Roger Waters
Photo: Getty Images, Justin Berl. All rights reserved.
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Roger Waters’ European tour, which kicks off in Lisbon this weekend, continues to heat people up. Of the venues in Germany, there has so far been an official “No” from the operators in the municipally operated Festhalle in Frankfurt am Main. In Munich, on the other hand, a decision to cancel the Waters gig in the Olympic Hall there has been postponed. The responsible economic committee wants to submit its placet later in March. The venues on the site of the 1972 Olympic Games are also in the hands of the city.
Waters’ German legal representative has now spoken for the Festhallen concert on May 21, 2023. The Cologne lawyer Ralf Höcker is quoted in the Hessian local press. He says that according to the current legal situation, it would be unlawful to unilaterally terminate such a decision on the contracts with the live group CTS Eventim as a national organizer.
Everyone is aware of that, says Höcker.
The lawyer points out that if Waters takes a tough stance, the public sector will have to foot the bill. He speaks of “misunderstood symbolic politics”. This brings “absolutely nothing in the important fight against anti-Semitism, but it costs millions of taxpayers’ money.”
In the local edition of “Bild”, Mayor Nargess Eskandari-Grünberg from the Frankfurt Greens is quoted as saying “We stand by our decision to cancel Roger Waters’ concert in the Festhalle. In the days after the pogrom night in 1938, 3,000 Jewish men from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main area were brought to the festival hall, mistreated and later deported to concentration camps and murdered. Anti-Semitism has no place in Frankfurt.”
Alon Meyer, head of the Jewish Maccabi organization, also doesn’t want to hear anything about a rejection of the rejection: “It was a mistake to allow it at all. And the consequences are now inevitable and right. Luckily it was banned!”
The anti-Semitism commissioner in the state of Hesse, Uwe Becker, in turn, wants to await a lawsuit from the Waters lawsuit team with a steady hand. It is now all the more important “to continue to act consistently now.”
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