‘The Clash of Generations’: The Identity Discourses of Romanian Jewish Intellectuals in the Interwar Period

Abstract

For Europe, World War I functioned as a socio-cultural fault line signaling the beginning of a new era as the collapse of old regimes, the development of indus. try, and a new lifestyle spurred the emergence of a new society and perception of life, wonderfully described in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (Zweig, 1964). Positioned between the old, exhausted world and the new, emerging one, the young possessed a ‘consciousness of explosion’ that manifested itself through different ‘isms’ in cultural life (Dadaism, Surrealism, and so on), and that also signaled a consciousness at once of finality and of a new beginning. As a result, a large ‘generational literature’ emerged in response to a compulsive need to explain this phenomenon; starting from this corpus of texts, historians and literary crit. ics analyzed these new developments and contextualized them in socio-political and historical terms, while the self-consciousness of a new Weltanschauung and humanism at a larger European level emerged.