Unscene Berlin

A combination of the pandemic and policing efforts have left Alexanderplatz looking like a still from the 1960's: empty, windswept. Aimless people, seemingly fresh-awakened to the endless possibilities of city life, are moving with uncertain freedom to the Reclaim Club Culture sound system. I had to bypass what looked to be a " hygiene demo " to get to this antiracist action by RCC, in support of freedom of movement. The hygiene demo was a messy scene, full of aggressive, drunk people trying way  too hard to look like they were having fun.  One can see the different intentions behind the two actions in the way that each group uses its allocated demo space. The hygiene crew use it to scream at passers by to take off their masks and invade their personal space, walking or dancing uncomfortably close. As if they blame you for whatever is going wrong with society. Under the auspices of freedom, they move into the power vacuum of an empty city street, and attempt ...

"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...