One way to connect the events of 1968 to those of 1989 is by rereading those who have theorised the artistic significance of the events in their immediate present: Aleksandar Flaker around 1968, and Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić around 1989. These thinkers created models which, used together, can help us grasp the causality that connects 1968 to 1989. Three hypotheses will be proposed: first, there is a development leading directly from the anti-protestant ethics of pleasure of the 1960s to the commodified desire of the 1980s to migrate from socialism to the shopping mall; second, there is a link between the upcoming literary generation’s struggle against canonical national literature in the 1960s and the nationalist programme championed by the same writers in the 1980s; third, whereas Slovenian literature produced only marginal cases of the 1968 model, its so-called alternative culture of the 1980s was an exemplary case of the European East as such.
