‘Love Parade’ techno party returns to Berlin five years after deaths

Five years after a stampede killed 21 and ended the Love Parade, the techno party returns to Berlin today under a more modest guise and a new name. Zug der Liebe (Love Demo) gets under way this morning in eastern Berlin, a day after the western German city of Duisburg held a memorial for the victims of the 2010 tragedy.

Not everyone is happy to see the party's return. The mother of all techno festivals began in 1989 as a birthday party for a German DJ with the stage name Dr Motte. His musical march attracted 150 ravers down West Berlin's Kurfürstendamm boulevard, to the uncomprehending stares of passersby. It grew exponentially with the 1990s rise of techno, and at its peak, in 1999, 1.5 million people descended on Berlin for what had become the world's biggest street party.

Political demonstration

Despite its growing commercialisation, organisers insisted it was a political demonstration, in part to avoid clean-up costs. Eventually Berlin city fathers stopped believing them, stripped the event of its political status and handed organisers the sizeable bill for staging the event and cleaning up the rubbish and the trampled

Tiergarten

park.

When the organisers filed for bankruptcy, the owner of a discount fitness studio chain bought the rights and took the parade west to the city of Duisburg, announcing a new Love Parade concept in an abandoned freight station.

Disaster struck on July 24th, 2010, when panic spread among crowds squeezing into the parade grounds via a narrow, 240m tunnel. Some 21 people were crushed to death; 500 were seriously injured.

Lisa Brotbeck, who was in the tunnel, recalls the day as a mix of thumping techno and hysterical screams. "It was supposed to be a party of love and joy, but it felt like a horror film," she told German television. "I was one of the lucky ones to get out. But I still hear the screams."

Gaps

A subsequent investigation examined 44,000 pages of documents and found serious gaps in the event’s crowd-management plan, as well as belated intervention by police to limit site access. The local mayor was forced from office but, five years on, no one has faced criminal charges. The first civil suit will come to court in September, with victims’ families demanding compensation from the city; 18 other civil cases are pending.

For Dr Motte, the Love Parade founder who departed the party in 2006, the lack of progress with criminal cases is “the second tragedy” of Duisburg. He has nothing to do with the Zug der Liebe parade in Berlin today.

Its organiser, Jens Schwan, agrees the shadow of Duisburg hangs heavy over his event. With 27,000 people registered on Facebook to attend, Mr Schwan insists his Zug der Liebe is not the Love Parade and never will be. It is, he says, a "techno festival for charity and tolerance".

The route through the city was cleared with Berlin authorities and contains no bottlenecks or other crowd risks, he said. He also wrote to families of the Duisburg victims on behalf of his 25-strong organisation team.

“Some of us are parents and we can only imagine the pain this catastrophe brought into your lives,” he wrote. “We are distancing ourselves entirely from the commercial madness that led to the catastrophe.”