RADIOPLAY

Adaptation/Direction: Milena Kipfmüller

Text: Milo Rau

Produktion: WDR/ORF 2013/ca. 53’

Winner of the  Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden 2014.

Nominated for the Prix Europa 2014

If someone were looking for simple and effective means to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, wrote the USAmerican journalist Philip Gourevitch, the radio station RTLM would have been a good place to start. With unspeakable cynicism, the staff of the popular station had been preparing the genocide like an election campaign for months. The program consisted of pop music, riveting sports coverage, political communiqués, and remarkably hateful calls to murder. The newest Congolese music and the most aggressive racial analyses were combined into a dreary few-square-meter laboratory of racist ideology.

The massmurder that took place in Ruanda 1994 had a „Soundtrack“ – and it came from the radio. On the popular radiostation RTLM people could listen to cool moderators, sports news and the top hits – mixed with hate propaganda and the incitement to kill. Listeners could call for music wishes and at the same time denounce the next the ones whoul would become the next victimes of the genocide. RTLM copyed the casual style and cool groove of radiostations in the world and instrumentalized it for their means. The radioplay “Hate Radio” brings RTLM and its propaganda mechanisms back to the german radio – with the moderators Max von Malotki, Bianca Hauda, Uwe Wassermann and Ill Young Kim. Its just needet to omit some names, places and dates and this radiostation could be everywhere and be broadcasting today.

With Bianca Hauda, Uwe Wassermann, Max von Malotki, Ill Young Kim and others.