Der Bätschcast live – mit Annika Brockschmidt & Anja Rützel

In the organizer's words:

The Bätchcast Live is a furious stage show between pop culture and politics, naked skin and Bible verses, romantic illusion and harsh reality - captivating for Bachelor fans and reality grouches alike.

When pop culture and politics cuddle, it is most intimately in the US "Bachelor" universe. While the German version fulfills the classic escapism promise of the trash genre, the original unabashedly serves the values of an extremely conservative, white, patriarchal, Christian and heavily airbrushed America - and is therefore unintentionally political.

In The Bätchcast, Annika Brockschmidt, expert on America's religious right and author, and Anja Rützel, long-time trash TV chronicler and journalist, pool their journalistic expertise, explain the political dimensions of trash TV and dissect what for many is a surprising propaganda tool of the US Republicans, camouflaged behind tear-jerking rose awards and ball gowns.

With plenty of visual material, re-enactments, clear words and humor, they reveal the deep political dimension of the US Bachelor universe: a platform on which evangelical world views, reactionary role clichés, unattainable images of beauty and white supremacy are more or less subtly smuggled into the living room.

This makes it clear that reality and reality are very close together. For all their garishness, the increasingly wild excesses of reality TV also say a lot about ourselves and our society, and the social rift that runs through the USA also affects the Bachelor Nation. The ideals upon which The Bachelor is built and which many of its contestants espouse reveal much about the state of reality TV, the role of conservative and reactionary role models in the crown jewel of all dating shows and the influence of the religious right on the US mainstream.

- Suddenly, TV fumbling in the hot tub is perfectly compatible with the Christian-conservative values of the New Right, and a convicted ex-trash TV star as president of the country seems less like coincidence than dramaturgical consequence.

About the authors:

Annika Brockschmidt is a freelance author and trained historian, and writes for a wide range of media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: her texts have appeared in Zeit Online, Frankfurter Rundschau and Tagesspiegel, among others. She is a senior correspondent for the US magazine Religion Dispatches, which is part of the renowned think tank Political Research Associates, which has been researching right-wing extremism for over thirty years. She has written three books, two of which were Spiegel bestsellers.

She finds good humor in the bad times by watching reality TV, from the US Bachelor to the Real Housewives, and by producing podcasts such as the "Bätchcast" with Anja Rützel and "Feminist Shelf Control" with Rebekka Endler, in which the two discuss what's on their minds from a feminist perspective about romance novels, sex, relationships and pop culture - both formats are now also available as acclaimed live shows.

Anja Rützel writes as a freelance author mainly for Der Spiegel, and her texts and columns have also appeared in Brigitte, the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Dogs, the members' magazine of Bayern Munich and many media outlets in between. As a podcast host, she has spoken about her two greatest passions in "Verbrechen am Fernsehen" and "Schnauze - der Hundepodcast", among others. She has written five books, in which she also dedicated herself to her side passions of TakeThat, being alone and anteaters. Since the 2023/24 season, she has regularly invited guests to her own trash TV salon "Only Fans" at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin to talk with guests such as Olli Schulz and Samira El Ouassil about those television formats that alternately excite or inspire us, but never leave us cold.