Ber­lin, through­out its vast loaded chapters of his­tory, has always been a mag­net for polit­ic­ally inclined people. But it’s not just the nerds who care the most here: with all of its charm and the dark side of the past, even our Ger­man Wasted Youth likes to get drawn into polit­ics and dis­cusses cur­rent events with a fierce pas­sion unknown to the rest of the Bundes­rep­ub­lik. But what gives? What made Ber­liner polit­ical events as pop­u­lar and exclus­ive as they are today?

Take the 1^st of May, Chris­topher Street Day or the most fam­ous, the largest and the king of all polit­ical parades: The Love­parade. The Love­parade was the begin­ning of a polit­ical era that would dis­tin­guish itself from everything its seen before. It was not merely about get­ting a point across: it was being loud, hav­ing fun, and it was rav­ing for a reason. To be on the streets and to show every­one what it was all about, to express the free­dom those Ber­liners had fought for so hard. Maybe even to say: these are our streets, and this is what we want.

Nowadays in Ber­lin, pre­par­ing a demon­stra­tion means gath­er­ing pop­u­lar DJs on cool floats and think­ing up the cleverest ban­ners you can think of to pro­voke the onlook­ers. It means party­ing hard on the streets, for every­one (espe­cially those politi­cians) to see. It means: if we can’t get people to listen to what we have to say, then we might just as well dance and play our music so loud, they’ll HAVE to come and see.

As for me, per­son­ally, I love the demon­stra­tions in the sum­mer; they’re open air, they’re free, they hap­pen for a reason and they attract a very mixed crowd from Antifa to Fam­il­ies to those Pro­fes­sional Party People. Last weeks Atomkraft Web­gassen Demo at the Regier­ungs­vier­tel was the ulti­mate con­trast between polit­ical motiv­a­tion and party­ing like it’s just another rave… thanks to Mar­cus for pump­ing out an amaz­ing video as always.