If you want to see the British musician Roger Waters in the Olympic Hall at 8 p.m. on Sunday evening, you can see in advance what the city means by “showing the flag”. On the way to the entrances, visitors have to pass groups of flags: at the small Olympic Hall and at Hans-Jochen-Vogel-Platz, ten flags each from the states of Israel and Ukraine, as well as flags with the rainbow colors of the LGBTQ community, are being raised.
Appropriately, the association “Munich is colorful!” called for a protest from 6.30 p.m. to “give the flags a voice”, as the chairwoman and SPD city councilor Micky Wenngatz put it. The aim of the demonstration, which is supported by various organizations, is “to point out to concertgoers that there shouldn’t actually be a stage in Munich for anti-Semitic statements”.
The city leaders would have preferred to prevent the performance of the former Pink Floyd bassist because of his proximity to the at least partially anti-Semitic Israel boycott movement BDS and his retelling of Russian propaganda in the Ukraine war. This mixture also met with unease on the other four stops of Waters’ Germany tour, in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Frankfurt. With the attempt to ban the concert, they failed in court in Frankfurt, which is why they didn’t even try in Munich. Especially since the city had already lost before the Federal Administrative Court in January 2022 when it came to preventing a BDS event in urban areas.
So the government factions in the city council requested that the city’s subsidiary Olympiapark GmbH (OMG), as the lessor of the hall, at least “set a clear signal” on the day of the concert. “We want it to be clear in the park that we are on the side of Israel and Ukraine,” explained SPD city councilor Nikolaus Gradl. That’s the case with the flags and the associated illumination of the Olympic Tower, says Green Party leader Dominik Krause: “But the second part is that Munich’s civil society is also taking a stand.”
Krause himself will position himself in front of the hall during the demo, although it is not yet clear where exactly the Waters opponents can gather. “It is also not yet entirely clear in which colors the Olympic Tower will shine,” said OMG spokesman Tobias Kohler. Possibly there should also be an indication of the attitude of the city in the hall. Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD), who had vehemently opposed the concert, will not be present, nor will Mayor Katrin Habenschaden (Greens). She is at the state delegates’ conference of her party in Erlangen at the weekend, where the government program for the state elections will be discussed.
The city council faction of the CSU and Free Voters is not officially taking part in the demonstration, but on Tuesday applied to the mayor to arrange for the proceeds from the concert to be used in a targeted manner: “The full amount of the proceeds must go to the fight against anti-Semitism in our city. “