About the work
Rebekka Kricheldorf's comedy was premiered in 2014 at the Theater Kassel and is among the most successful German-language contemporary plays of the 2010s. The author, born in 1974, is regarded as one of the most precise satirists of the German stage and in this work addresses the academic, liberal-left milieu and its linguistic self-righteousness.
Plot
In a community of highly sensitive, empathy-gifted people, moral hygiene reigns. Mindful language, vegan food and gender-equitable inclusion are obligatory. When a stranger — the Insensitive One — breaks into the idyll, the fragility of this world of virtue is exposed. The newcomer breaks taboos, speaks uncensored, laughs at the wrong things. At first the community tries to re-educate him; when that fails, he becomes the scapegoat. In the end it turns out that the empathy utopia is at least as exclusionary as the raw world it sought to overcome.
Cultural significance
Homo Empathicus is one of the most discussed contemporary plays and a precise study of the limits of moral superiority. Kricheldorf strikes a nerve of the debates around identity politics, cancel culture and academic virtue-signalling — long before these terms reached the wider public. In its productions the play is appropriated politically by both left and right, which attests to the sharpness of the satire. It has by now become part of the standard repertoire of contemporary German stages.