You don’t need to know German to appreciate this clip. It happened on the WDR program “Ende Offen” on December 3, 1971, during a discussion about commerce and music.

The one doing most of the talking, the one who pulls out a hatchet and starts banging on the table, is Nikel Pallat, manager of a politically oriented West Berlin band called Ton Steine Scherben. The other guy is named Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, an influential producer who co-founded Ohr Records and later would run a label called Pilz.

Pallat was pissed off that Kaiser had signed a deal with BASF that would give Ohr Records wider distribution—Kaiser might have been a sellout, but as it happens, Ohr released a ton of great music by Witthüser & Westrupp, Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, and many others.

In this melee, Pallat shouts, “You are working for the oppressors, not against the oppressors.” (“That’s your opinion,” goes Kaiser’s bland retort.) Then Pallat cries, “You have to work against the oppressors, you have to stay partisan, so that’s why I’m going to destroy this table here”—and proceeds to do just that.

Funnily enough, the table is made of sturdier stuff than Pallat was expecting, and hardly seems much different after a dozen or so blows; with his initial burst of rage now spent, Pallat starts unscrewing the microphones and stuffing them into his pockets so that he can give them to “youths in prisons.” Priceless.
 

 
Many thanks to Corinna Berghahn of the Osnabrücker Zeitung, whose 2011 article on this fracas was very helpful.