Love Parade

Eras

• Kurfürstendamm, The first years, when it fitted on one street. Dr. Motte's 1989 demonstration with 150 people and one van, registered as a political protest so the city had to allow it, and the Ku'damm parades that grew to tens of thousands before Berlin ran out of room for them.
• Siegessäule, The Tiergarten years, when it became the biggest thing in Berlin. The Straße des 17. Juni closed end to end, the Victory Column at the centre of it, and crowds counted in the high hundreds of thousands under the trees.
• Anthems, One record a year, and the motto it carried. From 1989's founding slogan through 'One World One Future', 'Music Is the Key' and 'Access Peace', the official hymns, the mottos printed on the plates, and the argument each year about what the parade was actually for.
• Ravers, The people who came. Costumes and body paint and whistles, the crowd photography year after year, dancing on lamp posts, and a million strangers in one street behaving remarkably well.
• DJ Sets, Who was playing. Westbam, Dr. Motte, Marusha, Sven Väth, Carl Cox, Paul van Dyk, Tiësto, Richie Hawtin and Moby, the sets recorded from the floats and the stages between 1991 and 2010.
• DJ Interviews, DJs and organisers talking about it afterwards. The Instant Moments and Instant Rave series, FundRaving, and the people who built the parade describing what it was like from inside.
• TV Broadcasts, How the rest of Germany watched. VIVA and MTV, ARD, MDR and WDR, the Offener Kanal Berlin feeds, and the live coverage that turned a street party into a national television event.
• Compilations, The records that sold the parade. Official yearly compilations and various-artist releases from 1992 onward, the mix CDs, and the sleeve art that fixed each year's motto in print.
• Essen, 2007, the first parade after Berlin. The move to the Ruhr, a route through a city built on coal and steel, and the question of whether it could work anywhere else.
• Dortmund, 2008, 'Highway to Love'. A parade on a closed stretch of the B1, well over a million people, and the year the Ruhr experiment looked like it had succeeded.
• Duisburg, 24 July 2010. The only route in and out ran through a tunnel and up a ramp; 21 people were crushed to death and more than 500 injured. The emergency response, the memorial and the 38 plates, the ten-year legal process that ended in 2020 without a verdict against most of the accused, and the documentaries that reconstructed how it happened. The Love Parade never took place again.
• Rave the Planet, The successor, from 2022. Dr. Motte back at the front, a new parade through Berlin, the campaign that got Berlin techno onto UNESCO's intangible heritage list, and the aftermovies and float crews of the years since.
• Documentaries, The parade looked at from outside. Feature documentaries, retrospectives, the UNESCO heritage films and the BEATS & BEYOND talks, the record of what it was and what people decided it meant.