Radio play: WDR, ca. 33', 2019
︎︎︎ audio link

Concept / Directing / Text: Adnan Softić
Compositon: Daniel Dominguez Teruel
Dramaturgy: Gerrit Booms

Primitive, brutal and corrupt. Balkanisation" is a suitable threat scenario with which to work populistically. No wonder, chaos and violence simply trigger more as catchwords than civilised coexistence. But what could the region really mean for Europe and its fear of foreign infiltration? In the former Yugoslavia, the idea of unity in diversity, the official mission statement of the European Union, was once lived: until the fratricidal wars of the 1990s, there were alleys in Sarajevo where descendants of Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century spoke and sang Old Spanish. Many Roma children in Kosovo grew up speaking five languages. In Macedonia, there was hardly any area with a clear ethnic majority. The diversity brought problems, solutions always had to be renegotiated, it was sometimes difficult, but it worked. Then national cultural thinking came and would not go away. It is time to reveal the true history of the Balkans! We will see: The "Balkanisation of Europe" is not a threat under democratic auspices, but the only way.