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INTRO
A growing number of DJs have been withdrawing their labour from Berghain in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide
However, some are still deciding to cross the picket line and play. We understand that this venue has a particular legacy in our scene, and want to move in empathy and good faith. In the next slides, we address some common questions around the boycott in the hope that these DJs will reconsider and stand with their peers in this historical moment of anticolonial solidarity.
Music should be about peace and unity. Isn’t this boycott just ‘cancel culture’?
Boycotts are a centuries old form of political resistance and action. They have played a critical role in numerous anticolonial and civil rights struggles: from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the US, to the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa.
This particular boycott is a targeted collective effort to mobilise the rave community in support of Palestinians facing occupation and genocide. It is also standing up for aan Arab artist who was, in fact, cancelled by Berghain for his solidarity with Palestine.
Boycotting Berghain as a DJ is not an act of cancellation. It is a positive, constructive and hopeful act. By participating in the boycott, you are standing with your peers and adding your voice to a chorus demanding change and accountability from a venue that has both performed a disturbing act of censorship and refused to apologise for it.
Right now in Germany, artists and cultural workers—mainly Black, Arab, Muslim and Jewish—are being targeted, surveilled and even arrested by the state. Berghain’s deplatforming of Arabian Panther makes it centrally complicit in this authoritarian crackdown.
Every time a DJ crosses the picket line and plays at Berghain, they send a message that censoring pro-Palestinian solidarity is acceptable. This empowers other clubs and institutions to deplatform artists and intellectuals. It also undermines essential efforts by activists in Germany and other western countries to challenge their governments’ material support of the occupation and genocide.
If DJs unite around this boycott, Berghain may feel enough pressure to apologise and issue a solidarity statement, as they did for Ukraine. This will immediately increase pressure within Germany for a ceasefire. It will also provide a powerful example of healing, change and accountability. Please do the right thing and join this effort.
Isn’t it better to take this gig and donate my fee to Palestine? What if I wear a kuffiyeh onstage?
Sure: you can do this for every club that is not being actively boycotted.
But for the five clubs being boycotted: please don’t cross the picket line. Solidarity works when it is collective and united. Every time a DJ branches off and decides their own “way to help”, it undermines the resolve of the movement, spreads confusion, and encourages other artists to ignore the boycott.
You waving a Palestine flag at Berghain is not going to change anything. It is not going to win hearts or minds. It is not going to bring people together. All it does is legitimise a club that has censored your peers for political expression and slows down efforts to stop the genocide.