I have in my possession a copy of an e-mail sent by the German organizer of the concert. It says, and I quote,

“the Musikfest (music festival) had to cancel the orchestral concert due to immense political pressure.”

It continues,

“there is a big coalition of the Christian Democratic and the Social Democratic parties in Bremen (the two major parties in Germany) — the leader of the Christian Democratic party himself put a lot of pressure on the Musikfest threatening that the Musikfest would lose all the public subsidy if they invited Chick to Bremen — moreover the artistic director of the festival would even lose his job.” That threat to deprive the artistic director of his job was leveled because he had declared his intention to hold the concert privately, without government subsidy.

Although both the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the Music Festival did everything they could to make my performance possible, the sheer weight of government pressure in the end forced the Music Festival to cancel my concert. This has been a recurrent pattern in Germany since 1993.

Such economic and career intimidation is frequently directed against concert promoters who wish to arrange performances for me in Germany. As a result, promoters have become increasingly reluctant to risk losing money by scheduling events for me and the number of my performances there has dwindled from 16 or 17 a year to a mere one or two.

The German government has consistently denied that religious discrimination in Germany is a federal problem, and have insisted that it is a problem for individual states to resolve. What we have found, however, is that the federal government is squarely behind these human rights abuses and is spreading them throughout both the public and private sector and into the states. This year, the U.S. Trade Representative placed Germany on the watch list over its government’s use of their hateful and odious “sect filter” — a particularly despicable form of discrimination designed to destroy the livelihoods and careers of thousands of German and American citizens, solely because of their religion. Sect filters mandate that an individual declare his non-membership of a targeted religious movement before he will be considered for employment or contractual relations.