Love Parade Gets Rave Reviews Despite Problems

Shattering records as well as eardrums, 1.4 million pierced and painted techno music fans bobbed along to the beat of Berlin’s 11th annual Love Parade on Saturday, as the world’s largest rave took place amid greed, acrimony and the threat of exile.

The summer celebration that began in 1989 with a few dozen dancers and a rickety Volkswagen bus has become Euro-Generation X’s yearly answer to Woodstock--as well as an image-boosting moneymaker for a city keen on shaking its sinister past.

“This event has made Berlin famous all over the world as a fun city where people are loving and tolerant, and we need that,” effused 18-year-old Annette Ziegner, tucking her lilac tresses behind ears sporting at least a dozen silver rings sparkling in the brilliant sunshine.

The whistle-blowing, bubble-floating, watergun-toting youths with hair of unnatural hues raise the hackles of a few of Berlin’s stodgier city fathers. But the massive street party with the motto “Peace, Pleasure and Pancakes” has traditionally transpired without major incident despite huge attendance, and it draws well over $100 million to local merchants and caterers in a single weekend.

Still, whether the money is worth the mess left once the party’s over has become a bitter dispute between the Love Parade’s franchisers and local officials, who have tried to oblige organizers to foot the bill for the morning-after cleanup.

Last year, nearly 200 tons of trash had to be collected by city disposal workers from the 17th of June Street parade site and the surrounding park, the Tiergarten. Environmentalists, meanwhile, denounced the damage inflicted by the revelers, who have taken to sleeping in the park and using its trees and flower beds as toilets.

More than 1,500 techno, house, drum ‘n’ bass and big beat disc jockeys took part in Saturday’s parade, which crawled through four miles of thronged thoroughfare for four hours, but even parts of the music community have fallen out of love with the procession. A rival Hate Parade has been staged in each of the last three years in eastern Berlin to protest what the dissenters see as crass commercialism and distortion of the event’s core principles of peace and love for all mankind.

This year, the Love Parade’s enigmatic founder, Matthias Roeingh, a.k.a. Dr. Moth, was already miffed by the city’s failed efforts to reclassify the yearly rave as an entertainment event instead of a political procession. That distinction would have obliged his firm, Planetcom, to pay for the cleanup as well as 2,000 extra police officers and more than 600 first-aid stations.

Then, officials of the Tiergarten district granted exclusive beverage sales rights to a competitor of the Love Parade organizers, who have previously controlled all concessions connected with the event. That spat spurred the fluttery Dr. Moth to threaten to take the procession elsewhere.

“The location of Love Parade 2000 is completely unclear at the moment, although we are in negotiations with all sorts of cities,” said Barbara Hallama, a Planetcom spokeswoman.

Berlin newspapers had reported over the previous few days that Roeingh would stage the millennium event in Paris, but Hallama said no decisions have been made yet.

Inspired by the success of the Berlin party, the French capital last year hosted its own techno parade, drawing 200,000 fans along with calls for the September event to become an annual celebration.

“If the Love Parade went to Paris, I would cry no tears,” said Horst Porath, the Tiergarten district official in charge of construction and repair. “I doubt it will ever go, but if it did, Berlin would survive this ‘loss.’ There are hundreds of other interesting cultural events taking place here.”

But Germans, who make up most of the Love Parade-goers and help turn the event into a full weekend of revelry in this city’s multitudinous clubs and discos, are reluctant to see their party sent abroad.

“That would be really crappy,” Marc-Andre Eckhardt, of the industrial city of Bielefeld, said of the prospect that this Love Parade might have been Berlin’s last. “But it won’t happen. This is something for all of the young people of Europe. We won’t let anyone take it away.”

Pointing to the record turnout, another of the parade’s organizers, Ralf Regitz, told journalists: “This shows that we are important here.”

Business circles also seem committed to keeping the techno fest. The firm Partner for Berlin, which promotes investment and tourism in this newly restored capital, anted up the $95,000 cleanup deposit demanded by Porath’s office to ease the acrimony and tension that threatened to afflict this year’s parade.

Even the city contractor for waste disposal sought to show loyalty, despite the event’s added workload. Street sweepers and garbage collectors were outfitted for the weekend in neon orange caps and T-shirts emblazoned with “Save the rave” and “Dirt angel.”