
the quarterly of the Sociological Institute of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences showed that the percenta,e;e of conscious atheists was in fact
much higher in the
25- 39
age group, who had been through those more
"melodramatic" experiences with religion and Communism, than in the
18- 24
age group, that is, the new generation , among whom agnosticism
was most widespread.
"Their concerns a re just very different from those we had," a
twenty-eight-year-old woman, member of the Pa rty, said in Budapest.
"The other night I went up to the Youth Park. I \\"as amazed. It's
not the crowd that used to go to Saturday dances when I was sixteen.
Perhaps, if I were sixteen now, I too would be interested not in ideology
and books but in the Rolling Stones. Or, at best, in both."
