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Germany scraps its Grammys over rappers' Holocaust lyrics

A firestorm erupted after this year’s prize for best hip-hop/urban album was awarded to rap duo Kollegah and Farid Bang

The German Grammys have been cancelled due to anti-Semitism.

The organizers of Germany’s equivalent of the Grammys, called “Echo,” announced Wednesday they are permanently scrapping the annual event, following an anti-Semitism controversy surrounding the winners of this year’s hip-hop award.

“The Echo brand is so badly damaged that a complete new beginning is necessary,” Germany's Music Industry Association said in a statement. “Echo will be no more.”

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The awards have been engulfed in controversy since this year’s prize for best hip-hop/urban album was awarded to rap duo Kollegah and Farid Bang, who are accused of having anti-Semitic lyrics, at the April 12 awards ceremony.

The lyrics to their track “0815” featured a boast about how their physiques were “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners”; in another song, they promised to “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov.”

Their win sparked an immediate firestorm, with Campino, the singer of prominent punk band Die Toten Hosen, criticizing the lyrics from the stage at the awards event. “In principle, I consider provocation is a good thing,” he said. “But we need to differentiate between art as a stylistic device or a form of provocation that only serves to destroy and ostracize others.”

As the backlash gathered steam, several artists returned their awards in protest and sponsors pulled out. Returning his award Tuesday, the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim described the offending lyrics as “clearly anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, and contemptuous of human dignity.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas also weighed in, tweeting: “Anti-Semitic provocations do not deserve awards, they are simply disgusting.”

Kollegah – real name Felix Blume – initially sidestepped the criticism on the night of the awards, saying: “I don’t want to make a political debate out of this.” The duo has since apologized, and their record label put up 100,000 euros for a campaign to tackle anti-Semitism.

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But that gesture has done little to assuage growing concerns about anti-Semitism in Germany’s hip-hop scene, with concerns that the anti-Israel political stances of rappers, many of whom come from Muslim backgrounds, are sometimes spilling over into outright anti-Semitism.

Kollegah — a 33-year-old convert to Islam who funds a school bearing his name in the West Bank – has previously been under scrutiny for anti-Semitic lyrics; Jakob Baier, a researcher focusing on anti-Semitism in German hip-hop, told the New York Times that some of the rapper’s music promoted conspiracy theories centered around a notion that “the world is in control of evil, and the evil is marked as Jewish.”

Germany’s Music Industry Association said in its statement Wednesday that it plans to hold industry workshops to come up with a new awards format, which will place greater emphasis on a jury’s discretion. The award given to Kollegah and Farid Bang for their album “Young, Brutal, Good Looking 3” was based purely on its commercial success, not on artistic merit; the album has sold more than 200,00 copies, topping the charts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The association said it would make sure it had nothing to do with music that promoted anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, or violence in the future.

“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,” it said.

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The scandal comes amid a wave of concern over rising anti-Semitism in German society, with statistics showing such incidents increased 60 percent from 2016 to 2017 in the German capital. Thousands of Germans wore yarmulkes Wednesday in a national show of solidarity, following a high-profile anti-Semitic attack on two men wearing the Jewish skullcap in Berlin last week.

Mobile footage of the April 17 assault, in which the attacker whipped at his victims with a belt, yelling “Yahudi,” the Arabic word for Jew, went viral, and prompted a bout of national soul-searching on the issue.

The far right has sought to capitalize on the issue, arguing that the surge reflects a new wave of “imported anti-Semitism” from the influx of Muslim refugees and immigrants who have arrived since 2015. Others, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have pushed back against the suggestion, arguing anti-Semitism has deep roots across that must be removed across the spectrum of German society.

Cover image: Kollegah (right) and Farid Bang, arrive for the 27th German music awards ceremony, Echo, in Berlin, April, 12, 2018. Photo by: Britta Pedersen/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images