The German-Indonesian great-grandson of a slave has been confronted with racism his whole life. Now Anoki’s face is being used by big advertisers as the “urban man” — against his will.
“Just don’t look,” the musician Anoki tells himself when he encounters his own oversized face, smiling down at him from an even larger advertising poster on Rosenthaler Platz. Contrary to its name, Rosenthaler Platz is not a square at all, but a noisy Berlin intersection that never sleeps, where kebabs are still on sale at 5 a.m. There you will find impatiently honking cabs, overturned e-scooters and intersecting streetcar lines.
For Anoki, Rosenthaler Platz is a stopover on his way to the music studio. Down by the train tracks, he walks past huge billboards every day. The 29-year-old rapper has had more than enough of the boards that show him. A student job is to blame.
Anoki: From Bavaria to Berlin
Anoki’s real name is Florian Griessmann and he is the son of a German and an Indonesian. He grew up in the southern German state of Bavaria — one of few non-white people there.
As a child and teenager, Florian Griessmann had to endure everyday discrimination. On his way to parties, he has often been stopped by the police.
“Once a policeman said to me, ‘If you look like a criminal, don’t be surprised,'” he tells DW. Sometimes, he says, he filed charges against police officers, which were always met with counter-charges. “Everyone with an immigrant background knows this and has tried to take action against it.”
Musician at any price
For Florian Griessmann, music is everything — even though for many years it didn’t look as if he would ever be able to make a living from it. He first had to earn his money in another way.
“Name a job, I’ve probably done it before,” laughs Anoki, who, as the child of a single mother, started working as a teenager. “I worked in a movie theater, planted plants at a wholesale nursery. I loaded trucks, polished shock absorbers on a factory line, tapped beer at a brewery. I worked in a notary’s office for three years, even hosted a radio show at one point and wrote advertising copy.” The only constant: his music. He taught himself to play the guitar and he writes his own songs.
“As Anoki, I work through a lot of things that have been on my mind for a long time. My own history, where I come from. But also questions about what the future can look like despite all the gloomy forecasts,” says Florian Griessmann. “For me, music is not just entertainment, but has the ambition to discuss things that are important to me.”
