Nebojsa Romcevic: We are not even at the Greek tragedy level

Nebojsa Romcevic, playwright, screenwriter, theatrologist and professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, states in an interview with the SEEcult.org that he cannot compare Serbian reality even with Greek tragedy, which has an unfolding, enlightenment and catharsis, because that is not in sight here . He is not optimistic about the future either, because he believes that cluelessness prevails and that young people are not interested in reality, except for those on the far right. In his opinion, the pandemic marked the end of the old world’s continuity and the establishment of a new one, while he sees the transfer of capital from state budgets to private hands as one of its negative outcomes. That is a problem on a global level, and in Serbia it has been brought to extremes, Romcevic believes.

"In every situation," as a Greek Stoic said, "things are not good or bad, but the view on those things is." The way we experience them can be positive or negative. What is happening with the corona (virus) is actually the cessation of the continuity of one world. We are witnessing the emergence of a new world on all the meridians, and we are still unable to recognize it as a rational process. Conspiracy theorists will say that this process definitely exists, that this is all a part of some kind of global conspiracy, automation of humanity, dehumanization, redistribution of social wealth, etc...But let's try to take a look at everything outside of that context. On one hand, people realized what they can live without, the nonsense and trivial things which they thought were important, which is very positive. They spend less money, they enjoy shopping less, and they realized that close and loving relationships are more important, that this is the essence. Maybe the pandemic had managed to get the garbage out of our heads, to partially populate it with new garbage, but not to the extent that we were in at, in that shopaholic illusion, in the race for the dominance of external splendor. Periods of isolation can lead us to severe depression and personality disorders, but they can also lead us to self-reflection, which is quite close, to some kind of intellectual immersion in ourselves, and the learning of new skills. We realized that happiness does not stand outside us, and that it should not be expected there. That we should not expect improvement from the State, and not even from the people of our own profession, but that the improvement or the deterioration is within ourselves only. That could be a positive outcome. The negative outcome is that the capital from the state budgets has been allocated to private hands, all over the world, and in Serbia this is extreme. The State became the property of private individuals. This is an infinitely negative consequence that will have to lead to global disturbances. I doubt that we will get out of these disorders by returning money to the nations. I think that the great renaming of all the important players on the global scene is now over and that we are yet to see how impoverished the countries as entities have become, and how much the individuals, primarily from the media and pharmacological industry, have become the masters of the whole Universe," Romcevic said,  the author of plays "Carolina Neuber", "The Easy Piece", "Passive Smoking", "The Paradox", series such as "We Will Be World Champions" or "The Penitentiary Space", and films "The Cordon", " The Herd"…

Comparing today's time and the war stricken 90’s in this area, Romcevic believes that there is a large difference, but the rhetoric of the government has more or less remained the same, and today it is much more ready to plug "absolutely every hole through which an independent opinion can pass."

“In that sense, the politics as an activity has been liquidated. If you do not have laws that apply, then you do not have the prerequisites for politics. Everything has been reduced to an alternative virtual reality, and there, in those discourses that lead to nowhere - except to themselves, a battle which no one can win takes place. The idea is for this battle to be fought in the media forever and that it should be a complete replacement for the real battle. In the 1990s, we did not give this much importance to media. We had the tyranny of the national television, and a few other media, but the overall quantity of media was much smaller.

Also, we had a completely different intellectual profile of the people protesting. Today, most of these people and their quality offspring are abroad. In the 1990s, we had people of capacity at the head of the opposition. Everyone understood in their own way, from their intellectual, emotional and pseudo-historical point of view, that the departure of (Slobodan) Milosevic was a precondition to stop the unbelievable decline into which Serbia had fallen. In the end, now it turns out that the period from the 2000 until the coming to power of this calamity was actually an Auftakt, because we are actually witnessing a continuous collapse of the idea of a republic and a civil state, and that it was only a short period.

And as for the phenomenon of people on the streets of that time and the absence of people at this time, the reason should be sought in the fact that people today are more afraid of freedom. It is easier to be slaves, to have neither energy nor idea. The fact is that in the thirty year period we have experienced a devastating internal setback in every sense, and above all in that idea for the need for freedom. That is a major difference between the 1990s and today. Hope is that carrot (on a stick). If there is no hope, one should ask what these people should hope for - not in the sense of some absolutely abstract category, but something concrete and that would be the legal order in the country and the dominant idea of justice. Everything else comes from this. But it is easier for people to endure injustices than to do something about it. These are the sweet torments for sociologists of cataclysm, who can see the decadence of a whole nation in laboratory conditions and a fantastic return to, let’s say, the 1820s...

It is something in the mentality, or the education, or in the whole web of things that make us human, there is a broken link, the elevator has become loose and when it hits the bottom, it will be very painful. Only, the problem is that it takes centuries for countries to fall apart, in case of Byzantium - a whole millennium. If we get out of this, and if the decline would to stop now, many generations will have to spend their lives in order for this country to start progressing again,” stated Romcevic.

*The entire interview (in Serbian) can be found on this link.

(SEEcult.org)

Funded by the International Relief Fund for Organisations in Culture and Education 2021 of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and other partners, goethe.de/relieffund