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After the surprising death of Xatar, a petition has now been started with the aim of naming a street in Bonn after the rapper.
The musician was found dead in an apartment in Cologne on Thursday, May 8th. He was 43 years old. The circumstances of death are still being examined.
“As the son of the city, he wrote cultural history”
The initiator: Request inside the petition, to rewrite a street or a public place in the Brüser Berg district of Bonn to Xatar. “As the son of the city, he wrote cultural history and was a voice from many young people from difficult conditions,” says the online petition website. The rapper showed that “people with a difficult start in life can also achieve great start,” said the further explanation.
Why the renaming a street could still stand in the way
If streets or the like are to be named in Germany, some criteria must first be observed. This means that names can usually only take place when the person has already died. Many cities also have a certain period of time after death.
Xatar is not the first rapper to be named after a street. In 2020 the discussion was already on arrest warrant. At that time, a petition called for Bismarckstrasse to rename Bismarckstrasse in Offenbach – but so far without success.
More about Xatar
Xatar, bourgeois Gewar Hajabi, was born on December 24, 1981 in Sanandadsch, Iran. In the early 1980s, his parents, who were active in the Kurdish democracy movement, fled to Iraq with him. During the first Gulf War, his parents were imprisoned by the Saddam Husseins regime due to their Kurdish origin. As a toddler, Xatar spent several months with his parents in prison in Samawa. In 1985 the family came to Bonn with the help of the German Red Cross via Paris.
In 2007 the rapper founded his own label “Alles or Nix Records”, his debut album of the same name appeared a year later. In 2009 he was imprisoned for a gold transporter attack, but this did not prevent him from making music. In 2012, record NR 415 was published-taken out of prison and named according to its cell number. In the end, he was not only active as a rapper, but also as a label boss and entrepreneur.
With the renaming of a street, the petition demands that the rapper posthumously honor. Xatar was a cultural ambassador of the city of Bonn, whose “life path was a story of ascent, remorse and commitment”.