Klappe halten - Cabaret with Bruno Jonas

In the middle of a turbulent era, Jonas is offered a role. He is asked to play the editor-in-chief of a prominent media outlet in a film satire called 'Herzlos'. This journalist is a nasty piece of work - a ruthless character with no morals or decency, focused solely on personal gain, a schemer willing to use any means to draw attention to himself and his outlet. Lies, half-truths, omissions and fake news are the pillars of his success. After reading the script, Jonas storms onto the stage and opens his new show 'Klappe halten' with the outburst: "I can't play this vile asshole! This has nothing to do with satire."

Jonas turns the lens on himself: what is satire actually allowed to do? Really anything - or does some of it go too far, and should you then just keep your mouth shut? Practice self-censorship? What role is expected of him - not just in the film, but in real life, in public, in private, across the spectrum of opinion in this democracy: is there, after all, a right way to live in a wrong world? What is right, what is wrong?

Jonas is not sure his mental compass is still properly calibrated. He sees himself as a deviant and suffers for it. "Do I still have the prescribed fears?" he asks himself. His fear of the apocalypse is, regrettably, still in the green zone. The thought of an energy blackout lasting several years, on the other hand, strangely terrifies him. He also feels a growing, diffuse unease when a new, supposedly woke culture of informing on one another spreads through the "transforming society" - all in the name of saving democracy. Belief in the Easter Bunny and the Resurrection strikes him as more plausible than the realisation of a European "GoodBorderControlsSkilled-WorkerImmigrationAndBureaucracyReductionAct".

Yet despite the crises spreading across the globe, Jonas...