For those who enjoy writing about historical events, 1989 is a year that has left gallons of ink spilled across history books. A year of collapses, where the democracy we know today was spreading across the world—or at least a good part of it. Europe witnessed the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War. Africa could already smell the end of South African apartheid, and South America was slowly returning to democracy after decades of bloody dictatorships.
But well, this isn’t a university history essay or a National Geographic documentary, no matter how much I’d love to keep adding fun facts about 1989—like the release of Madonna’s Like a Prayer, which I promise will be my last example before I bore you.
This time, we’re going to talk about something that directly concerns us at PEACHZ, because it’s hard to imagine what electronic music and its culture would be today without the Love Parade.
“Peace, Joy, and Pancakes” was the first slogan of the very first Love Parade. A rather innocent phrase if we compare it to the massive impact that initial spark had in July 1989 on underground culture. Surely, none of the approximately 150 people who gathered on Kurfürstendamm—or even the organizers—could have foreseen the seed that was planted that day in what was then the fertile ground of Berlin for electronic music. Just ten years later, that handful of people dancing to Acid House on the West Berlin boulevard would turn into a crowd of about 1.5 million on the Straße des 17. Juni. But the road was long, the obstacles endless, the criticism constant, and the organizers encountered the worst enemy of any event planner in Berlin: German bureaucracy.
The political and social context of the country changed drastically between its first edition and those that followed. After the fall of the Wall, the Love Parade’s message of unity and peace made even more sense. That small group of people in the streets during the first event grew to over 2,000 by 1990, dancing and celebrating under the motto “The Future is Ours.”
Berlin became a fertile ground for club culture. Overnight—after the Wall came down—the city was filled with countless empty spaces, and combined with the lack of government regulation at the time, it created endless opportunities for raves and club development.
The Love Parade was growing in popularity and attendance but also in the obstacles blocking its path. Tensions between the organizers and the Berlin government grew stronger, reaching a turning point in 1994 when the event was initially rejected by authorities under the pretext that it lacked a clear political message. However, the real concerns were related to waste management, police presence, and the demand for a larger space to ensure safety.
Despite these challenges, the 1994 edition was ultimately authorized under the legal framework of demonstrations and public gatherings. This was a lesson learned for those who later brought us what we now know as Rave The Planet, as in the following year, they officially organized as an association. Since 1995, Love Parade GmbH has owned the trademark rights, with partners including Juergen Laarmann, William Röttger, Matthias Roeingh, Sandra Mollzahn, and Ralf Regitz.
As a registered brand, Love Parade set its sights on securing financial backing. The snowball that started rolling in 1989 was gaining more momentum and size each year, making financial injections a necessary step. Sponsorships, media partnerships, and merchandising began appearing from 1995 onward, inevitably drawing criticism for the event’s commercialization.
The following years saw increasing challenges, but also a surge in attendance and popularity. By September 1996, Roeingh was already taking steps for the next edition, with a much more ambitious goal: moving the event to the Straße des 17. Juni. For those unfamiliar with Berlin, this is where the city’s most photogenic landmarks are located, including the Tiergarten, Siegessäule, and Brandenburg Gate—places you’ll see in most archival footage of Rave the Planet.As expected, not all Berlin authorities welcomed the change of route. While the mayor was open to it, the biggest opposition came from those responsible for maintaining the Tiergarten, citing potential ecological damage. However, the organizers won this battle since, for safety reasons, the park was deemed the only viable location to accommodate the massive crowds.
Not even last-minute threats from far-right groups could stop the Love Parade in 1997. This was the year the event truly echoed around the world, solidifying Berlin as the definitive capital of electronic music and its culture. It was also the first time the event exceeded one million attendees.
This is where criticism intensified. As a reference, Tiergarten is about the same size as Central Park in New York. If cleaning up after your birthday party is tough, imagine cleaning a park of that magnitude after over a million people partied all day. Essentially, Tiergarten turned into something resembling a Berghain bathroom: people consuming drugs, having sex, and using the area as a landfill due to unauthorized beverage sales. Despite all this, Berlin’s Interior Minister defended the location for safety reasons, and the organizers agreed to cover the cleanup costs—another hurdle overcome by Roeingh and company.
The new millennium brought what was by far the most complicated and controversial phase of what we now know as Rave the Planet. Sanitation and cleanliness issues grew alongside the event, but they became secondary when the magazine Raveline, through editor Cengiz Celik, declared war on the Love Parade organizers. They were accused of being completely disconnected from the Berlin scene, with little involvement in selecting vehicles and DJs for the parade, and of excessive commercialization of the event.
Attendance dropped from 1.5 million to 1.3 million between 1999 and 2000. However, the biggest blow came when Love Parade lost its status as a political demonstration in the early 2000s. This meant the government no longer held responsibility for security and cleanup, leaving the burden on the organizers. The additional €400,000 cost ultimately led to the cancellation of future editions after 2004.
The criticisms of excessive commercialization and the loss of a political focus seemed to be unforgivable to a rave audience that prided itself— or perhaps at that point, already prided itself— on being an anti-cultural movement. The purists and diehard fans gradually distanced themselves from the event, even within the ranks of the organizers, as was the case with Dr. Motte. The tension became so intense that it was even capitalized upon with a counter-festival, the Fuck Parade, founded in 1997 but gaining momentum at the start of the new millennium.
With the departure of Dr. Motte, Love Parade became even more entrenched in commercial criticisms, finding an ally in Rainer Schaller, the fitness mogul and owner of the McFit gym chain. With Schaller’s capital injection, Love Parade returned in 2006 under the slogan “Love is Back!” A love that wasn’t so well received by Matthias Roeignh (Dr. Motte), who wasted no time calling for a boycott of the event’s return: “Mr. Schaller is a businessman, he doesn’t know what the Love Parade is. It is about healing society through music and nonverbal communication. Not a marketing parade.”
Despite all the criticism, Love Parade 2006 was a success, drawing half a million people to the streets once again. However, the good news didn’t last long, as it was the last year for the event in the German capital. The Berlin Senate failed to issue the necessary permits in time for future editions. As a result, the organizers decided to expand to cities like Dortmund and Essen, where they held quite successful versions.
Then came 2010, marking the darkest chapter of the Love Parade. The organizers chose Duisburg, a city recently named European Capital of Culture, to host the event. For the first time, the parade was held in a confined space, and it ended in tragedy when a crowd tried to enter uncontrollably through a tunnel, which was the only available access. The chaos turned into panic, and panic into a human stampede, resulting in 21 deaths and around 650 injuries.
Naturally, everyone began searching for those responsible on the other side of the fence. Security experts had reportedly warned the organizers about the danger of the only access point to the event. The organizers blamed the police for the poor management of crowd control, while the authorities pointed to the organizers as the culprits. However, seven years later, the organization and staff of the Duisburg city council were taken to trial, with the case being suspended in 2020 without any convictions.
Whether guilty or not, this incident ultimately buried an event that began in 1989 with purely peaceful intentions. “The Love Parade has always been a peaceful party, but it will forever be overshadowed by the accident. Out of respect for the victims, the Love Parade will never take place again,” stated the organizers after the tragedy.
It was 2019, and the German capital was celebrating an anniversary. I promised not to turn this text into a history essay, so to keep it short, 30 years since the Fall of the Wall, dissatisfaction and protests, total crisis in the GDR, and also the 30th anniversary of the first Love Parade. To commemorate perhaps the most significant year since a certain Red Army visited Berlin, the multimedia exhibition Nineties Berlin was displayed throughout the German capital, with a special gallery dedicated to the anniversary of the parade.
Thanks to the exhibition, Dr. Motte met with the Nineties Berlin team with the ambition to resurrect the Love Parade and the intention to learn from the mistakes of the past. Thus, the idea of Rave the Planet was born, bringing a bit of that healthy nostalgia to a post-pandemic world that was aching to go out and dance. While the idea was for 2021, it had to be postponed to the following year.
On July 9, 2022, Rave the Planet officially kicked off, with the commitment to bring back the spirit of the Love Parade but maintaining a “non-commercial ethic, supporting sustainability, and promoting inclusion and diversity within the electronic music community.” Moreover, with the tangible goal of having UNESCO recognize electronic music as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. A brilliant move, considering it restored the status of a political manifestation.
A year has passed since electronic music was officially added to the UNESCO list, and the truth is that the Berlin scene is somewhat more desolate than that. But there will be time to delve deeper into the current situation in (one of) the capital(s) of Techno. Today, we simply want to honor one of the cornerstones of global electronic culture materialised in Love Parade and shaped in its new form as Rave the Planet.
