Youth Without God

Zagreb Youth Theatre in co-production with the Montažstroj

This exciting and in many ways provocative production is based on Ödön von Horváth’s novel Youth Without God and Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s sociological study Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. The novel shows a group of boys who experience catharsis on a school trip, when one of them gets killed in a game of power. One of Berardi’s heroes, in turn, the 18-year-old Eric Harris, turns Von Horváth’s imaginary trip into an ultimate version of the Doom video game, in which the weak end up under the feet of the strong. Both patterns emerge from fiction to become reality. The first led to a bloody war in the first half of the 20th century. The second led to the Columbine High School massacre. Drawing on these two resources, this show questions individual responsibility in a wider social and political context – not to downplay the truth but quite the contrary, to stress its importance in a system which, in its aspiration for perfection, does not care for the victims or mourns lost lives.