The concert by Roger Waters planned for May 28 in the Frankfurt Festhalle has been cancelled. The reason for this is the “continued anti-Israel behavior” of the co-founder of the rock group Pink Floyd, the city said on Friday. The city of Frankfurt am Main, together with the state of Hesse, which has also spoken out in favor of a cancellation, is a shareholder in Messe Frankfurt GmbH, which owns the festival hall.
Waters has repeatedly called for a cultural boycott of Israel, drawn comparisons to South Africa’s former apartheid regime and pressured artists to cancel events in Israel, the city said. The musician has repeatedly attracted attention because of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which he has spread, among other things, to media close to Hamas. Weeks ago, the Jewish community in Frankfurt, together with an alliance of Jewish associations, had called for the Waters concert to be canceled.
After the pogrom night in November 1938, around 3,000 Jewish men were rounded up in the exhibition hall and later deported to concentration camps. Many of them were murdered.
According to the city of Frankfurt, five concerts are planned in Germany as part of the “Roger Waters – this is not a drill” tour. There are also calls for a cancellation in Berlin, Munich and Cologne.
