Nobody can say they don’t get enough bang for their buck from Hagen Rether. During his appearance in the Prinzregententheater, the Essen native again reasoned for three and a half hours about the state of society and the world. But you don’t just get mass from him, you also get class. Precisely because of his conversational tone and his staying power, which goes through a topic for 30 minutes without aiming at a quick gag, his analyzes go deeper than almost everyone else. From time to time he says, not without reason, that he sees himself “not as a cabaret artist, but as a grief companion.”
There is enough to complain about. For a long time, Rether initially dealt with the desire to have children (“and then at the age of 45 you sit in a family tent on Lake Garda and ask yourself: How did I end up in this life”) and overpopulation. With the contradictions of the growth ideology. The principle is aimed at reproduction, without then having to worry about the children: “The best thing is for them to be born at 20 and then work through to 70. Our zombie capitalism isn’t interested in the rest.” Whether it’s about feminism and patriarchal structures, about ecology and economy, about autocracy and new rights – the leitmotif is similar: we are caught in a child’s belief that resists knowledge and change. And all tipping points have already been passed.
“So why am I doing this at all?” Rether asks herself accordingly at the end of Beethoven and “Over The Rainbow”, when the grand piano is finally used. Because resignation is not an option, hope is a human right and “my contribution is the least, if Holocaust survivors do this unbelievable labor of love even after 80 years by going to the schools and enlightening.” An evening with Hagen Rether is actually less cabaret than great world theater.