Waters divides audiences in Berlin as show accused of reflecting anti-Semitism

• Published date: 26 May 2023

Pink Floyd were favourites of German concertgoers for decades, particularly after they brought their multimedia spectacular, The Wall, to Berlin in 1990

But band co-founder Roger Waters has divided German audiences with his latest show, which sees him don an SS uniform and fire into the audience with a machine gun. Critics say the show's imagery and texts veer into anti-Semitism propaganda and compare Israel with Nazi Germany.

Among the set pieces are pig-shaped balloons covered with images including the Star of David, as well as logos of an oil company and an Israeli arms company.

Screens juxtapose the name of Frankfurt-born Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the face - mostly likely by Israeli security forces - while covering Israeli army raids in the city of Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank last year.

After his Berlin concert this week, the city's culture senator, Joe Chialo, condemned "in the strongest terms the performance of an artist like Roger Waters releasing pig-shaped balloons with Stars of David on them".

After Berlin, Waters takes his show to Frankfurt on Sunday, where city authorities failed in their attempt to ban his show, which is being staged at a publicly owned venue. They said their ban was justified because Waters is "one of the anti-Semites with the widest reach in the world".

After an emergency filing by lawyers for Waters, a Frankfurt court agreed that the singer "obviously uses symbolism based on National Socialist rule" in his stage show. More important, though, was the "overall impression" and, in the view of the court, the musician "neither glorifies or relativises National Socialist atrocities or identifies with the National Socialist racial ideology".

Propaganda

Postwar Germany has tight rules for the public use of Nazi images, propaganda or dissemination of views seen as glorifying the...