Germany: A tragedy ends the Love Parade

The biggest annual techno-music festival in the world has come to a gruesome end, said Alfons Kaiser in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Twenty people were crushed to death and more than 500 injured this week when panic broke out at the Love Parade festival in Duisberg. The stampede occurred in a tunnel that was the only entrance to the abandoned railway yard that served as the venue. “Everyone was screaming in panic,” said Hanna Simon, 22, who was injured in the melee. “I was lying on dead people. There were dead people beneath us with blue lips and blue eyes. I won’t be able to forget these faces for the rest of my life.” Duisberg officials are calling the stampede a tragic accident. But this was not just a tragedy; it was “a scandal.” The deaths were entirely avoidable.

How could Duisberg officials have been so criminally stupid? said Martin Oehlen in the Berliner Zeitung. “It is incomprehensible to have just one entrance for such a mass event.” The Love Parade routinely draws more than a million people. Until 2006, it was held in Berlin, but starting in 2007 other cities began hosting the giant rave. Last year, the party was supposed to be held in Bochum, but that city “wisely” canceled after determining it didn’t have the infrastructure. Duisberg, by contrast, was blinded by greed and the lust for tourism dollars. Some reports said the mayor’s office ignored warnings by police and firefighters that the railway venue could only hold 250,000. If that’s true, “this scandal will only escalate.”

Let’s not rush to judgment, said Michael Miersch in Die Welt. Whenever such a tragedy strikes, rumors and speculation spread faster than facts, and we need to see what investigators turn up. But there’s no denying that Duisberg authorities will have to face many “uncomfortable questions.” Would better organization and more careful preparation have prevented the tragic loss of life? Perhaps. The only thing that’s clear already is that the Love Parade has been irrevocably tainted. The organizers’ decision to never hold a Love Parade again “is the only right one.”

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The canceling of the Love Parade was overdue, said Julian Weber in Die Tageszeitung. Ever since it left Berlin, the festival has become “a perversion of the original philosophy of rave culture.” The event began in 1989 as a free parade through Berlin. It was “a long weekend that was split between countless clubs and a street parade in a spacious area in Berlin’s central Tiergarten park.” Yes, it was understood that Ecstasy would be consumed in abundance—and revelers under the influence need plenty of “space, time, and freedom.” In Duisberg, though, the Love Parade “took place on one day, and in a fenced-off, limited area.” That’s not a rave; it’s a recipe for disaster.