PARTISAN REVIEW
573
The differences between the two age groups are less clear to the
new generation, partly, no doubt, because it is as yet less conscious of
its own identity. But its admission of this is in itself important. In
Hungary, I saw a film based on stories of pure fantasy which an
eighteen-year-old, trapped in a half-built house for a night, might
be
telling himself and two hitch-hiker friends. In an episode shot as
cinema
verite,
the three of them could be seen wandering down a busy street
in Budapest, shouldering boards on which nothing at all is written.
"Are they fed up with all the slogans they and their parents have
had to carry?" I asked the director, who had been twenty-four at the
time of starting the film.
"That too, perhaps," he said. "But even more I was trying to sug–
gest that anything could be written on those boards. There's an early
time in every man's life and in the life of every society when they just
can't tell what their experience means. And then you want to be honest
and not cover it up with false confidence and brash slogans."
That part of the new generation prepared to be involved in poli–
tical or social action also tends to see its preparedness as a basic differ–
ence between itself and its elders: "He's a broken man," a twenty-two–
year-old said about a writer of thirty-four specializing in youth affairs
in one of the East European countries. "I mean, he's seen too much
trouble, as they all have. H e's accepted the system and doesn't want
to push it. Which is all right as far as he's concerned, but when he
imputes the same feelings to us, that's bad. It's not true, and it's not
helping anybody. Not us, not him or his generation, nor even the peo–
ple at the top."
But irrespective of how much the two halves of the younger gen–
eration recognize the differences between them , these are abundantly
evident in their behavior, as I discovered in Poland, where I arrived in
1968 at a critica l time. Repression after the March student riots was
just reaching its climax. Stories of beatings by police, long interroga–
tions, listening devices openly installed in students' rooms, police agents
in strategic rooms in hostels, and so on, cropped up in countless con–
versations. Yet it was the students ,,·ho were least afraid to talk , even
if I just accosted them in the street. By contrast, people about thirty
and older \·ery often refused to talk to me "in such bad weather," as
one of them put it, when a good friend of his and mine was trying to
introduce us. More than once, people to whom I was bringing news
from friends abroad subjected me to a painful period of interrogation
before they were convinced that I was not a secret policeman posing as
the friend of a friend.
