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JEWS

Pink Floyd founder: We need Berlin’s Wall

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters joined a protest against new luxury flats at the biggest remaining section of the Berlin Wall on Tuesday - as Jewish groups called for a boycott of his gigs which they say use anti-Semitic imagery.

Published: 3 September 2013 17:21 CEST
Pink Floyd founder: We need Berlin's Wall
Photo: Josie Le Blond

Waters, 69 – former singer, bassist and lyricist of the British band Pink Floyd – found himself in hot water in recent days over his rock opera show “The Wall” which features an inflatable pig bearing a Star of David.

Jewish groups on Tuesday condemned the show as “anti-Semitic, cheap propaganda” and called for a boycott of Waters’ performances in Berlin and Düsseldorf this week.

Meanwhile, apparently left feeling comfortably numb by the whole affair, Waters visited Berlin’s East Side Gallery to lend support to a movement protesting the removal of sections of it to provide access to luxury riverside apartments.

“I’m not known for recommending the maintenance of walls in the world,” said Waters, who follows actor and singer David Hasselhoff in personally championing the cause.

“But in this case I’m extremely happy to make an exception. It’s a very beautiful and moving experience even to stand by it and remember all the fallen loved-ones from those dark days of the Cold War.”

“I see they managed to get the crane in before you could stop them,” Waters told the crowd, as behind him cranes and construction teams continued their work on the controversial luxury accommodation.

Earlier this year, demonstrators briefly succeeded in delaying removal of sections of the Wall, but were then outmaneuvered and a six-metre stretch of the gallery was removed to provide access for diggers and cranes.

Authors of a petition against the “Living Levels” project – a 63-metre-high tower block to be built on the narrow stretch of land between the Wall and the river bank – say the East Side Gallery should be conserved not only as a hugely popular tourist destination, but as a historical memorial to German division.

“We came because we wanted to see what the Wall really looked like and what it represents, it’s very thought-provoking,” Gayle, a passing British tourist on her first visit to Berlin, told The Local. “It wouldn’t be the same if it was in a museum,” she added.

Waters said he had spontaneously decided to sign the petition and publicly support the protest while in Berlin ahead of his show, which comes 23 years after Pink Floyd played their acclaimed 1979 The Wall album to an audience of 250,000 in July 1990 to mark the fall of the much-hated barrier.

Waters – who refused to answer questions during his brief visit to the Wall – has previously denied using anti-Semitic imagery in his show – a claim which has only further outraged German Jewish groups.

After an earlier complaint in Belgium, Waters, who turns 70 this week, denied in an open letter posted on his website that he was anti-Semitic and highlighted that a crucifix, hammer and sickle, and dollar sign, among other things, were also included in “The Wall” show.

He said, in the statement dated August 1, that he had “many very close Jewish friends” as well as a Jewish daughter-in-law and that his father had died fighting the Nazis in Italy in 1944.

“The Wall” show is many things and includes “anti-fascist, anti-apartheid, anti-dogma”, he said.

Yet the singer also pointed out his support for the Palestinian-founded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which lobbies worldwide for the economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

“It’s grotesque for Roger Waters to deny the anti-Semitic imagery in his stage show.” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in a statement on Tuesday.

“If a horned pig [appears] with a Star of David, hammer and sickle and a dollar sign, this serves many age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes,” she added.

READ MORE: Part of Berlin Wall demolished at dawn

Josie Le Blond/AFP

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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