German Rappers Who Mocked Auschwitz Prisoners Agree To Visit Nazi Camp
Farid Bang and Kollegah perform at the Echo Awards on April 12, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Image by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
(JTA) — The rappers who brought down a prestigious German music prize over songs containing anti-Semitic lyrics will visit Auschwitz.
Kollegah and Farid Bang accepted an invitation from the International Auschwitz Committee to visit the former Nazi death camp next month, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported.
On April 12, they won an Echo Award in the hip-hop category for an album with lyrics that boasted of physiques “more defined that those of Auschwitz inmates” and called for “another Holocaust; let’s grab the Molotov” cocktails. The album’s title in English is “Young, Brutal, Good Looking 3.”
Several prominent German musicians, including conductor Daniel Barenboim, returned their Echo Awards in protest.
Last month, the executive board of Germany’s Music Industry Association, or BVMI, announced that it had decided to discontinue the Echo Awards. “The Echo brand is so badly damaged that a complete new beginning is necessary,” BVMI said in a statement. “Echo will be no more.”
“The events surrounding this year’s Echo, for which the board apologized, cannot be reversed, but we can ensure that such a mistake does not happen again in the future,” the board of the association also said.
Following the controversy, Kollegah and Farid Bang apologized for the lyrics, and their record label put up $125,000 for a campaign to fight anti-Semitism.
Award organizers had cited “freedom of artistic expression” in defending their decision to nominate the two rappers.
Artists are nominated for Echo Awards based on sales numbers and not the quality of their work.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
