Rainald Grebe
Musician and cabaret artist suffers from an incurable disease
Rainald Grebe at a performance in Würzburg 2019
© imago images / HMB-Media
Rainald Grebe suffers from the autoimmune disease vasculitis. He has suffered six strokes since he was diagnosed a few years ago.
He is a musician, actor, cabaret artist and author: Rainald Grebe (50). In an extensive and sometimes very intimate interview with the “Berlin newspaper” Grebe spoke about his varied work and confided that he did not know how long he could pursue it. “I’ll see how much longer I can do it. I’m a little sick,” said the 50-year-old.
It’s a huge understatement. According to Grebe, he suffers from the autoimmune disease vasculitis, “which shortens the life of many,” says Grebe. In the past, this diagnosis even amounted to an immediate death sentence after a few months, but now it is treatable but not curable. “The diagnosis was a while back, it was in 2014. And the first strokes came in 2017.” He has suffered six of these strokes since then, the last of which was in January of this year. “I thought I won’t. Sitting here is an encore.”
“I’m happy to have gotten away with it so far,” says Grebe. To counteract the disease, he no longer drinks alcohol and moves around a lot. Still “could [es] This year it happens that I only sit in a wheelchair. “He finds support from his family, he also processes his fate with his works and lets it flow into his art -” since then the subject of death has dripped into my lines of songs “.