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Prologue:
Berlin 2000
Gerald:
“You think people should just do as they
like.”
Rupert: “I think they always do. But I
should like
them to like the purely individual thing in
themselves, which makes them act in singleness.
And they only like to do the collective thing.”
--D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Imagine
half a million whistles blowing in brain-piercing,
unsyncopated rhythm to the fillibrating beat of
hardcore techno music. Although to call “techno”
music is an insult not only to music but to technology
as well. The whistles, the thumps, the beats,
the scratches, the pops, static and samples add
up to an assault on the ears not unlike the banshee
wail demons make while roasting on the spits of
hell. But here on planet Earth it’s all in
the name of Love and Peace. Welcome to One World,
One Love Parade.
 The
Love Parade is held each year in July in the city-in-progress
called Berlin. First held in 1989 on the Ku’damm
with around 20,000 spectators, the Millennium
Edition in the Tiergarten—-under the motto
“One World, One Love Parade”—-had
around 1,000,000 doing the collective thing. Or
1,000,001 if you count a certain American expatriate
with delusions of the literary cult of individuality
dancing in his head like sugar plum fairies.
The Love Parade is the offspring of Dr. Motte,
a DJ who originally wanted to stage a demonstration
of “tolerance, respect and understanding
between nations” incorporating music instead
of speeches. The “techno community”
converges at the Siegessäule on Strasse des
17 Juni in the center of the Tiergarten and drinks,
dances, drugs, urinates and fornicates the time
away while huge “Love Trucks” slowly
force their way through the crowd, towing dancing
fools and DJs blasting their techno creations
to the heavens. This demonstration has morphed
into a full-fledged cartoon fashion extravaganza,
the whole spectacle shown on German, Austrian
and Swiss TV, adding further incentive for outrageous
attire and foolish acts of behavior, all in the
name of those famous fifteen.
Part Mardi Gras, part Fiesta of San Fermin, part
Gay Pride parade, part European summer festival,
and part Fascist rally, the Love Parade is laboratory
proof of Friedrich Nietzsche´s concept of
the herd. Although demonstration, not festival,
is the correct term, since the city of Berlin
will pick up the cost of cleaning up after a demonstration,
but not a festival. Clever guy, that Dr. Motte.
 Systems.
Order, control and conformity will always take
precedence over chaos, spontaneity and individuality,
because of the human desire for safety and security.
Most people only desire freedom from the risks
and hazards of an unpredictable and, ultimately,
uncontrollable world; through this freedom-that-is-not-freedom
they feel in control of a predictable life, as
if the future is ever predictable. But most of
all they desire freedom from desire.
Why?
Perhaps Philip Roth explained it best in his novel,
The Counterlife. Desire is “the intolerable
disorder of virile pursuits and the indignities
of secrecy and betrayal, the enlivening anarchy
that overtakes anyone who even sparingly abandons
himself to uncensored desire.”
The
enlivening anarchy that most of us perceive as
a threat to our hard-won illusion of safety and
control, an illusion provided by governments,
corporations, religious institutions, family and
spouses. We have a natural disposition to follow
the herd, to be and act like everyone else, to
avoid the crazy anarchy that paradoxically can
enliven our lives. Then again, most of Roth’s
characters, from Alex Portnoy to Peter Tarnopol,
from Nathan Zuckerman to Coleman Silk, suffer
mainly misery and humiliation because of their
devotion to desire.
But
in the world outside of novels, no place in Western
culture is this disposition toward safety and
security, toward Gemütlichkeit and the avoidance
of Weltschmertz, on display more prominently than
in post-millennial Deutschland.
It
is supremely ironic that Friedrich Nietzsche,
the greatest of German philosophers, the warrior
against idealism, the poet of free spirits, the
prophet of individuality, the precursor of the
modern, desiring self, should have come from a
country so defined by mass movements and group
behavior. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declared himself
“de-Germanized,” the descendant of Polish
nobles and not of what he often called the idiotic
oxen of German culture.
He
thought of Germany as the shallows of Europe,
a country filled with muddleheaded misfits, cabbage-heads
and anti-Semites. He definitely did not consider
himself one of those:
My formula is well-known, “to be a good German
means to de-Germanize oneself;” or he is—-no
small distinction among Germans—-of Jewish
descent. Jews among Germans are always the higher
race—-more refined, spiritual, kind.
 So
much for Nietzsche as the father of German anti-Semitism.
He
also considered the heavy German diet and weather
to be sufficient enough “to turn a genius
into something mediocre, something ‘German.’”
For this free spirit, who had nothing but contempt
for the German character, “genius depends
on dry air, on clear skies”—-and on
Italian food.
Nietzsche
offered hard truths to the German people:
My
patience is exhausted and I feel the itch, I even
consider it a duty, to tell the Germans for once
how many things they have on their conscience
by now. All great crimes against culture for four
centuries they have on their conscience—and
the reason is always the same: their innermost
cowardice before reality, which is also cowardice
before the truth; their untruthfulness which has
become instinctive with them; their “idealism.”
Add
a fifth century—-the twentieth—-and
we can see that nothing has changed since this
damning critique of a country whose pinnacle achievement
was the systematically planned and executed near-extermination
of an entire race of human beings, that “higher
race” of Germans, the Jews.
That
is, until they got caught.
Then
again, with the exception of an influx of 75,000
Russian Jews post-1989, Germany remains remarkably
Judenfrei to this day. Hitler might not have achieved
his goal of total world domination, but he did
rid Germany and much of Europe of its Jewish population.
Germany has absolutely no moral ground from which
to criticize Israel, because without Germany the
state of Israel would not exist.
If
we believe Nietzsche, then the reason people embrace
systems of safety is simple cowardice: “error
(faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is
cowardice.” The history of the human race
and my own experience teaches me to believe Nietzsche.
I’m
tightly packed into a group of people about 100
yards from ground zero, the Siegessäule,
the victory monument spruced up with video screens
and advertising for Deutsche Telecom´s Internet
service. Four young Frauen stand around me, each
wearing the same bucket hat, the same shade of
chromium red hair dropping like a curtain onto
the same thin shoulders, the same dark shades,
the same lip piercing in the triangle below the
lower lip, the same tongue piercing visible during
laughter and gum chewing, the same naval piercing
and the same style jeans. I’m reminded of
the scene in “Life of Brian” where Brian
of Nazareth stands on the balcony overlooking
the crowd of his followers and shouts: “But
don’t you understand? You’re all individuals!”
And the crowd shouts back in unison: “We’re
all individuals!”
This
is the dynamic of mass herd behavior. It’s
just a short jump from hundreds of thousands of
people chanting “One World, One Love Parade,”
to “Seig Heil!” and “Heil Hitler!”
The untamed energy of mass crowds is actually
easy to tame and manipulate, as the propagandists
of Fascism, Communism, mass marketing, popular
culture, religion and this techno celebration
understand only too well. As Henry Miller wrote
in Sexus:
If
you had any aesthetic leanings you wouldn’t
be able to go through the stupid routine year
in and year out. Art makes you restless, dissatisfied.
Our industrial system can’t afford to let
that happen—-so they offer you soothing little
substitutes to make you forget that you’re
a human being.
It’s
controlling the individual that’s the hard
part.
When
some of my German students heard I was planning
on going to the Love Parade, they responded with
deliciously sordid tales of naked dancers, public
sex in the bushes of the Tiergarten and Love Trucks
populated with fornicating couples on loan from
a German porn production company. “You’ve
seen all of these things?” I asked. “Not
actually,” they usually responded, “we’ve
never been.”
In
truth, the Love Parade is not exactly an unfettered
Dionysian orgy. Cavorting couples on the Love
Trucks? An occasional topless woman being fondled
by her boyfriend, perhaps. Sex in the bushes?
Under cover of darkness, perhaps, but not in the
bright, revealing light of day. Actually, there’s
more urinating in the bushes, on the trees, and
on the leaf-strewn groundpaths of the Tiergarden
than seed spilling.
Five
guys in red plaid kilts stomp through the lacework
of light filtering through the canopy of leaves,
encircle a tree like a pack of wild dogs and—-as
if they’ve choreographed the move like a
dance routine they’ll use later that night
at a disco—-flip up their kilts and, penises
in hand, water the tree like a human sprinkler
system. One of them, his T-shirt reading “Bier
Rein (arrow pointing up) Bier Raus (arrow pointing
down)” accomplishes the not unimpressive
feat of drinking one beer while recycling another.
Growing
up in the late ´60s and early ´70s
I remember all too well the televised images of
the Berlin Wall and the machine-gunning of those
brave, or desperate, or stupid enough to try to
escape from the Communist East across No Man’s
Land to the Democratic West. In one of those turns
of phrase George Orwell delighted in, the East
was then called the Deutsche Democratische Republic,
the Democratic Republic of Germany.
Today
you can walk through the Brandenburger Tor, across
the Pariser Platz and down Unter den Linden, right
into the heart of what was once East Berlin. Even
though there’s now a McDonalds, a Burger
King, a TGIFridays and a Häagen Däaz
shop, it’s still an eerie feeling. So much
history and so much horror here. The eastern part
of Berlin is now a city-in-progress: construction
sites, scaffolded buildings, tall cranes, fences,
and old, broken sewer pipes are everywhere. The
Potsdamer Platz, once a deserted wasteland flanked
by the Wall, is now a pedestrian shopping extravaganza,
its centerpiece the gleaming silver Sony Center
and IMAX theater. The revolution—-architecturally
and culturally at least—-has been won by
the forces of consumer capitalism, their new temple
a monument not to some charismatic Austrian or
furrow-browed Russian bureaucrat, but to mass
consumption, Sony-style.
As the construction crews and politicians go about
the business of erasing the last historical tidbits
of Berlin, there are still pockets of memory to
be found. Several buildings in the former East
are still pockmarked with bullet holes from the
fierce fighting in the last days of WWII. Past
the Lustgarten, site of mass Nazi rallies in 1935
and now front yard to the Altes and the Pergamon
Museums, across the Spass River, is a tiny street
called Rosenstrasse. The remaining buildings are
undergoing renovation into flats, but red columns
at both ends of the street documents the story
of the Gestapo deportation of the hundreds of
Jews of Rosenstrasse to Auschwitz in 1943.
Another
photo plaque marks the site where the oldest synagogue
in Berlin once stood (“Hinter dem Gebäude
befand sich in der Heidereutegasse die älteste
Synagoge Berlins” [“behind this building
could be found on Heidereutegasse Berlin’s
oldest Synagogue”]—-note the German
syntax), before being destroyed during Kristallnacht.
As I’m pondering all of this, a young man
walks up and asks for directions, in heavily accented
English, to the Pergamon. “Where are you
from?” I ask. “Poland,” he answers.
“Katowice.” He studies the column for
a moment. “Near Auschwitz.” He shakes
his head and walks off.
The
millennial fashion statement at the Love Parade
is angora-like leg warmers. Shorts with leg warmers.
Mini skirts with leg warmers. Bathing suits with
leg warmers. Red or green or yellow or silver
or pink dyed hair with leg warmers. Thousands
and thousands of pairs of leg warmers. If I were
someone like David Foster Wallace I would spout
some nonsense about this being a self-reflexive,
ironic comment on the Flashdance generation, irony
being for postmodernists what daffodils were for
Wordsworth. But as the hours drag on and on, no
amount of theorizing can disguise the fact that
the Love Parade is as monotonous and tiring as
the thumping techno beat jump-starting the hearts,
hormones and adrenaline of the youthful community
gathered together in the Tiergarten.
While
the Love Parade is supposed to be a non-commercial
enterprise, a demonstration of Love and peaceful
togetherness, it’s not. Deutsche Telecom
is a major presence, both as a source of advertising
revenue and free condoms. Other cell phone companies
are present as well, passing out promotional gimmicks.
The Love Trucks are also just massive moving advertisements
for DJ´s and record companies, as well as
Yahoo! and E-Bay. You can buy the commemorative
T-shirt for only 50 marks and order the special
edition Love Parade 2000 compilation CD for 30
marks. The revolution is over. Long live the revolution.
There’s
something pathetic about the decline of the revolutionary
impulse in our culture, a steady spiral downwards
from Dada to the Wobblies to the Beats to rock
and roll, through the 60´s to the punks,
deconstruction, grunge and rap. A new revolution
in art, music, literature or politics? Forget
about it. The great reifying power of capitalism
transforms all revolutionary ideas into marketable
products. Now music, hair color, body piercings,
tattoos, outré fashions and dance movements
synched to the antics of DJ and dancers on a Love
Truck contain the cultural and sexual revolutionary
impulses of youth. Or perhaps it’s just a
self-reflexive, ironic commentary on revolution
itself. One thing’s for certain: no one here
will be wearing their green shorts, pink hair
and fuzzy yellow leg warmers when they stumble
back into carefully-regulated, managed and controlled
German workspaces first thing Monday morning.
There they will perform the ultimate masquerade:
normal people leading normal lives.
The
Love Parade represents nothing more than the triumph
of global capitalism and its largest export, popular
culture. In these late capitalist, post-postmodern
times of ours, content has become irrelevant.
Content is no longer a valuable attribute formed
by a single, conscious artistic genius but is
constructed through the collaborative synergy
of marketing and the media. How else do we explain
Britney Spears, reality TV and post-death Robert
Ludlum novels? The goal of this revolution is
to produce the highest profit level possible,
at any cost with little or no moral or ethical
reflection. Warning: any aesthetic value the products
of this culture may contain is purely incidental
and irrelevant to an audience trained through
the manipulations of advertising to accept the
mediocre, what Alexander Pope called the bathetic.
The
Love Parade is a celebration of the Bathos: in
music, fashion, thought and alas, revolution itself.
Che Guevara T-shirt, anyone?
By
6am, after the all-night dancing, drinking and
drugging have dissipated into another cool, cloudy
Berlin summer morning, the 250 truckloads of city
work crews have nearly finished cleaning up the
streets and pathways surrounding the Tiergarten.
The revolution ends at dawn on a Sunday morning.
Two people have died from drug overdoses and a
couple of hundred more have been arrested. A few
shell-shocked revelers stumble around the Brandenburger
Tor, one lone whistle tooting in the distance
to an unheard, non-existent electronic beat, sounding
more like the clipped whistle of a policeman controlling
rush-hour traffic than a member of the new Love
Generation.
Welcome
to Deutschland.
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