The Calling of our Generation

From Karl Polanyi
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[67] […]

To the soul that lacks a sense of direction, life … […]

Not only can we not live in a world devoid of meaning, we … […] one of the gravest afflictions of the Great War, both in the hinterland and in the trenches, was boredom – the boredom of a world without meaning.

Posterity, when news of this tedium reaches it,

[68] … its mother […]

3. There was no escape from such a world. […]

The conscience of the governing circles could never be secure, for during … […]

[69] During the time of the Burgfriede

[70] … brought for it. Once war itself …

The peasant was …

[71] turning point lay in wait … […]

4. Such was our epoch, this generation our generation.
[…] What we perceived was not who was to blame, but that we all were. If mankind could have cast this revelation into an institution, the United State of the World would have been born in a single day. But all this merely appeared to the souls in flashes, as the fleeting recognition of a single moment.

Text Informations

Reference:
Original Publication: “A mai nemzedék hitvatása”, Szabadgondolat, (June)[1] 8.4, 1918, p. 37-46
KPA: 01/26 (34 p., 2 typed versions in English) + 01/42 (40 p., 3 versions, copies of the original and a tipped, in Hungarian)
Recent Publication in English: in POLANYI 2016, p. 64-73.
Other Languages:

Lge Name
DE
FR « L'appel de notre génération »
  1. …“published in June 1918.” [Litván 1990, 32]