German premier

A woman leans casually on her desk and counts the spectators. Are there enough partisans to clear the Germans out of ugoslavia? They often played this as a child and, since the Second World War, the Germans were always the most popular opponents. A man rushes in light-footedly and with a heavy steel helmet and chases out the partisans. Who is the victim and who is the offender?

The jovial children’s game changes to ironic social critique. Parallels open up between the Germans after 1945 and the Serbians after the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian war in 1995. For both nations, self-discovery is still a hot topic even 20 years after reunification. Sanja Mitrović compares her Yugoslavian-Serbian biography with that of her German stage partner Jochen Stechmann. Using resources from documentary theatre, she outlines the effect of nationality on identity and creates a small, fascinating piece with a European dimension.

Sanja Mitrović, born in Zrenjanin near Belgrade in 1978, studied mime at the Amsterdamse Hogschool voor de Kunsten till 2005, where she has been teaching since 2007. She danced, among others, for the Hungarian company Montažstroj and explores the fields between dance, theatre, visual arts and pop culture. Since 2006 she had created own plays, such as »Shame« and »Books once read make a good bullet proofing« (2007). »Will you ever be happy again?« has been shown before in Belgrade, Amsterdam, Priština/ Kosovo, Strasbourg and Zurich.

»It‘s an absolute challenge to use the naivety of childhood for highlighting socio-political questions of universal nature« (Khadija Ben El Kebir, Journal Dim, Strasbourg, 07.06.2009).