60,000 attend the German Communist Party festival
The weather had been chaotic all week, and the 200-strong collective of helpers from all over Germany and beyond was forced to work extra shifts, and got soaked to the skin countless times. It took communist fighting spirit to get there.
By Friday afternoon the Revierpark was ready for the occasion: six kilometres of coloured lights, fifteen stages, hundreds of stalls, eleven huge marquees, and the “biggest bookshop in Europe”—all up to accommodate the crowd.
The worrying question “Will they come?” soon answered itself. By the time the Irish contingent arrived from Paderborn airport the park was absolutely mobbed, and none of the cloudbursts during the weekend was able to change that. Sixty thousand (police figures, which are not known to be given in our favour) turned out to celebrate with the communists and their newspaper, and the atmosphere was electric at all corners of the festival grounds. Space here allows for little more than a bare mentioning of the absolute highlights.
One of these was certainly the Clearwater Walkabout Chorus from the United States. Founded by Pete Seeger in 1984, the fabulous fifteen-piece choir performed eight times during the festival, and each gig was packed. Though Pete, now 87, doesn’t do the big tours with them any more, they carry on his message of a better, more peaceful, socialist world. The only people who had problems with them were sound engineers and MCs. Because of the never-ending “More, more!” they upset the schedule on every stage they played at. At one gig “We shall overcome” lasted fifteen minutes: the crowd just kept on singing.
Konstantin Wecker has been Germany’s number 1 songwriter for a good few years now. His concert on Saturday evening drew a crowd of fifteen thousand. When he left the stage after two hours of playing and singing without a break his comment “I’ve been at many gigs in my life but this here is in a league of its own” was far from being a sweet-talking exercise.
Microphone Mafia and the Cologne rock band Brings delivered an outstanding “rock against fascism” concert, and the Israeli multi-instrumentalist Gillard Azmon set the highlight in jazz.
Working-class songs have always been at the heart of the festival, and you got them all over the place: Rotdorn (Hamburg), Achim Bigus (Osnabrück) and of course “our own” Ernesto Che Guevara Song Club from Dresden.
Their special gig was at the Irish stall. On Saturday afternoon they drew such a big crowd outside the tent that all traffic on the main path through the park came to a halt. Nobody minded; why walk on when the crack is good?—stand and join in.
More debates, more public lectures, more arguments (often controversial but always in an atmosphere of great solidarity), more readings from new books gave proof of the large and growing interest in the communists’ answers to the burning questions of these times. Usually the marquees weren’t big enough to hold the crowds.
The “international club” runs alongside the festival. It is an exchange between communist parties, and this time twenty-five sister parties followed the invitation of the DKP. Marion Baur, the CPI representative at the festival, will give an overview and reports on some of the discussions in the next few editions of Unity after the summer break.
I am not known for ending a report with a quotation from a bourgeois paper, but here is the exception. The Westphãlische Rundschau carried a front-page article on the Monday following the festival saying: “During a weekend of cancellations and wash-outs the Communists remained unimpressed by the weather and put up a massive festival. It makes one wonder how they can do it.”
Some day they will understand what solidarity, iron discipline and communist spirit can achieve. Mind you, the day they will admit that will be the day after the paper has been turned into a communist one.
[HGB]
