A screen backdrop at Roger Waters’ concert in Berlin with the names of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank and Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Photo: Twitter

The top official dealing with antisemitism in the German state of Hesse has demanded that the local authorities conduct a review of the forthcoming concert in Frankfurt by Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, as accusations of antisemitic motifs displayed during the previous performances on his current tour surfaced on Wednesday.

Uwe Becker — a former mayor of Frankfurt who is now the commissioner for Jewish life and combating antisemitism in Hesse — argued that Sunday’s concert at the city’s Festhalle venue was likely to feature antisemitic content. “After the concerts that have already taken place in Berlin and Munich, it is clear that Roger Waters will, as feared, spread hatred against Israel with antisemitic and Holocaust-related imagery on this tour,” Becker told the Frankfurter Allgemeine news outlet.

Audience photos of Waters’ performances in Berlin on Wednesday and Thursday last week showed a video screen backdrop that included the names of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who kept a wartime diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, and Shireen Abu Akleh, a a Palestinian journalist killed during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022.

Many of those who posted the images argued that the comparison was antisemitic, saying it sought to link the plight of the Palestinians in a complex regional conflict with the systematic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. A text beneath the name of Anne Frank noted that she had died at the Bergen-Belsen camp for the “crime” of “being Jewish,” while Abu Akleh was killed for the “crime” of “being Palestinian.”

“How did Germany allow this to happen in 2023?!” asked one outraged tweet.

“All possibilities must be used here to prevent such a scenario in the Frankfurt Festhalle, the former place of Jewish deportation,” Becker said. Following the nationwide Nazi-directed pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, more than 3,000 Jews were assembled and abused by the Nazi regime at the Festhalle prior to their deportation to concentration camps.

Waters’ “This is Not A Drill 2023” tour includes five German cities. He has already played in Munich, Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, with the last date in Frankfurt on Sunday. A ban on the Frankfurt concert imposed by the city council in February was overruled on appeal.

The 79-year-old Waters has established himself as one of the most visible supporters of the campaign to subject the State of Israel to a regime of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS)” as a prelude to its elimination as a sovereign state. As well as including antisemitic motifs in his concerns, Waters has made incendiary comments in a number of media interviews about the alleged power of the “Jewish lobby” in the US and Israel’s supposed program of “genocide” targeting the Palestinians.