Thousands of people danced their hearts out at Berlin's techno Love Train festival this past weekend, the first such street event since 21 revellers died in an accident at the legendary Love Parade five years ago.
The Love Train festival, called "Zug der Liebe" in German, featured 14 trucks loaded with massive speakers blasting electronic music as they inched their way through the sunny city of Berlin on a 10-kilometre (six-mile) route. According to police figures, 10,000 people attended the party.
Banners pinned onto the trucks appealed for "tolerance not hate" and "love without borders," though other slogans were more political.
One expressed solidarity with refugees, in reference to the thousands of people fleeing war and poverty and risking their lives to reach Europe by boat. Another called on the EU to reject a draft free trade agreement with the United States.
Love Train organisers see the event as a political demonstration rather than a festival, rekindling the original spirit of the Love Parade, which was held for the first time in 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As the Cold War neared its end in the then-divided city, 150 people came together to dance while calling for peace, disarmament and pancakes to end world hunger.
But by 1999 the event had swollen into a 1.5 million-reveller affair, and German authorities refused to continue classifying it as a demonstration, making organisers responsible for cleaning and security costs.
The Love Parade concept was then bought from its founders and relocated to Duisburg in western Germany, where a massive stampede inside a concrete tunnel killed 21 people and injured 500 others, bringing an end to the annual rave.
A ceremony was held last week in Duisburg to commemorate victims of the tragedy, provoked when 1.4 million people converged on a site with a capacity of just 250,000.
The Love Parade came to an end with the accident, and Love Train organisers are keen to distance their event from it.— AFP
