According to consequence.net, last night a protestor stormed the stage with the Israeli flag during Roger Waters’s concert in Frankfurt, Germany in response to Waters’s tour which some people have allegedly deemed anti-semitic.
According to stereogum.com, the protestor’s actions follows last week’s news where police in Berlin launched an investigation into the alleged use of pro-Nazi imagery in Waters’s May 17 and 18 performances.
The content in question included a uniform intended to invoke a fascist character from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and an inflatable pig prop with Third Reich imagery, which Rogers has been using at his shows for more than a decade and the Anti-Defamation League declared to have “no anti-Semitic intent.”
The Berlin shows also outraged supporters of the Israeli government by equating Anne Frank with Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed a year ago by shots from Israeli soldiers during a shootout with Palestinian militants.
Waters issued a statement about the Berlin controversy, confirming that the imagery was intended to critique fascism and describing the pushback against him as “bad faith attacks from those who want to smear and silence me because they disagree with my political views and moral principles.”
Last night, Waters chose not to wear the “Nazi demagogue” uniform and in a five-minute speech to the audience, the artist explained that he left the costume out of this show in Frankfurt out of respect for those closer to the situation than he is.
“I feel for the people who are concerned about desecrating the memory of this place, this, if you like, shrine to the memory of the men who were taken.”
A POWERFUL NIGHT IN FRANKFURT. THANK YOU! pic.twitter.com/bbPvFnsmsv
— Roger Waters ✊ (@rogerwaters) May 29, 2023
“A POWERFUL NIGHT IN FRANKFURT. THANK YOU!”
Photo Credit: Sharon Alagna