Day 305: Loveparade

At nine in the morning, we set off for Berlin to take part in one of the largest outdoor mega-parties in the world: the Love Parade. On TV, you always see lots of young people dancing and pretty girls topless, standing on any traffic light on the street. This image is completely false. In reality, the Love Parade is the largest gathering of crazies, geeks, and weirdos from Germany and Europe, so much so that the ratio is about 1 normal person for every 6.93 lunatics. All these lunatics are following the world’s best DJs, who play their music from disco trucks moving up and down the Straße des 17. Juni, between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, right in the middle of Tiergarten. Then, at the end of the party, these trucks gather near the Siegessäule (the aforementioned Victory Column), and all their speakers are used to amplify the music of a single DJ playing from a stage with lights set up next to the column.

The party itself isn’t bad; it’s fun to see so many crazy people, and the music is good—you just have to get into it a bit. Our problem was that we spent half the day trying to find the rest of the people from Dresden we had lost right after arriving, and with so many people and no mobile signal, it was practically impossible. We didn’t find them until eight in the evening. A bit late, because our return train left at 9:30. But we made the most of that little time to have fun.

The Love Parade perfectly sums up the contradictions of 21st-century Germany: youngsters with piercings and outrageous hair colors dance among statues honoring German soldiers and civilians who died in World War II, and they have street drinking parties next to the statue of Otto von Bismarck. In the crowd, you can find both a guy wearing clothes worth more than 3,000 euros and an elderly woman collecting beer cans to get ten cents for each. A crowd shouting against racism and xenophobia, and a handful of lunatics attacking a Black person.

All of this is the Love Parade, all of this is Germany.