On 24 July 2010, a crowd crush at the Love Parade in Duisburg caused the deaths of 21 people, with at least 500 others injured.[2] As a consequence, the organizer of the festival announced that no further Love Parades would be held and that the festival was permanently canceled.[3][4][5]
History
Lovers on the Love Parade, 1999
The parade first occurred in July 1989, when 150 people took to the streets in Berlin.[1] It was started by the Berlin underground at the initiative of Matthias Roeingh (also known as "Dr Motte") and Danielle de Picciotto, who were partners at the time.[1] It was conceived as a political demonstration for peace and international understanding through love and music.[1] It was supposed to be a bigger birthday party for Roeingh, and the motto Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen (in English— Peace, Joy, Pancakes) stood for disarmament (peace), music (joy) and a fair food production/distribution (pancakes). Roeingh dissociated himself from the parade in 2006 because of the commercialization of the event.
The parade was held on the Berlin Kurfürstendamm until 1996. Because of overcrowding on this street, the festival moved to the Straße des 17. Juni in the Großer Tiergarten park in the center of Berlin. The festival became centered around the Siegessäule in the middle of the park; and the golden angel atop the column became the parade's emblem.
Many people from Germany and abroad traveled to Berlin to take part in the Parade— over a million attended in the years 1997 through 2000 and 800,000 in 2001. Attendance at the 2001 festival was significantly lower because the date of the parade was changed with little advance notice. 2002 and 2003 also saw lower figures, and in 2004 and 2005 the parade was canceled because of funding difficulties. The parade had inspired opposition because of the damage to the Tiergarten by attendees, who were provided with insufficient toilet facilities. Opponents allegedly complicated matters for organisers by booking their own events in Berlin and so to exclude the parade from being able to register with city police. In 2004, however, a scaled-down version took place which served more as a mini-protest and was promoted with the title Love Weekend. Dozens of clubs promoted the weekend-long event all over the city, with various clubs staying open for three days straight without closing. In 2006, the parade made a comeback with the help of German exercise studio McFit.
The Love Parade 2007 was planned for 7 July 2007 in Berlin. However, the Berlin event was canceled in February because the Senate of Berlin did not issue the necessary permits at that time. After negotiations with several German cities, on 21 July, it was announced that the parade would move to the Ruhr Area for the next five years. The first event took place in Essen on 25 August. The parade in Essen saw 1.2 million visitors in comparison to the 500,000 who attended the 2006 parade in Berlin.
In 2008, the festival took place in Dortmund on 19 July on the Bundesstraße 1 under the motto Highway of Love. The event was planned as a "Love Weekend", with parties throughout the region. The official estimate is that 1.6 million visitors attended, making it the largest parade to date.[6]
The 2009 event, planned for Bochum, was canceled;[7] a year later, the deaths of 21 attendees at the Duisburg venue prompted the parade's organiser Rainer Schaller to declare an end to the festival. "The Love Parade has always been a peaceful party, but it will forever be overshadowed by the accident, so out of respect for the victims the Love Parade will never take place again," Schaller said.[8] The parade was one of the oldest and largest festivals of electronic music, together with Zürich's Streetparade, Mayday and Nature One.
On 9 July 2022, the Love Parade founder took part in the Rave the Planet Parade in Berlin to call for the city’s electronic music culture to be added to a World Heritage list.[9]
Setup
The music played at the events was predominantly electronic dance music— in this case mainly house & techno, and schranz music. Attempts to introduce other music styles, such as hip hop, have failed. Hardcore and gabber music were part of the parade in early years, but were later removed. They are now celebrated separately on a counter-demonstration called "Fuckparade".
The parade was seen to be louder and more crowded than most concerts. With its water-cooled sound systems on every truck, the parade produced an extremely loud sound floor.[citation needed] After the 2001 arrangement, veterinarians at the Berlin Zoo blamed the parade for giving more than half of its animals diarrhea. Chairman Heiner Kloes said veterinarians told him the heavy bass was to blame for disturbing the animals.[10] The parade consisted of the sound trucks that usually featured local, or important, clubs and their DJs. It had become a rule that only trucks that had sponsors from a techno-related field, such as clubs, labels or stores, were allowed, but advertising space was increased after the 2006 event to offset the high costs of equipping a truck.[citation needed] The trucks were usually open on top and featured dancers, with box-systems mounted on the side or rear.
The parade was a place where some exhibited and enjoyed other people's exhibitionist tendencies.[1] Some attendees enjoyed carrying around toys or other items such as dummies (pacifiers) or face masks. Often the crowd was imaginative in terms of clothing (or lack thereof) and appearance.
One famous picture from the parade is people sitting and dancing on streetlamps, trees, commercial signs, telephone booths, which gave the event's nickname "the greatest amateur circus on earth".[citation needed]
The demonstration concluded with the so-called "Abschlusskundgebung" which were sets of the world's leading top DJs such as DJ Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Carl Cox, Armin Van Buuren, DJ Rush, DJ Hell, Westbam, Drum Connection, Miss Djax, Marusha or Chris Liebing. During this time all trucks (usually about 40) were connected to each other and set online to the statue of victory where the turntables are. This was one of the few chances a DJ can ever have to play for a crowd of about one million people.
Disturbances
The parade was quite peaceful for an event of its size, seeing few arrests. In 2008, for example, charges were pressed for six robberies, three sexually related offences and forty thefts. Twenty-three attendees were caught with drugs and forty-nine were charged with bodily harm. There were 177 parade visitors provisionally arrested by the police.[11] Arrests were usually related to drug crimes and most other incidents featured people passing out due to dehydration or hyperthermia. In 2000, after the parade, a girl under the influence of ecstasy was run over by an S-Bahn after she had been leaning on the door too hard.
At the 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg, the number of people attending allegedly reached 1.4 million – the original expectation was around 800,000 – whereas police believed around 400,000 people were present.[12] 21 people were killed, and more than 600 injured,[13] in an incident on an overcrowded ramp leading from a tunnel into the festival. All of the victims were crushed to death, according to officials.[14]
Safety experts and a fire service investigator had previously warned that the site was not suitable for the numbers expected to attend.[8]Rainer Schaller, the festival's organizer and chief executive officer, later said the festival would not continue in future.
A preliminary investigation of the ministry of the interior placed heavy blame on the organizers around Rainer Schaller. Schaller in turn claimed that errors by the police in controlling streams of visitors led to the accident.[15]
Similar festivals have taken place in other cities of Germany and many other countries worldwide. Large spin-off festivals in Europe include Zürich's Street Parade, Geneva's Lake Parade, Paris's Techno Parade, Rotterdam's FFWD Dance Parade, Munich's Union Move, Hamburg's Generation Move, Hannover's Reincarnation, Bremen's Vision Parade and the Love Parade and the Freeparade in Vienna. In 1994, 1995 and 1996 an event called Love Parade was held in Melbourne, Australia. Unlike its overseas counterparts, this was a smaller "rave party" version of the festival. In 1996 it was held at Festival Hall in West Melbourne and included a parade that made the evening news. It was followed in 1997 by a Love Parade in Sydney, Australia, likewise a smaller rave party, held at the infamous Graffiti Hall of Fame in Redfern. In 1999 and 2000 technoparades named "Buenos Aires Energy Parade" took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina under the motto "Love, Peace and Dance". On Saturday 8 July 2000 a Love Parade was held in Roundhay Park, Leeds, United Kingdom sponsored by BBC Radio 1. In 2001, the official UK parade had moved to Newcastle upon Tyne which was to have seen a parade through the streets of Newcastle before ending up on Town Moor but was canceled after the police refused a license: BBC Radio 1 still hosted a more contained event, however.[16] Since then no Love Parade has taken place in the United Kingdom. In Summer 2000 one of the first public events that took place in post-war Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was Futura, Festival of Electronic Music. Some of the world's most famous DJs, including the organizers of the Berlin Love Parade, performed in a bombed and burnt out factory.
LoveParade in Tel Aviv in October 2004
After being held in the North-American Continent for the first time in Mexico (2002), in the fall of 2004 the Love Parade was held in San Francisco. They had held their inaugural Parade in September 2004 with 37,000 attending. The parade was held again in San Francisco in September 2005 as a rousing success drawing over 50–60,000 people. In 2006, the parade was held on 23 September and was renamed Love Fest because the Loveparade Berlin organization did not renew any of their worldwide licenses not already under contract so they could focus on their own event. 2009 was the biggest success of the parade now renamed Lovevolution with over 100,000 people. The first Love Parade in Santiago was held in 2005 and gathered over 100,000 people; the 2006 version gathered over 200,000 people. The first Love Parade in Caracas was held in June 2007 and gathered over 25,000 people.
Spin-off festivals of the Love Parade have taken place in:
Under German law the state has to pay for security during political demonstrations as well as cleaning up the streets after the demonstration.[1] In the case of a commercial event however, the organizer must cover these expenses. For a large event like the Love Parade the costs are quite high: an estimated €300,000 to €400,000.[1]
The Love Parade was initially held as a political demonstration to save costs; however it was organized by two companies set up just for the Love Parade.[1] Due to this there was a dispute between the organizers and the city of Berlin every year about the status of the Love Parade and who should bear what costs.[1] Finally in 2001, the courts ruled that the Love Parade had to be held as commercial event.[18]
According to media reports, the attendance figures had been misstated by the organizers for years.[22][23] Accurate counts are not available since entry is free and uncontrolled. The mayor of Dortmund and the police confirmed the number of attendees in Dortmund.[24][25][26]
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that emerged from EBM in Frankfurt, Germany, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and quickly spread throughout Europe.
A rave is a dance party at a warehouse, club, or other public or private venue, typically featuring performances by DJs playing electronic dance music. The style is most associated with the early 1990s dance music scene when DJs played at illegal events in musical styles dominated by electronic dance music from a wide range of sub-genres, including drum and bass, dubstep, trap, break, happy hardcore, trance, techno, hardcore, house, and alternative dance. Occasionally live musicians have been known to perform at raves, in addition to other types of performance artists such as go-go dancers and fire dancers. The music is amplified with a large, powerful sound reinforcement system, typically with large subwoofers to produce a deep bass sound. The music is often accompanied by laser light shows, projected coloured images, visual effects and fog machines.
Duisburg is a city in the Ruhr metropolitan area of the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Lying on the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers in the center of the Rhine-Ruhr Region, Duisburg is the 5th largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the 15th-largest city in Germany.
Maximilian Lenz, known by his stage name WestBam, is a German DJ and musician. He is the co-founder of the record label Low Spirit.
Christopher Street Day (CSD) is an annual European LGBTQ+ celebration and demonstration held in various cities across Europe for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, and against discrimination and exclusion. It is Germany's and Switzerland's counterpart to Gay Pride or Pride Parades. Austria calls their Pride Parade Rainbow Parade. The most prominent CSD events are Berlin Pride, CSD Hamburg, CSD Cologne, Germany and Zürich in Switzerland.
A technoparade is a parade of vehicles equipped with strong loudspeakers and amplifiers playing electronic dance music. It resembles a carnival parade in some respects, but the vehicles are usually less elaborately decorated. Unlike some carnival parades, a technoparade does not share the tradition of bombarding the spectators with sweets. However, the revellers do occasionally throw confetti and spray foam from the vehicles onto the crowd.
The Street Parade is with over 1 Million visitors the most attended technoparade in the world, since the end of Love Parade 2010. It takes place in Zürich, Switzerland and is the largest annual event in Zürich. Officially a demonstration for freedom, love and tolerance attended by up to one million people, it proceeds along the side of Lake Zurich on the second Saturday of August.
The Fuckparade is an annual summer technoparade in Berlin. The event began in 1997 as a demonstration against the increasing commercialisation of culture and public life and the misuse of the right of assembly by purely commercial ventures, in particular the Love Parade. The event has had problems with the authorities since 2001, but in 2007 the Federal Administrative Court of Germany decided that it met the definition of a demonstration.
I Love Techno is an international techno music event that takes place in Montpellier, France. National and international DJs perform every year at this event. Associated with the event is a set of music prizes known as the Elektropedia Awards, which are given for excellence in various categories related to techno and the broader electronic dance music genre.
German electronic music is a broad musical genre encompassing specific styles such as Electroclash, trance, krautrock and schranz. It is widely considered to have emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming increasingly popular in subsequent decades. Originally minimalistic style of electronic music developed into psychedelic and prog rock aspects, techno and electronic dance music. Notable artists include Kraftwerk, Can, Tangerine Dream and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. German electronic music contributed to a global transition of electronic music from underground art to an international phenomenon, with festivals such as Love Parade, Winterworld and MayDay gaining prominence alongside raves and clubs.
The Folkwang University of the Arts is a university for music, theater, dance, design, and academic studies, located in four German cities of North Rhine-Westphalia. Since 1927, its traditional main location has been in the former Werden Abbey in Essen in the Ruhr area, with additional facilities in Duisburg, Bochum, and Dortmund, and, since 2010, at the Zeche Zollverein, a World Heritage Site also in Essen. The Folkwang University is home to the international dance company Folkwang Tanz Studio (FTS). Founded as Folkwangschule, its name was Folkwang Hochschule from 1963 until 2009.
LovEvolution was a technoparade and festival that occurred annually in the Bay Area in late September and early October. From its inception in 2004 to 2009, the parade included 25 floats and started at San Francisco's 2nd and Market Streets. The parade continued all the way to San Francisco Civic Center Plaza. The 2009 parade drew over 100,000 people.
On 24 July 2010, a crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade electronic dance music festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, caused the deaths of 21 people from suffocation as attendees sought to escape a ramp leading to the festival area. 652 people were injured.
The actual boundaries of the Ruhr vary slightly depending on the source, but a good working definition is to define the Lippe and Ruhr as its northern and southern boundaries respectively, the Rhine as its western boundary, and the town of Hamm as the eastern limit.
Rainer Schaller was a German entrepreneur. He was the Founder CEO of the RSG Group, which includes the McFit, John Reed Fitness and Gold's Gym fitness studios. He hit headlines as a result of the disaster at the 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg, which he organized. On 21 October 2022, Schaller and his son Aaron died in a private plane crash in Costa Rica.
Fabian Lenz is a German DJ, Techno musician and events producer, who was also known before under the moniker DJ Dick.
Ruhr in Love or Ruhr-in-Love is an annual family festival of the electronic music scene in Oberhausen, Germany, where it has been held since June 2003. It is a one-day open-air festival at which more than 35 "colourful and imaginatively designed floors" are presented by clubs, event organisers, record labels, booking agencies, radio stations, magazines etc. The focal point is the Mixery-Stage featuring international headliners.
Union Move was a technoparade that occurred annually in Munich from 1995 to 2001. It was an initiative by Munich event organizers and nightclub owners to demonstrate against the Munich curfew and excessive police controls. A recurring motto of the parade was "Music is the only drug!". The first Union Move took place on 27 May 1995 and attracted 60,000 people. The 1996 parade for the first time attracted 100,000 people, as well as the 1997 parade which involved 16 trucks equipped with sound systems. The next three parades attracted between 60,000 and 70,000 people, but in 2001 attendance declined. The parade usually started at Münchner Freiheit square and continued over Leopoldstraße all the way to Odeonsplatz, and in the first years even further over Isartor to Marienplatz where the final took place. After the final ravers could board a Housetram and this way continue partying through the city. At night the festival was continued at multiple after-parties in the local nightclubs under the motto Night Move. In 2015 an initiative was launched to revive the parade. So far, however, these attempts have not been successful.
The Sea You Festival is a techno music festival that has taken place at Tunisee in Freiburg im Breisgau since 2002.
KW – Das Heizkraftwerk was a nightclub in Munich, Germany from 1996 to 2003. The techno club belonged, besides the Tresor and E-Werk in Berlin, the Dorian Gray and Omen in Frankfurt, and the Munich-based clubs Ultraschall, Natraj Temple and Millennium, to the most renowned clubs of Germany's 1990s techno culture.
References
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 John Borneman & Stefan Senders, "Politics without a Head: Is the "Love Parade" a New Form of Political Identification?" Cultural Anthropology J5(2) 294-31, American Anthropological Association. 2000
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