Falsifikator
(The Counterfeiter)
by Goran Marković
Drama, Belgrade 2008
“That is your disease! Doing so much good, sacrificing yourself for others all your life – it is in reality a serious case of egoism. A complete obsession with yourself! You never really looked at other people, you never delved into their lives one bit. The world is bad, people are evil, everyone tries to swindle his fellow man, or at least to pull a fast one on him. That’s the reality of it! But you don’t see that. You gaze through your rose-tinted glasses, and all you see is an illusion.”
(Suljo to Anđelko in “The Counterfeiter“)
The story of the counterfeiter Anđelko takes place in Bosnia in the late 1960s/early 1970s, a time that saw the collapse of the righteous ideals that students all over the world espoused in their 1968 revolts, and a time that saw the beginning of the end of an equally grand illusion called Yugoslavia.
Word has it that the headmaster Anđelko is the “best person in all of Yugoslavia”, someone who, using forged school reports and certificates, improves the job prospects of those around him. And he does so free of charge, motivated by a social (and socialist) conviction, for he believes in the fundamental good in and of the state. Anđelko “has dedicated his life to the educational system and the progress of our country. If it weren’t for him, thousands would’ve lost their jobs, and their children would be starving to this day.”
One day, of course, he is betrayed and imprisoned. But he’s not about to let anyone shake his faith in the good of the state. His advice to other political prisoners, some of whom have, as it quickly becomes clear, been wrongly imprisoned and abused, is to write directly to Tito himself and to appeal to his sense of justice. To a minor wrongly accused of planting a bomb, he promises that the state will never execute minors. The accused bomber, however, is ruthlessly executed, just as the prisoner who writes to Tito is abused even more inhumanely than ever.
Video Reportage „Falsifikator“ in Belgrad
For himself, however, there seems to be an unexpected turn for the better. He is released and allowed to return to work. As it turns out, the only reason he was spared worse treatment is that those deciding his case attained their positions of power with the help of his forgeries, and now they feared that this would come to light. But the world is no longer the same for Anđelko. He is asked to do forgeries again, this time by his wife, but he can’t do it anymore. When he is then nominated to receive a medal “for his service to the people”, he enters a near-empty cinema and blows himself up before a laudation to Tito. The play deals with the loss of social ideals and utopias, and with the decline of morality that accompanied the destruction of the belief in a “united Yugoslavia”. The origins of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, according to Marković, are to be found in the era of Tito. This opinion, held by the author, is shared by one part of the Serbian population; the other part sees Tito’s death as the cause of the break-up. The topics of betrayal and corruption, which pose a major problem in the Balkan countries to this day, also give the play an even greater topical relevance. The new state is built on a foundation that is in part made up of forged school reports and certificates – a problem that can hardly be rectified in the years to come. The play unostatiously looks beyond its own historical confines and immanently poses the question: Won’t subsequent generations ultimately be worse because they no longer believe in anything at all? The eldest son, who follows in his father’s counterfeiting footsteps, shares none of his father’s good intentions, idealism or moral scruples. The younger son’s first name is Slobodan, the last name Milosevic.
A text by Jens Groß
