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Berliner Hasenheide: Where the wild ravers live
Photo: Daniel Rosenthal
The invitation comes by email.
A few names, a date: Saturday, 4 p.m. until sunrise.
There is also a link to Google Maps: a wasteland, somewhere in Berlin-Charlottenburg, near the S-Bahn line.
It then goes through the premises of a shipping company, where a few men are loading a container with cardboard boxes.
You can already hear it, the pulse of a bass drum, UumpUumpUumpWoschUump.
There is a gap in the fence on the camp site, it goes through here, a little further, and then you are there.
There where the wild ravers live, in the illegal, in the middle of Berlin, wedged between rails and commercial properties.
Two hippies sit at a camping table and give a friendly greeting.
You have a few sheets of paper in front of you.
"Hi, nice that you came."
And then they ask the question of all questions.
The night question.
"Are you adding yourself to the contact tracking list?"
Is this one of the parties the Chancellor warns against?
One of the events that once again show this country only partially defensible against the uncontrolled spread of the virus?
Has the relative security of the past few months been gambled away?
"The first thing in a crisis is the nocturnal curfew, that is, the freedom to move in the dark is lifted."
Luc Gwiazdzinski, night geographer
There will be a curfew in the German capital from Saturday, October 10th.
All restaurants and bars must be closed between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Even gas stations and the famous Spätis have to lock their beer fridges.
That hasn't happened since 1949.
No matter what was going on, whether the wall was being built or the autonomists and the police fought: the freedom to get drunk around the clock was sacred.
Berlin, the open city.
But science can be merciless.
Two effective measures against the corona pandemic, according to a new study by the CDC, the American federal agency for infectious diseases, are: wear a mask - and close bars.
Most clubs had already closed voluntarily in March, even before the Senate decided on the contact restrictions for the city.
It was an attempt to be sensible - an attempt by an industry that is actually responsible for organized irrationality.
And now that. Something seems to have gone very wrong.
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