In Germany, there are calls for the cancellation of the concert by Marko Perković Thompson, which is scheduled to take place on November 13 at Frankfurt’s Jahrhunderthalle. All tickets for the concert sold out in just two hours, but calls to ban the performance soon emerged.
According to German Tagesschau, the regional public broadcaster ARD’s service for the state of Hesse, local left-wing politicians have already launched a campaign against the concert taking place.
The Frankfurt branch of the Die Linke party said that “there should be no dealings with fascism” and stated that Thompson has for years been criticized because of nationalist and fascist symbolism at his concerts.
“His song ‘Bojna Čavoglave,’ for example, begins with the words ‘For the Homeland — Ready,’ the salute of the fascist Ustaše regime. Anyone who romanticizes and promotes such an ideology should not be given a platform,” the statement said.
The party added that people of different backgrounds, religions and life experiences live together in Frankfurt, including those whose families were affected by fascism, nationalism, war and persecution.
For this reason, they called on the management of the Jahrhunderthalle to cancel Thompson’s concert, with the message that “there is no place for fascism in Frankfurt am Main.”
The diaspora continues to buy tickets in large numbers
Tagesschau states that the Jahrhunderthalle has a capacity of just over 4,000 people, which is small compared with Thompson’s concerts in Croatia, where he has attracted hundreds of thousands of people.
The German public broadcaster also writes that Thompson continues to enjoy strong support among the Croatian diaspora in Germany, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, frequent accusations of nationalism and glorification of fascism.
The article states that he regularly appears at celebrations involving Croatian national sports teams and events dedicated to the wars of the 1990s, while videos of children’s choirs singing his songs at Croatian masses in the Rhine-Main region circulate on social media.
The venue is not giving up on the concert for now
Tagesschau recalls that until about a decade ago, Thompson performed relatively freely in municipal venues across Germany, while in recent years he has mostly moved to smaller private venues.
The Jahrhunderthalle is also a private venue, so city authorities and politicians cannot simply order the concert to be canceled.
The venue’s management said that, for now, there is no legal basis for canceling the performance.
“Of course, before and after such an event, we check whether the program and content are conducted within the framework of applicable laws, namely whether there are concrete indications of unconstitutional or criminally relevant content or other threats to public safety and order,” the management said.
Thompson last performed in Frankfurt in 2007, and previously claimed that he had held more than 100 concerts in Germany. At least two scheduled performances, in Hamburg in 2008 and Berlin in 2014, were canceled.
At a concert in Böblingen near Stuttgart in 2022, one attendee gave a fascist salute, after which Thompson stopped the performance and reacted. The following evening, however, he did not react to chants of “For the Homeland — Ready” from the audience.
Interestingly, the same Frankfurt venue was also used three months ago by Serbian singer Ceca Ražnatović, the widow of Željko Ražnatović Arkan. Her concert was also, according to Serbian media reports, sold out in a very short time.
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