A new Youth, Gottwal's Youth? : The Period of the mid-1960's and the revival process in Czechoslovakia as a generational break
Abstract
Within the socialist society project, the image of youth was associated with the ideal of creative power. The youth represented the new socialist people, not burdened with the past and the remnants of bourgeois ideology.
From the early 1950's, it was a group attracting an enormous interest of the communist ideologues on which hopes were pinned and on which ideas of completing the future socialist society were projected. This idea was applied even more intensively in the 1960's, when the new generation grew up that had been brought up in the post-war period, largely in the people's democratic and socialist enviroment.
The intellectual world of the young generation did not always fully match the expectations of the communist establishment, which stimulated both intraParty and social discussions. I am focusing on defining the Czechoslovak young generation in terms of the generational structure of Czech society in the post-war period, trying to determine the possibilities and limits of thinking about the period 1963-1967 as a generational break.
I attempt to outline the expectations and horizons of thought in relation to the socialist project in a group of young people who did not have experience of the economic crisis and the Second World War. These findings will then be confronted with historically dominant discourses about youth, both in the enviroment in the Communist Party and in the epxert enviroment of studies of the youth as a specific group within the socialist society.