When you see a Turk in a tram And he is looking at you annoyingly Just stand up and give him a good punch And stab him seventeen times
The music-named “Oi!” after a working-class British greeting-is both a cause and a symptom of neo-Nazi violence. Skinhead rock is basically a fringe phenomenon: concerts tend to attract only a couple of hundred kids, occasionally a couple of thousand. The English magazine Spectator, which monitors right-wing activity, says 5,000 records worldwide would be considered a best seller; many titles don’t come close. Nevertheless, British and American social historians call skinhead rock the emblem of an international underground of haters. The German government, too, apparently considers the music a continuing threat to the peace. This year there were 2,000 attacks on such Jewish sites as synagogues and cemeteries and on foreigners-including the Nov. 23 firebombing murder of a Turkish woman, her granddaughter and her niece. Last week the German government rushed to invoke “every legal step to combat violence and political extremism,” Chancellor Helmut Kohl told diplomats in Bonn. That included specific bans on a long list of German “Oi!” songs, including “Kanakensong” (from a pejorative term for foreigners).
“Oi!” has been a worrisome phenomenon since the 1970s, when it emerged from the British punk-rock scene and spread to Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Many punk bands used Nazi symbols to create an outrageous image; “Oi!” took that a step further. In the early ’80s, one British band called Skrewdriver allied itself with the National Front, which railed against immigrants. By signing with the German label Rock-O-Rama, it found an international audience for such albums as “Hail the New Dawn.”
Skrewdriver was banned last year from entering Germany, after five British followers were charged with assaulting an elderly black man during a week of neo-Nazi demonstrations in the east German city of Cottbus. But imitators have proliferated. There now are about 50 hate bands from Germany, Britain and the rest of Europe that hold concerts in Germany. That’s partly because the scene was given a big boost by German unification in 1990. Groups like Storkraft (Destructive Power) found an enthusiastic new audience among skinheads in the east. “We get better concert halls there and the audiences are a lot better,” explains Storkraft manager Thorsten Lemmer. “There are more social tensions there. Here in the west, the antifascists throw rocks at us and the police forbid our concerts.” Now the movement is catching on in such former East-bloc countries as Hungary, where the collapse of communism and the rise of unemployment have created a void that skinheads seem ominously capable of filling.
Rock-O-Rama has been the leading instrument of hate, according to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in New York. The charges that the label serves as an international clearinghouse for right-wing bands-including several from the United States. U.S. authorities say they often find Rock-O-Rama products while investigating hate crimes. (The company did not respond to a message left on its answering machine last week.) Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director, last week urged Kohl to close down Rock-O-Rama, saying it brings “nothing but shame on your country.” A spokesman from the Cologne prosecutor’s office says a probe into the label “has been concluded because of lack of evidence.”
Germany is actually well equipped to fight neo-Nazi rock. In reaction to the Holocaust, its 1949 Constitution prohibited “incitement to racial hatred” and “demagoguery.” Federal officials have indexed most neo-Nazi music over the last two months, making it a crime to advertise or sell it to those under 18 years old. And anyone who calls for the murder of foreigners can be tried for murder if that advice is heeded. Still, prosecutors already are swamped with cases of right-wing violence. The bands could skirt the law by changing their names and toning down their lyrics. And a head-on attack could backfire. “Negative advertising is the best advertising of all for young people,” says Lemmer. “It’s ridiculous to -try to stop the unstoppable.” That may be, but the growing violence has left Germany with no other choice.
