What are people's great, real longings?

They are on happy birthday cards - and are banal: happiness, love, money, success.

You walk through this cold world and look for it and mostly find nothing of it.

Because life is unfair and honest and brutal.

But it could be different, like on TV;

on the private channels, of course, because they promise what most people want - in programs such as “Bachelor” or “Bachelorette”, “Battle of Reality Stars”, “Love Island” and “Prince Charming”.

Anna Prizkau

Editor in the features section.

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You switch on, and while the brightly colored, fast pictures are running, you think: Are the beautiful people looking for the fulfillment of their small, big dreams in the loud shows? Or do they just want to shine and applause? Why do you go on TV? Why are you watching them? And why do you sometimes keep it a secret - say wrongly, mendaciously: What, last night? "Bachelor"? No! I read this and that novel!

The search for answers begins in Cologne. Milky skies, rain, a café. Rafi Rachek is sitting on the half-deserted terrace. He - 31, his hair dyed white blonde, his short beard as black as his browbones - could do a floss advertisement, that is what his smile says. On television, Rachek said he was looking for love. That was 2018 and on the show "The Bachelorette" that you watch when you want to see love, at least on your screen. Because every year a lonely woman meets twenty lonely men only to fall in love in the end. That Rafi Rachek was looking for love there was a lie. He was looking for an alibi for his mother, father, siblings. "If I take part, I thought, no one will ever suspect the truth, and my parents leave me alone," he whispers now,runs his right hand over his sharp triangular chin.

He clarified the truth on another show and a year after the "Bachelorette": He cried, said that he loved men.

As a spectator, one had cried along with them, was happy and relieved.

“Kurdish, Yazidi, gay, that's a lot,” says Rafi Rachek, and his brows knit as if he were lifting something heavy.

It is now about Rachek's family, who did not understand his outing: "One of my brothers said it would be better if I died."

"White, black, gay - everything is included"

Rachek was born in northeast Syria, in Hassaka County. 21 years ago he fled with his parents and siblings. In Germany they lived in a refugee home for seven years, and it was difficult, he says. A life in uncertainty, years with an unclear whereabouts. Rafi Rachek takes a break, not a rhetorical one, because he tries to remember. He says that all the refugee children in the home wanted to become professional footballers. It didn't end up on a soccer field, of course. He ended up on TV. But Rafi Rachek's biography was never told. Why? Because private television is not interested in the private, unless there are simple stories in which the fictional and fortunate viewers can recognize each other.

That's why you let Rafi Rachek talk in the café and watch him and hope - however you always hope in front of the television - for the big happy ending.

He made it from secondary school to high school and graduated from high school, studied politics and history in Kassel.

Short.

“That always interested me.

But after a semester I couldn't anymore, there was way too much in my head, also because of my sexuality, which I was still suppressing at the time. ”Then Rachek tells about other oppressors, about the racists he met - there were many.

Also on reality television?