CROATIAN HINKEMANN CASE is MONTAЖ$TROJ’s first project conceived as a "model-play", that is, a project created in a local community, for the local community, in order to point out the possibility for a more just social system, through direct work with marginalized social groups. Later MONTAЖ$TROJ’s plays were shaped according to the model established during work that was done on this unrealized project.
The project CROATIAN HINKEMANN CASE was inspired by Toller’s drama "Der deutsche Hinkemann". The text describes a man who lost his genitalia and his fertility, in war. His victorious return to society which glorifies him as a hero crumbles due to an invisible wound he carries with him, which eventually causes the failing of his marriage. CROATIAN HINKEMANN CASE was envisaged as a "community art" project in which a number of artists, sociologists, psychologists, theorists and journalists were to participate. During a period of several months, the project was supposed to include Croatian veterans with PTSD, who would thus have a unique opportunity to speak of their own traumas and empower and encourage themselves in the process of artistic creation. Due to the lack of sufficient financial support, the project was never realized.
CROATIAN HINKEMANN CASE was envisaged as a cultural (multidisciplinary) project that investigates, in an experimental manner, the implications of a "post-traumatic reality" and the possibilities of artistic action that has (at least locally) measurable effects. By continuing the ideas and issues in Ernst Toller’s drama "Der deutsche Hinkemann" (portraying the problems of a solder made impotent by war, that is, a returnee into a society whose values are broken), we wished to begin a search for a Croatian Hinkemann. The project was to begin in Zagreb and be implemented in five other Croatian cities. This project would have used two fundamental approaches: one being personal work with individuals or smaller target groups, the other advocacy work in order to influence a change of attitudes in the public, taking a more active stand toward this issue by both individuals and legislators. Its primary goal was to actualize anew and actively question a neglected issue. The victims, as a target group, were to become collaborators and co-creators, along with artists, in this process in which they would attempt to sensitize the wider public to their specific problems and the ways in which those problems are reflected onto a wider social community. The project would attempt to achieve wide media attention, and its media coverage would have been an indicator of change in the social presentation and reception of this problem. The strategies and methods developed in this project would have been systematized into a model, and it would, allowing for possible modifications, be offered to other regions directly or indirectly affected by war.
