Prelude to a War

Theatre, Nationalism, and Disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia

“They won’t say: the times were dark,Rather: why were their poets silent?”

—Bertolt Brecht, “In Dark Times”

Maps

As a result of nationalistic madness many theatre artists from the former Yugoslavia now live as emigrants all over the world. All that remains of their former cold-bloodedly murdered country are old maps reinforced by tapes to last longer, images of places that do not exist any more, and memories of years living in a country which had a good chance of becoming a multi-ethnic democracy based on equality, justice, freedom, and creative intercultural integration.

What were the processes—historical, political, social, economic, cultural, artistic—that brought about the violent disintegration, fragmentation, and collapse of the former Yugoslavia? What was the role of the theatre in that collapse? What did theatre artists—playwrights, directors, actors, scholars—do to prevent or to enforce that destruction? Why was theatre transformed into an instrument and misused, while life was theatricalized to the utmost?

National sentiment and general party line

At the end of 1990 there were 88 professional and state-subsidized theatres in the former Yugoslavia. They all looked alike. Most of them were built in the tradition of the old mid-European Burghtheater-style in the second half of the last century. In one way or another, they all had, and still have, the same prefix “national” in their names regardless of the ethnic identity: Macedonian National Theatre, Skopje; Serbian National Theatre, Beograd; Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad; Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb; Slovenian National Theatre, Ljubljana; National Theatre of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Sarajevo, to name a few.

This conception of art dominated by national sentiment emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century as part of the Romantic philosophy and its rediscovery of national values. In that period the first nation-states were formed; immediately along with them the first national theatres in Europe were founded. Theatre as an art, therefore, was intended as a means to serve the nation-state; its purposes and aims were to protect and affirm state policy. Under such circumstances any form of theatre was, and still is, perceived as an expression of the collective consciousness and the will of the nation. ¹ This “theatre” represents the very identity and emancipation of the nation. In return, the nation-state protects and supports the theatre, a conception that by and large characterized the theatre in the pre-war Yugoslav republics.

In addition to this “national” element, the theatre in Yugoslavia was significantly dominated by party ideology. The party interfered in all matters of society, political, economic, cultural, artistic. Following the general party line, the party strategists and ideologists required theatre to be an ideological means of expression of the “class struggle.” In fact, they imposed a form of theatre which accorded with Lenin’s writings on the importance of literature and the arts to society and with his idea of art as a weapon in the hands of the working class. Yugoslav theatre was, as a consequence, generally dominated by two contrasting elements: a) a publicly declared socialist ideology striving for a classless society, and b) a covertly supported, protected, and encouraged repository of national sentiments.

In this complex conglomerate of divergent forces and conceptions, there was no aesthetic diversity. No matter what kind of punctuation mark stood in front of a given kind of theatre—one which emphasized the national sentiment or one which displayed ideological meaning—it signified a politically colored form of art dominated by its ideological content. Either way, the aesthetic point of departure was within the framework of the traditional psychological realism inaugurated by Stanislavski. Any artistic attempt which focused on development of the form was seen as meaningless formalism and/or liberalism, while the artists were accused from both sides, nationalists or communists, of attacking either the national dignity or, even more seriously, of attacking the fundamental values of Yugoslav society.

This secret alliance between official party ideology (supported by a demagogic and faceless bureaucracy) and expressive national passions (represented by drunk counselors in the male dominated “Balkan bar”) was hidden behind various masks...