Hagen Rether - Liebe

In the organizer's words:

What Hagen Rether serves up to his audience is not classic cabaret, but rather an associative game, a thought-provoking offer. The cabaret artist refuses to reduce complex contexts and social and political absurdities to mere punchlines. The slaughtering of scapegoats and the satirical firing of the usual media straw men are also not his thing, because ultimately it is not just "those at the top" who bear responsibility. It is precisely in such turbulent times that audiences particularly appreciate his cabaret, because "Hagen Rether is regarded as a moralist of the 21st century who is committed to uncomfortable truths.

He dismantles the mechanisms of our social system with a razor-sharp mind, linguistic power and a love of storytelling. (...) He is a chronicler of the ills of our time, an enlightener who takes a stand against hypocrisy, fear-mongering, injustice and stultification. His view of everything that is wrong is unrelenting, his comments on it bitterly angry." These were the words of the jury for the 2010 Swiss cabaret prize "Cornichon", and this is just one of the many prestigious awards Hagen Rether has received ...

In great detail, Rether links the current with the forgotten, the close with the distant, questions,
disputes, doubts. He thoroughly shakes up the central tenets of Western "civilization", exposing so-called factual constraints to laughter as collective fictions. With surprising comparisons, he entices the audience to change their perspective - to take a different look at the world, into the future, into the mirror, even to face uncomfortable truths. And he calls on us to free ourselves from our often instrumentalized fear and anger.

Rethers LIEBE is tragic, funny, painful, infectious: the constantly mutating program with the same title causes lasting dissatisfaction with simple explanations and encourages us to think and act for ourselves. The cabaret artist makes a passionate plea for enlightenment and compassion, against double standards and consumerist sausages: change is possible - if we want it.