50 years of Rock against Racism in review

in K9, Kinzigstraße 9 (rear building),

Berlin Friedrichshain, (near Samariterstrasse subway station)

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 7:30 p.m

Round anniversaries are actually often used to confirm identity. It may be a bit surprising that in the case of 50 Years of Punk, if the impression is not misleading, things remained rather quiet. Certainly, on arte and elsewhere, the rebellious attitude characteristic of the subculture is celebrated and the usual suspects focus on memorial literature focused on the musical dimension. The social context of punk, however, remains pale. With the well-known background image of the old Clash promo video for 'White Riot' from 1976 in mind, which shows rioting police officers during the Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976, we invite you to two small excursions into the 'scenes'.

Evening 1: White Riot? 'Rock against Racism' in review

Who Shot the Sheriff? (Alan Miles, UK 2005, 66', OV)

Punk emerged at the moment of a profound crisis of the Fordist fix in Great Britain, in the context of which, for the first time in Europe, apart from Italy, racist and neo-fascist forces such as the National Front seemed to gain threatening space in politics, but also in popular and youth culture. Against this, from the autumn of 1976, a campaign was formed in London called 'Rock against Racism', which sought to take up the fight in the field of music and (youth) culture itself and was assessed by Stuart Hall in his first Thatcherism essay "The Great Moving Right Show" in 1979 as "one of the timeliest and best constructed of cultural interventions, repaying serious and extended analysis".

Alan Miles, who works full-time for the London Fire Brigade, retrospectively reconstructed the history of the “Rock against Racism” campaign of 1976/81 at the moment of its re-launch under the motto 'Love Music Hate Racism' (2002) from its London headquarters and with a focus on the musical dimension of the story.

Although the campaign was taken up in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979/80 under the motto 'Rock against the right', these mobilizations developed in other directions; The few German-language reflections on RaR, apart from a recent essay by Gerd-Rainer Horn, tend to lead astray. So let's take a first look at the film (and maybe some other bits and pieces) and see what RAR was all about, to what extent the story is still relevant, what might be learned from it and whether it might be worth going into the topic in more depth at a later date.

(Please note: film in English without subtitles).

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web address: https://kontrapolis.info/18640/author/group: Political Cafe in the K9feed date: Saturday, September 12, 2026 - 08:30