Hate Radio

Beforehand and afterwards there are short statements by victims and perpetrators, but without any sense of pedagogy or claim to be informative. How can we bridge the gap between the present and the recent past? At best not at all. Instead the International Institute of Political Murder makes this productive. Milo Rau’s radical historical illusionism explicitly avoids seducing the audience into empathizing with the perpetrators and victims of that time or to understand them like in a classical Russian novel. The distance is preserved. Instead this historical theatre installation looks for confrontation: the juxtaposition of a reconstruction prepared behind glass like a terrarium with contemporary audiences. Here each member of the audience can answer the decisive question for themselves: How would we have reacted then to the massed charms of genocide?

www.hebbel-am-ufer.de