Kilencvenizmus – Back to the ’90s
“Nothing ever happened to our generation. Freedom, peace, the infinite array of consumer and political choices—the 1990s themselves—were handed to us as a finished product. We did not define the era; the era defined us.
Every decade bears its own distinct hallmarks, yet some are truly indelible. There are decades that leave a mark with an atmosphere more striking than the norm, possessing a gravity all their own. The nineties were such a time. The simultaneity of glamour and optimism, naivety and inanity, decadence and tragedy returned to the world for the first time since the sixties. Following the leaden-footed seventies and the shoulder-padded eighties, the colorful, viscous nineties were once again pregnant with euphoria, with shelves built of VHS tapes, illusions spun from the “end of history,” and the now charmingly ridiculous mementos of technological progress.
It remains a matter of perspective whether Hungary joined the free world at its most auspicious or its most perilous moment; whether the generation born in the early eighties and coming of age in the nineties was singularly fortunate or peculiarly vulnerable. One thing is certain: we had an incredible time. We cannot, and have no desire to, move beyond it.”
