From the gramophone record Edison Bell Pen SZ 1980 a persistent listener who searches for it on YouTube can easily hear the song today Come over, sweetheart, on the hood. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Dr. Ivan Mirnik, an archaeologist and lover of old sound recordings. Today, the record is more than a musical curiosity: it is one of the few preserved traces of the actor Aleksandar Ace Cvetković, a great comedian whose voice outlived both the theaters where he played and the country that killed him.
Cvetković was born in 1900 in Belgrade. He started acting during the First World War, went through traveling companies and theaters in Sarajevo, Cetinje, Split, Zagreb and Banja Luka, and in 1938 became a member of the National Theater in Belgrade. Teatroslov, the website of the Museum of Theater Arts of Serbia, describes him as an extremely talented actor and comedian with great creative potential. In November 1944, he was shot for alleged cooperation with the occupying authorities, after a procedure that did not meet even the elementary standards of a fair trial.
His "sin" was, above all, acting during the occupation. He performed in small comedy theaters, in colorful programs, sketches and comedies that offered the citizens of Belgrade a few hours of oblivion. Such theaters were not politically innocent. The German and collaborationist authorities wanted to show life under occupation as a renewed everyday life: pubs are open, the radio is playing, halls are full, people are laughing. While Jews and Roma were taken away and killed, and hostages, real and would-be communists were shot, newspapers wrote about "cheerfulness", "optimism" and crowded auditoriums. Laughter could become a backdrop to a normality that was not there.
But between the fact that the regime used the theater and the claim that every actor was a criminal there is a difference from which the law begins. The post-war ancestral courts did not want to see her.
MINUTE AFTER TEN
Theater scene Humor Center she presented herself to the audience on November 28, 1942 in the large hall of Kolarč University. The program resembled a variety show: operetta arias, hits, ballet, skits and comic spots. Names already known to the audience appeared in it, among them Žanka Stokić, Aca Cvetković and Dušan Životić. Soon the troupe switched from colorful programs to what was called "war comedy revue".
The piece achieved the greatest success One minute after ten Mice Dimitrijević. The plot of the first part was almost obscenely simple. Žika Jagodinac, a small-time food smuggler, is found by curfew on the street with a suitcase full of meat and a bottle of toasted brandy. Looking for shelter, he breaks into the apartment of the widow Mrs. Živka, played by Žanka Stokić. There is also the talkative neighbor — Coka Perić-Nešić — and the tenants to whom the unexpected guest, in order to save himself and the reputation of the hostess, must play the role they impose on him. Zika was played by Aca Cvetković in the first lineup. At the beginning of June 1943.Round” notes that Dušan Životić has been playing that role for several days, and Joca, that is, Jovan Tanić, also appears in the cast.
The wartime citizen of Belgrade did not have to ask why the hero is a food smuggler, why he carries meat in his suitcase, or why a minute after ten is enough to start the whole comedy. Curfews, shortages, vouchers and the black market were the common language of the audience and the actors. The play offered the pleasure of turning what was dangerous outside in the hall into a plot, a gag and a song.
The piece is written at about the same speed as it is played. A few weeks after the start of the screening, Mića Dimitrijević wrote the second part, in which the action moves to Jagodina, Žika's hometown. Then the third one arrived. At one point, all three parts were played together on the open stage at Kalemegdan. The newspaper first recorded 25.000 viewers, then 50,000, who were promised a gift. According to the monograph of Bora Majdanac Theater in occupied Serbia from 2011, a total of 150.000 people reportedly saw the show by the end of the summer. Those figures come from the controlled, propaganda press and should be read with caution. Nevertheless, photos of the full Kalemegdan stage and news about daily, sometimes double performances leave no doubt that the play was a big hit, profitable for the producer as well as for the participants in it.
Cast division explains part of the success. Dušan Životić was an experienced actor, director, writer and theater entrepreneur. Born in 1892 in Ripnje, he went with the army through Albania, and in Bizerte he founded the Serbian Military Theater with Dimitri Ginić. He then founded troupes and several theaters in Šabac and Belgrade. When he played Žika Jagodinac, he played a man from the people without folklore adornment: a resourceful man who simultaneously creates trouble and gets out of it. According to the newspaper announcement, it was up to him to present a gift to the 50,000th viewer.
Žanka Stokić was something else — an acting institution. Nušić's former Mrs. Minister was now the widow Živka, a woman who is trying to preserve her reputation while the black market materializes in her apartment. Already in 1936, she suffered from diabetes and during the occupation she had to earn money for insulin, which was obtained with great difficulty. It doesn't turn every performance of hers into an act of resistance, but it shatters the comfortable notion of an artist choosing between pure heroism and well-paid betrayal.
Sofija Coka Perić-Nešić, born in 1906 in Tomaševac, studied at the Acting and Ballet School and between 1931 and 1946 played in the Belgrade National Theater. She was an outstanding comedian. In this comedy, she got the role of a neighbor, that eternal watchdog of a small town and a big palanquin: a person whose language can be more dangerous than a police patrol.
photo: private archiveTHEY ENHANCED THE LIVES OF OTHERS: Aca Cvetković and Jovan Tanić
KING OF PARADISE AND SENIORITE FURNACE
Later on Minutes... she came C.V. Mina. It was premiered on August 23, 1943 at Kalemegdan. Vita and Mina, two small people, join forces and open a grocery store, and around them gathers a group whose names already belong to the world of counters and kitchens: Kvantašica, Zvekla, Arpadžik and Mirođija. The then famous and popular singer Milan Timotić (born in 1908 in Banovo Polje near Bogatić, and died in 1988 in Chicago) sang the hit of the same name. The author of the music is unknown to us, and the text was:
C.V. Mine is a fine company. / The store accepts everything. / Our company two quants / Sea of mani, the whole world feeds🇧🇷 🇧🇷 C.V. My shop is nice. / They love the whole world., everyone is praying for her / Because everyone knows all the goods. / She always asks you to. / C.V. Mina / Two partners everyone knows / C.V. Mina / There are only two in the world.!…
Dušan Životić was the "king of tomatoes", Coka Perić-Nešić was the "queen of beans", while Žanka Stokić, Ana Paranos, Žarko Mitrović, Stanko Buhanac and others appeared in the ensemble.
Criticism at the time, even when it praises the piece, does not claim that it is great art. C.V. Mina is described as a cheerful, unburdened, "purely Belgrade thing", seasoned with hits and burlesque. That is precisely why it is valuable as a document today. Behind the tomatoes, beans and grocers is a city obsessed with procurement, prices and resale. Big ideologies enter everyday life through small measures: a kilogram of flour, a liter of oil, a bracelet of wood.
It was the third in a row of Mica Dimitrijević's war revue-comedy Calories. Calorita is not the name of a seductive señorita, but of a furuncheta — a small oven that is the "main hero" of the play. Family and neighborhood entanglements are woven around her, without the title being without the promised exotic color, Don Tozos, Don Vlayos, Vandita, Rosita del Cato and other Spaniards tailor-made for the Belgrade scene appear. In a town where firewood was a problem, the stove was a hero that needed no explanation. Singers Milan Timotić and Ružica Protić complemented the performance with hits. It is a curiosity that somehow at that time they both appeared on film: Timotić in 1941 in an avant-garde The story of one day Maks Kalmić, in which he sings and fantasizes about happiness in the "Mažestik" hotel, and Ružica Protić in 1943 in Innocence without protection, a tragicomic, but well-watched farce by the author and athlete Dragoljub Aleksić.
We don't know how funny these comedies really were. We are not aware that they are manuscripts or possible printed editions One minute after ten, C.V. Mining i Calories saved. Only newspaper views, advertising texts and photographs are available: the actors at the table, the group in front of the backstage of the grocer, the crowded auditorium under the open sky. Today's reader will easily find them contrived, vulgar or insignificant. They were probably often all of those. But the audience may have laughed less because of the text, and more because of the need not to think about hunger, captivity, forced labor, Banjica, Sajmište, Milan Nedić's adopted "Serbian mother" or a murdered family member for two hours.
Should we condemn the people who bought the ticket? In the nasty nineties, films like Sweeter than dreams i Big fuss, and good actors played in them. Bad art in bad times can be a means of escapism, a sign of adaptation, commercial opportunism, and a political symptom—all in one. The audience is not an innocent collective abstraction, but neither is it a dock.
SELECTIVE JUSTICE
What happened to the actors is a much more painful question. With the fates of Joce Tanić, Ace Cvetković and Žanka Stokić readers "Times” they already met in the text of Marina Milivojević Madjarev "To play or not to play, the question is now".
Cvetković and Tanić were shot in November 1944. Their guilt was not determined in a procedure in which they would have had a real defense, the right to appeal and an impartial court. Žanka Stokić was brought before the Court for the Trial of Crimes and Offenses Against the Serbian National Honor (Sic!) without a lawyer, and was sentenced to eight years of loss of national honor — she was practically blackmailed. She died in 1947, while the proceedings on her third petition for pardon were still ongoing.
After the war, Dušan Životić continued to work in theaters in Vršac, Niš and Novi Sad. Coka Perić-Nešić continued to perform, among other things in film and television. Milan Timotić, after his stay in Austria in 1944 and the alleged death sentence in absentia, settled in the United States of America, where he died without ever returning to his native country. Mića Dimitrijević, pre-war journalist "political", co-editor of the proceedings Our Jews from 1940, war editor "Kola” and the writer of these comedies, was sentenced to several years in prison.
Same ensemble, same scene, and completely different punishments. This is not proof that everyone had to suffer equally, but that retribution was not justice. Responsibility for public work under occupation, as well as during dictatorship and fascism, can and must be examined. But a civilized society distinguishes propaganda from acting, moral compromise from crime, opportunism from betrayal. And he doesn't kill anyone for appearing in a bad comedy.
If we fight against simplicity and violence, then there are no "our" and "their" crimes. We will also condemn the man with the dagger who proudly took a photo next to the victim or trampled the protesters with his car, and the man with the pentacle who took the actor to the firing squad without a fair trial, as well as the one who beat a prominent member of the ruling party when he once stepped down from power. No ideology, no matter how loftily it talks about nation, class, democracy, liberation or the future, has the right to abolish man.
On the board Edison Bell Pen the needle still passes through the groove. Aca Cvetković appears in front of the audience again. The performance lasts a few minutes. This time, no one can take him behind the curtain and bury him somewhere unknown. And we are left with a reminder that One minute after ten is not just the title of a forgotten revue-comedy about a man who found himself on the street after curfew. It is also the name of that dangerous moment after every change of order, when the winners believe that the law can wait, but man cannot. The moment when the song of freedom easily turns into a howl and scream of injustice.
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