#2
TIME BEHIND THE WALL
For all those lined up along the ethnic and nationalistic lines, the process of disintegration of Yugoslavia—a common home to many Slavic and non-Slavic nations—was seen as a liberation. For them Yugoslavia was considered “a dungeon for the nations.” In that way the fascinating words “liberation” and “freedom” in the small new countries—Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia—that appeared after the death of Yugoslavia received a very special place. They became the most used and abused expressions.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, when the removal of the Berlin Wall was bringing new life and real freedom to many Eastern European countries, unfortunately many did not see the new invisible walls that were being put up on European soil. They were raised for the ordinary people of an already vanished Yugoslavia. On the one hand there were the walls on the south side of Europe built by the nationalistic and repressive elites of the newly-formed countries who shaped the new reality and separated the people of the former Yugoslavia from each other. On the other hand there was, and still is, a wall built all over that part of Europe by the European Union and the Western democracies, one that separates the people of the former Yugoslavia from the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.
#3 This new wall, invisible to many, is in fact so visible and so high for the ordinary people who come from the former Yugoslavia and who attempt to travel to any of the Western European countries. From the very moment these people apply for a visa at the foreign embassies and consulates, to the moment their planes land in Vienna or Amsterdam, in Frankfurt or Paris, in Prague or London, or to the moment when they are treated as if they have a deadly disease, or to the moment when they are subjected to the humiliation of customs and immigration officers, the tall and well guarded wall of the “New Old Europe” is there. United Europe without boundaries, where there are no walls and no visas, is closed for these people who come on tightly-watched trains. The long lines of “hope and dreams” in front of the foreign embassies and countless accounts of rude and unacceptable behavior by the consular personnel can easily attest to this.
What was written behind the walls? What was performed within that closed environment? What did the theatre do and what can it do in a time measured by war? What did intellectuals, authors, and theatre practitioners do in their ruined and culturally vandalized cities? How did they respond to the new moral challenges? How did the playwrights address the new freedom? What does the dramatic expression in the newly emerged democracies mean today? How does it speak to its own new audiences?
The “new life” behind the walls during the first decade of the “new democracies,” especially after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on November 20, 1995, was basically marked by a few distinctive socio-political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic processes; most importantly that “new life” was strongly and enthusiastically supported by many prominent theatre practitioners and playwrights who lined up along nationalistic lines. In their public activism, in writings and productions they returned to national values, and ethnic roots, fought for their land, burned down bridges, literary and figuratively,4F and chose to affirm the archaic idea of “blood and soil.” In so doing they became national advocates who reaffirmed the romantic idea of nation—ethnos. Consequently, in the new milieu, which affirmed and glorified the nation, the preservation of the old National Theatre model of management and the creation of nationally relevant theatre was a highly supported idea. In many ways, in fact, the National Theatre seasons served the political elites. During the mid- and late-nineties many theatres in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia were performing shows that glorified the national heroic past. National-romantic plays like Osman by Ivan Gundulic at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, or Maksim Cernojevic by Laza Kostic at the Serbian National Theatre in Belgrade, that glorify the past and wars against all sorts of enemies from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were commonplace for many theatres in the new countries.
In that same period, behind billboards advertising the “new time,” real life was marked by political oppression, crime and corruption, huge unemployment and economic hardship, and by discontent, bitterness, disillusion, and isolation. As a response to that desolate atmosphere many of the prominent national figures promoted light genres, entertainment, and popular forms. It is interesting that while there was a revival of old Serbian comedies in Serbia, in Croatia one can could have seen more operettas and American musicals, while in the other regions national domestic plays were frequently produced. Encouraging in that way a theatrical form of escapism from reality, these theatre artists at the same time unscrupulously started to serve the world of entertainment and fast success. “Now we have a new god—it is entertainment,” someone could have echoed the Czech writer Ivan Klima’s lucid comment on the intellectual travesty in Eastern Europe at that time.
In those dark times, many of the theatre authorities became artistic hypocrites who contributed to the polluted setting that was eating the intellectual fabric of post-Yugoslavian countries from the inside. Instead of standing up against the war madness, state and political terror, they advertised the “new times” and stood along the same line with the political elite in their already ethically and morally contaminated small countries. It is shocking that in their subordination to the political elite, many well-educated and well-informed theatre writers and critics denied the horrors of the war in their journalistic writings. Some of them went even further and denied the massacre in Srebrenica or the war crimes committed by “their boys.” The denial of the war, the promotion of escapism, and the advocacy of the “the ideology of fracture” (Ihab Hassan’s term) in their writings, productions, and public activities, enabled them to continue their dominance on the new cultural stage, blending at the same time their communist’s and nationalist’s sentiments into a new breed: war profiteer.
An interesting question comes to mind: Why there is no International Tribunal for those who have planted the seeds of hatred and committed intellectual crimes against humanity?
#b
4. Slobodan Praljak, the Croatian general who ordered the bombing and destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar on November 9, 1993, holds a degree in film directing.