BREAKING URGENT EMERGENCY: Revellers in a tent north of Frankfurt caught singing "Foreigners Out" to club music, German democracy on life support

I write this post through tears to report on the ongoing political emergency that is afflicting the Federal Republic of Germany. Naughty, fascistic and racist people will not stop singing “Ausländer raus” (“foreigners out”) and “Deutschland den Deutschen” (“Germany for the Germans”) to the tune of Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’amour toujours.” They have been told thousands of times to cut it out BUT THEY JUST KEEP DOING IT AND EVERY TIME YOU THINK THEY HAVE STOPPED THEY START UP AGAIN.

As of July the police had responded to at least 368 separate “Foreigners out” incidents, and this five-word racist plague shows no signs of abating. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the completely necessary and boundlessly justified moral hysteria inspired by every “Foreigners out” incident merely encourages more people to sing “Foreigners out,” which is precisely what we don’t want them to sing. It is like National Socialism all over again, except National Socialism only lasted twelve years and at the rate things are going people will still be chanting this execrable hymn to the racism demons a century from now:

That video is from the latest Gigi D’Agostino-inspired crime against humanity. It was filmed last Friday night by a heroic audio technician known to us only as Patrick R., who was hired to assist with a city festival in Burgholzhausen, just north of Frankfurt. Patrick R. first notified the world of this atrocity via a brief and deeply urgent thread on X. Even though it was a day later, the good Patrick R. was still quite shaken, as anybody would be after such a close and harrowing encounter with the forces of evil:

Yesterday I was in Burgholzhausen … working as a technician at a party. After thinking about whether I should publish the video, I’ve now decided to publish it because of my deepest dislike for this behaviour. I can’t understand why neither the DJ nor the organisers took any action here. Instead, the party just continued and the behaviour was accepted in public as normal. Nobody said anything.

Patrick R. went on to say deeply original things about dehumanisation, racism and xenophobia, the likes of which nobody has ever heard before:

Right-wing agitation, xenophobia and pure racism have now been so alarmingly normalised that apparently everyone finds it okay when half of the festival tent sings along to slogans that have recently made so many headlines. I don’t want to live in a society where this is normal. Dehumanising strangers is inhumane. It makes me angry and I believe there is NO excuse for behaviour like this.

Patrick R.’s shocking thread with its incontrovertible video proof of hate went immediately viral, and the Frankfurt police responded right away. They assured Patrick R. that they had “secured the videos and forwarded them accordingly.”

Soon a regional news team summoned our heroic defender of human rights and democracy to discuss the gruesome scene he had witnessed. You could tell that the brave Patrick R. was still traumatised, but he tried to hold it together for the cameras:

“I stood there at first, just stunned, watching the scene,” Patrick R. told Hessenschau.

It started with a few people chanting these slogans. Then more and more people in the tent apparently decided to join in. And I just shook my head and took out my phone. At that moment I just felt powerless.

The reporter informs us that “the song was played several times,” and also that, since posting his recording to X, Patrick R. has been the victim of threats. The poor man has had to deactivate his email account because of “threatening messages,” that is how dangerous and racist all of this is. Despite all of the arrant racism, Patrick R. has not deactivated his X account for some reason. There he is still thanking people for their attention and begging larger accounts for retweets crusading against racism and xenophobia as I type this.

In a second media interview of what will doubtless soon be dozens, Patrick R. explains that he has been “in a state of absolute shock since Friday evening.”

Patrick R. still trembling from the trauma of ambient xenophobia.

“Nobody stopped the shouting, nobody reacted,” he tells his interviewer, adding that at that point he “didn’t understand the world anymore.” To uncharitable critics who have accused him of silently filming this blatant racism for social media credit while doing nothing about it in the moment, Patrick R. explains in words totally bereft of self-satisfaction that “today I’m of the opinion that I did the right thing,” because otherwise “I’m not sure I would still have all my teeth.” And he adds: “Apart from that, the reach that this is generating and the explosive nature that the topic is developing is just right.” What a gift it is to share a country with a good, upstanding man like Patrick R. I could listen to him complain about racism for hours.

Soon the press were picking up the story. Jörg Lau, who writes for Die Zeit – that beacon of all that is good and virtuous – was among the first to denounce this most recent and regrettable resurgence of fascism. “I want dancing to hate-inciting slogans to be punished with severe repression,” Lau tweeted from the depths of his democratic convictions. “Why aren’t the police taking down these people’s identities? This is just as threatening to our state as those pro-Caliphate demonstrations.”

The association that organised the festival threw up a semi-literate Instagram post screeching that singing “Foreigners out” “is absolutely irrevocably against the mentality of our organisation” and clarifying that they “stand for openness and do not tolerate any hate [speech].”

Our stalwart racism denouncer, Patrick R., is however unwilling to absolve the festival organisers. “When I realised they had posted a story on Instagram and Facebook, I reached out to them and wrote that I was the one who had posted the video. ‘If you need to talk, feel free to get in touch with me.’ There was no response.” As we all know, not responding to racism denouncers is itself a clear and blatant form of racism.

Lars Keitel, the mayor of Burgholzhausen, published a slavering statement deploring his city’s disco racism incident this morning. Perhaps worried what Patrick R. might say to the press about his delayed apology, Keitel first explains that he has been travelling, before assuring us that he has “been in contact with the police since yesterday,” and that authorities are “already investigating and looking for further witnesses.” There follows his heartfelt and sensitive endorsement of “respect, tolerance and mutual cooperation” – indeed, of “humanity” itself – and his rejection of “xenophobia,” “hatred,” “exclusion” and “intolerance”:

It is irrelevant to me whether just a few or many people shouted “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.” There is no place for such words in our city. We are an open and diverse community built on respect, tolerance and mutual cooperation. I personally stand for these values and I am glad that there are many people and institutions in our city who have contacted me in the last 24 hours or are publicly expressing themselves and representing exactly these values …

I would like to make it clear once again: xenophobia and hatred of other people because of their origin contradict the values that we live and defend here. Those who shout such things are acting against the cohesion and peaceful coexistence that makes our city strong …

I want our city to be a place where there is no room for hatred and exclusion, but where we treat each other with respect and humanity. We all have to do our part to make that happen. Let us stand together against intolerance and racism and show that we stand together as a community – regardless of origin.

While Keitel was rushing back from Austria to pen these eloquent and introspective words, municipal officials were doing their part to exorcise local racisms by posting this helpful antiracist graphic to the Burgholzhausen website, which does not at all look like it was thrown together in the last minute by some nine year-old girl for a school equity-and-inclusion project:

At the top it reads “Heart not hate, brains not hate in Burgholzhausen,” and continues with perfect coherence: “Birthplace: Earth; Race: Human; Politics: Freedom; Religion: Love.” In accompanying text our city administrators note defensively that “you can’t check everyone at a city festival,” and with some vague hope for absolution they also muse that “not every partygoer is from Burgholzhausen.” News to Burgholzhausen: This is not how you do a racism apology. Racism is everywhere, Burgholzhausen is especially and thoroughly racist, and until you can unreservedly own your racism and loathe yourself for it before the entire world you are just the same as all the other racists singing “Foreigners out.”

Meanwhile, the press stories just keep rolling in. Welt have an article, as do Focus and Pro Sieben. The Frankfurter Rundschau have a particularly extensive write-up, as this racism is happening in their territory and they are basically responsible for it. There we read that this is the the thirteenth incident that state police have investigated in Hessen, where “L’amour toujours”-inspired racisms are such a problem that they have apparently become a separately-tabulated category of criminal offence:

Before November 2023, the state criminal office is not aware of any right-wing incidents in connection with “L’amour toujours”, a spokeswoman told our editorial team. It is therefore quite reasonable to speak of an “increase” of alleged incidents in the recent past. The city festival in Burgholzhausen now fits into this inglorious series.

BILD ask potential witnesses to contact investigators in Bad Homburg to assist them in laying bare this crime of the century. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung promise us that police will issue a statement on their progress sometime today. Der Spiegel put in a little more effort to lament the “almost inevitable automatism” via which Germans are driven to “chant racist slogans” anytime somebody plays “L’amour toujours.” They rightly fret that the 368 officially registered cases are but a small fraction of the true number of Italodance-inspired racisms happening out there, because “the police are not always called and recordings are not always made.” Particularly worrying in Patrick R.’s video, they note, is the fact that “so many partygoers were singing … that they could be heard clearly despite the loud music.”

The crack reporters at Stern, famed for their investigative reporting, do not have much to add to this cornucopia of coverage, and so they simply repost an old video that the journalist Michel Abdollahi made during the last “Foreigners out” uproar. In this memorable statement, Abdollahi claims that “it really hurts when people shout ‘foreigners out’ in your face for 38 years” and that “the problem” of racism “is getting bigger and bigger,” such that only “profound change” like “the constant, constant, constant questioning of racist thought patterns” and “the defence of democracy” can save us.

Racism explainer Michel Abdollahi explaining why everybody is racist.

Alas, not all voices are joining this righteous chorus. Henry Albrecht at Apollo News, who is probably a racist himself, has the insensitive temerity to ask why the police are investigating in the first place – and even to question how merely singing “Foreigners out” constitutes a crime:

At a folk festival in Friedrichsdorf-Burgholzhausen in the Hochtaunus district of Hesse, several people are said to have sung the slogan ‘Germany for Germans, foreigners out” … Now the police are investigating, but it’s questionable whether this makes any sense …

For example, the Augsburg public prosecutor’s office dropped its investigation after several members of the Hohenfurch rural youth sang the lines in question at a carnival parade in Landsberg in February. The facts of the case do not constitute the offence of incitement …. and is therefore not punishable.

A similar case also occupied the public prosecutor’s office in Neubrandenburg, which in October 2023 opened an investigation against four people who had sung these lines in a nightclub. As a spokeswoman told Spiegel at the end of June, the investigation was closed because the authorities could not find any criminal offence. According to current case law, the statements are covered by freedom of expression and thus do not constitute incitement …

At the end of August, the public prosecutor’s office in Hanover also closed the investigation into an incident at the marksmen’s festival in Kleinburgwedel in mid-May. The songs were also sung there – but according to the public prosecutor's office, they did not constitute the criminal offence of incitement of the people.

Yes, you read that right: Somehow it is the year 2024 and racism is still not illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. Somebody needs to get our antiracist audio technician’s thoughts about that.