MORNING STAR regulars Attila the Stockbroker and Calum Baird entertained the crowds at the Unsere Zeit press festival in Berlin over the weekend.

The pair performed joint and solo sets featuring their own compositions as well as revolutionary classics like Comandante Che Guevara as part of the festival’s varied musical scene.

The Pressefest moved from its usual location in Dortmund, as the park in which it usually takes place has been set aside for emergency accommodation for refugees from the Ukraine war.

Instead it took over Berlin’s Rosa Luxemburg Platz, adjoining the headquarters of Die Linke in Karl Liebknecht House, where the original Communist Party of Germany was headquartered in the 1920s and early 1930s before its suppression by Hitler, and the offices of the Morning Star’s sister paper Junge Welt.

Large tents hosted rallies against imperialism, in solidarity with Cuba and on government policies that were impoverishing Germany’s workers, while dozens of stalls, including one for the Morning Star organised by Leipzig-based supporter Keith Barlow, lined the streets.

At a briefing for foreign guests Unsere Zeit editor Wera Richter said her paper’s view was that peace was the most important campaigning area of all.

German workers were losing out as a self-inflicted energy crisis exacerbated by Western sanctions was threatening the country with recession, she warned, but German unions were being urged to make sacrifices for the sake of the war effort.

Unsere Zeit international editor Melina Deymann said the German left could take inspiration from the wave of militancy among British trade unions.

“In Britain there is movement,” she told the Morning Star, praising the national postal and railway strikes. “In Germany we have nothing like this.”