Unscene Berlin

"Peace, joy and pancakes!"     ... was the deliriously random tagline for the Berlin Love Parade, back when it started in 1989.  The Love Parade was founded in 1989 to celebrate DJ Dr. Motte 's birthday.  It was originally billed as a protest and had an ambitiously broad range of demands: global disarmament, unity through music and an end to food poverty.  The solution offered to all these problems was simple enough: bring people together to dance, hug and share. Tomorrow, the Zug der Liebe demo & street party will be doing something a bit similar, but it has made some necessary updates to the template that its predecessors created.  At the time when the first Love Parade happened, its organizers had a glaring example of division, corruption and repression sitting right on the doorstep in the form of the German Democratic Republic, lurking darkly behind its Wall.  After people started streaming through that wall that had been controlled by t...

The 25th anniversary of the 'Mauerfall' (fall of the Berlin Wall) last Sunday was in some ways similar to the original fall of the wall.  Throngs of people gathered at the old checkpoints, and all along the path of the old political barrier between east and west. It was cold and everyone was tense. But instead of release from the GDR, they were waiting for the release of a  f*** ton of glowing balloons that lined the Wall perimeter.  The release had been meant to happen at 7 p.m. sharp. It was meant to be one of those magical, cathartic moments where everyone would tear up as they looked into the night skies and watched the balloons (which symbolised bricks, apparently) drift away on clouds of helium, dissolving like the Wall itself was meant to do. But as was usual for any Fall in Berlin, it was drizzly, dark, foggy, and people were lucky if they could see from one side of the Spree to the other.   The tourists throngs seemed  enrapt by the displa...

My friend Katja and I were some of the first people to arrive at Kater Holzig for the reading of " Berlin, Techno und die Wende ", an 'oral' history book about Berlin's rave scene. Katja was kicking herself when she saw how empty the venue was on our arrival. "I am such an ossi ," she cried. "I was so worried there would be lots and lots of people here and I hate being crowded - but it's dead! I'm so sorry." Her fastidiousness had paid off for us though because, by quarter past nine, people were standing from one end of the room to the other. Meanwhile, we were sittin' pretty in some of the second-best seats in the house: just behind the row of sofas at front that had been reserved for the really honoured guests (I thought of our row as being the L.I.P. - Less Important Person - section). After teaching Katja the time-honoured English tradition of blagging cheap drinks we settled back into our seats with a couple of under-pri...