A Generation in Doubt

    The very existence of the generation which I am about to try and introduce is doubtful. That is to say it does exist, but only in the minds of a number of individuals – the members of this supposed generation – who know each other largely through hearsay or perhaps on the basis of one another’s writings. It is not unusual for generations, movements or trends to be designated or “discovered” without their representatives getting to hear about it until after the fact (if at all), – in his manifesto, for example, the American painter Ron B. Kitaj, suspected any artist with a “multiple identity” of being a “diasporist”, irrespective of their cultural background, epoch, or self-declared affiliation. In what follows we will be talking about declared identities only: about an image which nine Central and Eastern European Jewish creative intellects have endeavoured to build around themselves, as well as a myth which they have tried to make acceptable to their contemporaries, that is, to those born into the third generation after the holocaust. It is a familiar intellectual “recirculation” process – the intellectual presents herself as the most sensitive antenna to the traces of the social agent, and sets herself the task of transcribing the thoughts and moods that lie latent in the polity. The resulting texts then supply the same social agent, whose “traces” were registered in the first place, with processes of reasoning and strategies for happiness, thereby producing a circuit, in which the intellectual acts simultaneously as mediator and generator of opinions. What is interesting in the case of the Jewish intellectual is that these texts begin to transmit feelings and moods to a subject which was rumoured not to exist any longer, or to have at best a purely physical existence, the last reserves of the spirit having been exhausted to the point where it would be senseless to say they even had “opinions” to “generate”.

    The story begins when Gábor T. Szántó and I with the help of János Kõbányai organised a meeting in the Central European University with the aim of deciding whether such a generation really exists and if so, what are its defining features. Not a single one of the contributors we invited turned us down – although with the exception of three, none actually turned up. The question thus remained unresolved: we each remained faithful to our own

opinions. Then – and without any further encouragement – the invitees began to contact us one by one with their contributions and essays. Each of them wrote about how they dealt with their own Jewishness, and what it was that prompted them to identify themselves as Jewish writers despite not having endured the “shared experience” of the Shoah – the lives of their parents having been (or being) spent between the twin temptations of wholesale assimilation or emigration. From their enthusiasm we realised that we were moving into uncharted territory, where the concepts were at least as difficult to map as any relating to either Central and Eastern Europe or Jewishness in general.

    The only sure things in the midst of these doubts was that there were still Jews in the area, that creative intellectuals and writers existed among them, and young ones at that. Our term for them, the “third generation” was not without ambiguity however: two of the nine chosen witnesses – Victor Neumann from Temesvar and David Albahari of Belgrade – were over forty. They contrasted with the general collection of kid-survivor-grandchildren – a theme which receives full treatment in the psychological literature (Thalassa, 1994, 1-2). Age-group and generation don’t necessarily fall into the same bracket however – not only did the older members enthusiastically send us their texts (and therefore consider themselves to be members of the “third generation”), but the trajectory of formation of their characters also bore similarities to the younger ones – resulting more from a series of conscious childhood decisions, which arose along with the possibility of identity choice in a (closed) society, and was only an indirect continuation of the traditions learned at home. At the same time the “third generation” came into being without exteral provocation, as a psychological reaction to the absence of a “canonical order”. This generational consciousness didn’t necessarily manifest itself in opposition to another generation – it would be more accurate to say that the hidden behavioural patterns of the previous two generations brought it to the surface. The fact of the existence of generations does not therefore conceal a single inter-generational conflict – rather the whole of society confronts the Jews with its “generational unconscious”. This is most likely what nourishes the “consciousness of social norms” of those of the third generation.

Time stands still

    In this region – with the possible exception of Hungary and Poland and maybe pre-’68 Czechoslovakia – the generation issue up until the mid 80s was a physiological rather than a philosophical or sociological question. In a state where the emblematic figure of social mobility is a leader who retains power until natural extinction, and where the entire official order within the state reflects this, it is meaningless to talk about generation gaps or sharp conflicts between the generations. In the interests of “social stability” – as social stasis was termed at the time – every (non-state) organisation had to become official, if it wished to continue. In other words it had to fit in with the “ruling gerontocracy”, wherein what was produced was an exchange of leadership elite with no pretensions of adjustment to changing circumstances and no resulting generational shift, but merely the promotion of a number of youths of an adaptable nature. De Tocqueville’s remark that “among democratic nations each generation is a new people” – applies negatively to these conditions. De Tocqueville penned this comment about America in the first half of the last century, and as usual, in this too he was prescient: Twentieth Century American history could be described as a ferocious fight between the “GI”s and the “boomers”, and then between these and the “thirteeners”, with the committed assistance of the “silent generation”. The “thirteeners” generation can be justifiably compared to the “lost generation” of the First World War, and two witty and knowledgeable American writers do just that in the greatest imaginable detail (Howe-Strauss, 1992, 67-89). But the whole story arouses about as much familiarity in the average Eastern European as, say, the debate of the Sunnis and Shi’ites about the correct interpretation of the Koran.
    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.
    The first argument for the failure of generational consciousness to emerge in Central and Eastern Europe was that in the absence of a sense of historical continuity there can be no generations. But the historical consciousness of the Jewry of the region is not identical with the consciousness of

the majority, because no Jew could say that they had lost or won the Second World War. “Its only now I understand, “ writes Maxim Biller, a child of Russian parents raised in Prague and currently living as a Jewish writer in Germany, “that a German writer has no need of history or historical sense, and finds it unnecessary to identify himself with or even understand himself as a kind of individuality or personality whose existence is directed by the entire current of history. When a man knows that in all probability he will be buried one fine day in the same ground on which he has spent his whole life roaming, that he has a permanent home, that’s more than enough to put his soul to rest. (…) But for a Jew who is sure, at the end of the day, that he is not bound to any single place on earth (…) the history of his own people is the only permanent dwelling place.” Apart from its uncharacteristic pathos, this assertion of Biller’s could probably be extended over all the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.

The School of Identity

    The memory of the shared experience of the Shoah is kept alive involuntarily in the continuity of history, but above and beyond that, through the kind of attitude described by Korniss. And that is the second reason why generations existed within the Jewish diaspora. Whereas for a long time an independent discourse, which one or another generation could regard as their own, failed to appear around the events following the war, the Shoah did not allow for competing discourses. Nor could any self-respecting state apparatus allow itself to alter the holocaust story to the extent they did the histories of the ‘56 and ‘68 revolutions for example. The accounts, in Thalassa 1994 1-2, of the psychoanalysts who examined and treated the offspring of holocaust survivors in the region testify that what is at issue here is a continuously sustained discourse, and not some kind of mystified “national spirit”. In one of her papers Judith Kestenberg distinguished three generations: the survivors, their children and the third generation. She concludes that the children of survivors tend to treat the Shoah secret as their own, and feel they have to hide it from their own children, yet they unwittingly bequeath it to the third generation. The transmission takes place through slips and silences

and spontaneous outbursts (what psychologists term “acting out”) – with the aid of the entire artillery of meta-communication.

    From inadvertent fragments such as these the identity of the third generation came into being: from an event which they can remember without ever having experienced it; the unconscious behaviour of one generation generating a conscious identity in the next. Emi Baruh of Sofia devotes a large section of her essay to what she terms the “will” of memory – that is, the “selective memory” of the Jews – in which, for example, every Passover repeats the story of the exodus from Egypt, while a deep silence surrounds the lived experience of the holocaust. The creative artist wishes to remember everything, leaving no part of the past uncovered, and it is from this will that she draws her identity of otherness. Maxim Biller, who writes exclusively about Jews asserts that for him it’s not so much the holocaust itself that supplies his theme, but what it did to the survivors and their offspring, or rather exactly those shifts in conscious and unconscious behaviour which made his own identity just so. He replaces actual memory with aestheticized renderings of “acted out” moments and the other phenomena of meta-communication.
      
    Milosziak, in whose family Jewishness was never mentioned, was Christened by each of his grandmothers separately, because “if another Hitler comes along and the authorities don’t let you into one village, well, you can go to the other”. The twice-Christened Milosziak then lived through the “holocaust-like” Czechoslovakian assimilation policy – the exaggeration illustrates the extent of his identification, as though he himself had become a participant in the story of his ancestors. This is even clearer in the case of David Albahari who performs the same identification as a certain kind of “ars poetica”: the memory of the holocaust, according to him, obliges the writer to stand against every kind of horror. Albahari’s reference here is to the Yugoslavian war; Elma Softic -Kaunitz from Sarajevo puts it more directly – in Sarajevo they survived a second holocaust, which goes to show that humankind has not improved in the least since the Shoah. Victor Neumann, Konstaty Gebert and Milosziak don’t put a name to it, but they write about communism as an unmistakably similar “small age of fear”, which further broadens the already wide shared experience of the Jews of the region with yet another oppressive experience.

Traditional Choices

    When it comes to the Jews, my earlier treatise on the absence of the dynamics of modernity is only moderately true. No amount of state propaganda could have convinced all these people, who carry within themselves the memory of a shared experience, that their sense of belonging together was mere deviance. The propaganda could not counter the fact that everyone knew that “Jewish consciousness” had provided the dynamic that modernised an internationally recognised Jewish state. It is a separate issue that the image of Israel in the popular imagination of the time was so obviously idealised – a sort of vision of Canaan, since whatever was actually happening over there could only be guessed at from the vague rumours that reached us.
    The third generation came to consciousness in the mid-‘80s, in the era of the “revival of history”, and immediately began searching for a tradition for its own peculiar, fragmented Jewishness, a Jewishness which was patched together from the haberdashery of meta-communication. The return to tradition has always proved a secure “modernisation strategy” in periods overburdened with history, or, as Mircea Eliade puts it in his Myth of Eternal Return, the return to tradition is elicited by an instinctive opposition to history (Eliade, 1993, 212-222). This generation freely chose the possibility (or rather the obligation) of a “revival of history” as their identity, but on the other hand they undoubtedly moved to replace their “instinctive” Judaism with “conscious” Judaism as quickly as possible, because they blanched at the uncertainty that accompanied the changes. The most obvious solution seemed to be the “importation of tradition” and in this too Israel stepped in immediately with the “nationalist innovation” – to use Eric Hobsbawn`s term – of tradition (Hobsbawm, 1983, 13-14). In 1989, Israel had several hundred young people – myself among them – flown out to the Jewish state, for a taster of the promised land as guests of the nation, to witness both the ancient and the four-decade-old traditions, the ideology, the kibbutzim etc. This was the first time most of the young Central and Eastern Europeans had ever seen Jews doing physical labour – but then this was the first time any of the Israelis had ever met Jews who were not fanatical about the ideology of the nation-state. The missionary fervour of the Jewish Agency has subsided significantly since then, although I once met an orthodox guy in

Cernovic who was leading kids in a dance to fake Israeli folk songs, and in Prague I saw young people in kipot booing the newly elected Netanyahu with all the zeal of the neophyte, when in the course of his speech he alluded to a pursuit of the peace process.
    The writers of the “third generation” unanimously acknowledged that imported Israeli tradition could not bring spiritual inspiration to this region. They agreed that Israel is the place where the others emigrated to, so the possibility doesn't even arise. “Irreconcilable motivations, customs, memories”, is how Emi Baruh answers when asked what it is the the sabra (Jew born in Israel) “likes” to recall – who would happily strike from his “selective memory” the grandfather who, without a word of complaint, enlisted for the concentration camps, while – as it transpired from the essays – the same memory could be the keystone to a modern Central European Jewish intellectual's identity. It was once again left to Maxim Biller to express it most succinctly “a young Jew is more scared of his first visit to Israel than of brain-surgery.”

Normality and its Vicissitudes

    Their consent to being Jewish does not manifest itself in allusions and hidden signs but in conscious self-reflection, which leads each writer to a unique conclusion. The revival of history put the spark of heterogeneity back into Jewish intellectual life. Nobody writes about a return to tradition – nor to Israel nor to anything else, but then again it wouldn't be Central and Eastern Europe if the writers – with a few exceptions – couldn't find a comparatively “golden era” onto which to project their ideals as a kind of “retrospective utopia”. For Victor Neumann the multicultural mix of pre-war Banat, where liberal Jews lived together with other peoples in “multiple liaisons” is one such. Elma Softic -Kaunitz indicates a similar, if today clearly unreachable idyll: a Sarajevo which is not inhabited by Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Jews and the rest, but by townspeople living “in multiple liaisons”, who – as she writes – “are killed for being from Sarajevo, not because they're the enemy.” Through the example of her own father, Pinkas, Emi Baruh introduces the tranquil idyll of pre-war Bulgaria, and how Jews were saved in their thousands by a Bulgarian friend and neighbour who they had voted into the pre-war parliament. Làszlу Màrton was probably the first

of his generation to start searching for his own place, or the place of the Jews, in the midst of the new societal relations: in 1988 he formulated a theory of the “Hungarian-Jewish community of fate” where he envisaged the sort of process of gradual assimilation, or “assimilation to one another” which had been interrupted by the Hungarians. Here the “golden era” is the beginning of a process, whose task is the completion of the “assimilation of consciousness” of the two peoples, which is undertaken by the writer's thought-experiment.

    “Humanity, human brotherhood, liberalism, democratic spirit, internationalism, the respect of reason, intellectualism, the will to continue human culture” – these are the spiritual imperatives of the Central and Eastern European “Jewish being”, as formulated by Andràs Komor six decades ago and quoted by
    Gàbor T. Szàntу in his essay. If anyone were to plea for a return to these traditions today, it would not be considered particularly “Jewish”, but simply an expression of normal human aspirations. In fact normality occupies a central position in almost all of the essays and generally emerges in the same context. They, the representatives of the third generation, are “normal” because their predecessors whom they remember (selectively) and with whom they identify were, as victims, the only moral victors of the holocaust. Normal, because their parents or they themselves stayed in their place in Central and Eastern Europe – they were taken in neither by the ancient myths of tradition (original home, promised land, etc.), nor by the pseudo-traditions of the new-age Israelis – they had only one tradition, which they themselves unearthed, nourished and maintained – the regional tradition of rational, liberal and cosmopolitan Jewishness. Normal because they resolved and untangled the dilemmas and complexes of their parents; because their generation was already immune to the idiocy of communism; because the consciousness of generation – the sense of historical continuity – survived in them; because they – like any normal individual – chose their own identities. And the question obviously arises: what about the rest? Are they all “abnormal” – all those who had no sympathy whatever in those days, who left them and their predecessors to their own devices, who endlessly cajoled them to assimilate – can we judge them differently now than then? In a general sense the answer is no but that doesn't alter the fact that their place is also here in Central

and Eastern Europe, living in the same place, albeit in isolation from one another. “The Hungarian Jews committed treason (in good faith) against their own Jewishness. Later the Hungarian people committed treason (in bad faith) against the Hungarianness of their Hungarian Jews” – so runs Làszlу Màrton's “assimilationist” argument. Maxim Biller is much more ruthless with the Germans: “We live with them, we work with them, we laugh with them, but we remain parted forever.” In a 1995 interview Konstanty Gebert declared that “two chosen peoples cannot live in the same land” – recognising a situation in which two peoples have lived together for so long that neither one of them can understand themselves without the other, and as long as the notion of being chosen applies on both, reconciliation is forever over the horizon. In the optimism of the intoxication immediately following the “change of system”, Làszlу Màrton conceived his Hungarian-Jewish “community of fate” very differently. He thought that secularism could be resolved by a mutual recognition of co-dependence – that some sudden and unbelievable wave of empathy would inundate each individual and strip them of their centuries old prejudices. Gàbor T. Szàntу is infinitely more down to earth: “The ghetto is us, we live in it and it lives in us. Even if we threw open the gates and integrate with the host society there's no shame in it: we owe our existence to the ghetto.”
    Sympathetic or otherwise, the third generation Jewish intellectuals feel a calling to keep a moral vigil over the spiritual ascension of the majority in the name of normality, in other words that which Pascal Bruckner felt to be lacking is materialising. This is what Gàbor T. Szàntу euphemistically calls “a certain critical attitude to society” – the rest speak openly about normality. Elma Softic -Kaunitz explains unambiguously that she deliberately stayed in wartime Sarajevo and even gave birth to a child in those merciless times because her disappearance would have significantly reduced the number of “normal” people. “Considering the number of people who hate each other,” she writes “– and for the sole reason that they belong to a certain race or people – you can't assert that they aren't normal. There are too many of them. So many that I often used to wonder whether it wasn't me that was on the far side of normality. Because I

don't hate.” In a text composed in less extreme circumstances, Maxim Biller writes frankly that the reason German contemporary literature is boring and flat is that to this day Germans are afraid to face the part their parents played in the war: “they are unwilling to tap the collective memory of their people.” In Victor Neumann's trans-historical perspective, the shared inheritance of Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Polish and Romanian Jews is precisely the fact of having a “multiple identity”, which he considers to be the only rational response in a multi-ethnic state. Konstanty Gebert finishes his essay with the idea that, in the end, they got what they were struggling for before 1989, during the period of their identity formation: a small and banal Jewish community has come into existence, which is no better or worse than anywhere else on the planet, that is, a “normal state” has been resumed. Làszlу Màrton's unrealisable “community of fate” was also written from a starting point of historical reconciliation, which is utter normality. Emi Baruh too, who shares a certain kindred spirit with him, quotes Hannah Arendt in the name of “universal normality” who asserts that “Europe is the home of the Jews” and that's why they are battling against the idea of “Schengen-Europe”, because it deprives them – together with the Bulgarians, with whom she claims a genuine “community of fate” – of the pleasure of their shared fatherland.

    I began this introduction by saying that the very existence of the generation I wanted to talk about is doubtful. It is possible that even now the existence of a new generation of Central and Eastern European writers is obvious only to me. To the extent that the intellectuals of an era can be regarded as the expression of a generational “world-view”, it can also be said of the “third generation” in general that they are those who are not concerned about leaving and staying, forgiveness and revenge, repression and sublimation. They wish, by means of self-reflection, to bring order to the mind and soul, and to complete the task shifted over to them, whether consciously or through absent-minded procrastination, by the second generation. And just as it is true that traditions are created, generations too can be created – through meeting, through the publication of a shared anthology, or even through the writing of an overview such as this. And if such a generation ever

really arrives at self-knowledge, then it will also be to their credit that the most authoritative texts on future generations of Central and Eastern European Jews will not be written by psychologists.

Translation from Hungarian by: Stephen Humphreys

Quoted Essays
    Albahari, Davi (Belgrade – Calgary): The Burden of Mimicry
    Barouh, Emmy (Sofia): Fragments About the Conflicts and Cultural Adaptation of the Wondering Jew
    Biller, Maxim (Prague – Köln): Writing History
    Gebert, Konstanty (Warsaw): Dial-a-Jew
    Neumann, Victor (Timisoara): Central-East European Jews and the Intercultural Idea
    Màrton, Làszlу (Budapest): The Chosen Ones and the Mingled Ones
    Szànto T. Gàbor (Budapest): To Be a (Hungarian-) Jewish Writer
    Softic-Kaunittz, Elma (Sarajevo): Few Sentences about the Rhytm of Crime
    Milos Ziak (Bratislava): “We Want Messiah Now”

Bibliographical Notes
    Bruckner, Pascal: On Cosmopolitism, Magyar Lettre International, 1996/2.
    Danto, Arthur: Narration and Knowledge. New York 1985
    Eliade, Mircea: Az örök visszatèrès mitosza (The Myth of Eternal Return) Budapest,
    1989.
    Fehèr, Ferenc – Heller, Àgnes: Amodernitàs ingàjà (The Pendulum of Modernity) In: A modernitàs ingàjà, Budapest, 1993.
    Hobsbawn, Erik: Inventing Traditions. In: The Invention of Traditions. (Ed. by:) E.
    Hobsbawn and T. Ranger, Cambridge, 1983.
    Howe, Neil – Strauss, William: The New Generation Gap, The Atlantic Monthly, 1992 December
    Kestenberg, Judith: A túlèlok gyermekei ès a gyermek túlèlok (The Children of Survivals and Survived Children) Thalassa, 1994/1-2.
    Toulmin, Richard: Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, 1990.