Germany’s biggest music prize is being abolished after one of this year’s awards was given to a rap album allegedly containing antisemitic lyrics.
“The Echo brand is so badly damaged that a complete new beginning is necessary,” the Federal Music Industry Association (BVMI) said on Wednesday afternoon.
The BVMI had drawn increasing criticism in recent days for honouring the album Jung, Brutal, Gutaussehend 3 (Young, Brutal, Good-Looking 3), which sold more than 200,000 copies despite some of its content considered offensive by many Jewish groups and others because of lyrics that refer to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp.
In the song 0815, the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang say their bodies are “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners”, while another says: “I’m doing another Holocaust, coming with a molotov.” Both rappers have said they reject antisemitism.
On Monday, the conductor Daniel Barenboim joined a growing number of artists to hand back their prize in protest over the antisemitism row.
“We don’t want this music prize to be perceived as a platform for antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia or belittling of violence,” the BVMI said.
“While events at this year’s prize gala could not be undone, the association said it wanted “to ensure that such a mistake could not be repeated in the future.”
Instead, the association plans to create three prizes that with a greater focus on artistic merit. While the Echo honours for jazz and classical music are awarded by a jury of critics, the main pop prize is based official German music chart rankings and has been criticised for drawing further attention to successful artists.
This year’s prize also honoured the 17-times Echo-winning schlager music star Helene Fischer and the veteran pop-rockers Die Toten Hosen, who have won the award 11 times.
The author Jens-Christian Rabe criticised the criteria for the award in the broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Prizes in the arts are usually awards for outstanding artistic achievements,” he wrote.
“But while that is currently the case with the German book prize and the German film prize, for instance, the Echo awards reward the commercial success of a work, not its artistic quality.”
The controversy around the Echo prize, as well as a filmed attack in Berlin on a 21-year-old man wearing a skullcap or kippa by a belt-wielding young Syrian asylum seeker, has over the course of the last week inspired a public debate about rising antisemitism in Germany.
The victim of the Berlin attack, non-Jewish Israeli citizen Adam Armoush, later told German media that had worn the skullcap as an experiment, to disprove a friends’ claims about antisemitism in Germany.
Several “wear a kippa” solidarity marches are planned across German cities on Wednesday evening. Berlin’s Social Democrat mayor Michael Müller, as well as politicians from across the political spectrum, have announced plans to attend a solidarity rally outside the House of the Jewish Community in Berlin.
Foreign minister Heiko Maas tweeted a picture of himself wearing a skullcap, stating that “when young men are threatened solely because they are wearing a kippa, we have to show them that they are not alone. We must never allow antisemitism to become an everyday reality in Germany”