Conclusion: Kitschy Parents, Barbaric Children

Summary

Literature has the capacity to capture the conflicts of a particular time and dress them in narratives that convey the timelessness of human struggles. Often literary works identify social ills long before they appear in sociological and psychological discourse. In this light, literature provides a safe place to examine and interpret the distorted balance in human relationships, and to test strategies for its restoration.

The focus of this book has been a generational conflict that only at first glance looked banal. In theory, generational change is as natural as birth and death because in its essence it is a renewal, a perpetuation of life. For the Polish ‘89 generation, however, this supposedly natural process went wrong. I have argued that two concurrent social processes should be held responsible for the disrupted transmission of cultural norms at the turn of the twentieth century: the profound political change during which Poland transformed itself from a communist to a democratic state and the rapid development of technology that deepened the divide between the two adjacent generations.

The latter is a global phenomenon. As early as the 1980s Polish Party leaders began to notice that the technological advances and rising popularity of electronic media were creating a new type of culture, a new language, and new sources of knowledge that were setting parents and children apart. The elders’ distrust of the alien young was growing parallel to the disappointment of the young with the elders’ abdication of their mentoring responsibilities.

Without undermining the influence of the global developments, I have focused on the sociopolitical situation in Poland as it played a major role in widening the gap between the ‘89ers and the ‘68ers. Societies have gone through system changes before, but the transformation experienced by the countries of the Eastern bloc was unique because it had no precedent. Thus, the transition from communism to a liberal democracy was based on the principle of trial and error, and it took a much longer time than anyone had foreseen. Moreover, today it is not uncommon to hear opinions that the transition is ongoing and that Western-type capitalism does not really fit the postcommunist terrain.