Looking For a Crowd

Berliners love a crowd. In a city with an annually shrinking population, which at 3.4 million is half a million smaller than it was in the 1920s, it can be hard to find a nice clustering of fellow residents, especially since the population is spread over a huge land mass bigger than Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart combined.

Locals will profess that they love the "Ruhe" and quiet, village-like atmosphere of residential districts, but their secret yearning for a taste of the urban flavor of denser metropolises like London or Frankfurt emerges every so often during municipal events. Berliners turn out en masse for packed public events, from Christmas markets to marathons and, most recently, for last Sunday’s "Fasching" parade.

Newcomers to celebrating Carnival

As anyone who has been in Germany for this event knows, "Fasching" is old German for “Silly Wig Day;” it is also called "Karneval," which non-fellow-travelers will recognize as the world wide tradition of debauchery before Lent.

Although more popular in Catholic areas of the country, Fasching/ Karneval has officially been celebrated here in the capital as well since 2004, partially due to the influence of thousands of civil servants from the Rhineland area who moved post-Reunification with their government offices from Bonn to the united "Hauptstadt."

While the biggest festivities traditionally take place on Carnival Monday, Berlin’s Sunday parade nonetheless provided ample opportunity for inhabitants to demonstrate their inner yearning for urban crowding (and affection for rainbow-Afro wigs).

Thousands lined up in the Western half of the city, along Ku’damm, around Zoo, and on the Tauentzienstrasse, watching floats go by and scrambling for candy being tossed down from the floats.

Yet, despite the population’s best efforts to cluster themselves, the parade still felt a bit sparse, especially in comparison to the throngs your correspondent has witnessed in Cologne.

They'll do better next year

Katharina Stump, 15, was watching the parade with her parents and younger sister, and commented, “There’s not enough people here to fill up the street, really. And too much space between each float. It gets a little boring.”

Her father agreed: “They stretched the parade too long this year [in contrast to previous parades with a shorter route on Unter den Linden].” As a native Berliner, however, he had to concede, “But it’s only been a few years and the organizers are still learning. Next year it’ll improve.”

An ecological smorgasbord

A more successful experiment in urban herding was perhaps the "Grüne Woche" [Green Week], which took place in mid-January. At Messe Berlin, a massive convention hall not far from the Olympic grounds, international presenters from the food, nutrition, green building, and energy sectors displayed their wares, showing off not only technological advances but also the basic science behind growing the things we eat. Countries from around the world presided over booths offering meals and free samples, from Indian spiced tea to Russian sausage.

At ten in the morning on a Tuesday, the S-Bahn train to the Messe was packed, with large swarms of people making their way to what was essentially a combination feast/trade show, an opportunity to pig out in a somewhat ecologically enlightened fashion.

Inside, the zoo-like atmosphere was literally enhanced by livestock pens in the agriculture pavilion, and the event’s density reached an uncomfortably immobilizing crush by midday. No one seemed to mind though; what a thrill to finally be surrounded by people, something that almost never happens on a typical Berlin sidewalk!

It's still a lonely route home

On streets throughout the city, just about everyone was sporting the green bag used by supermarket chain LIDL to give out free apple juice. That German habit of saving and re-using plastic bags revealed that literally all of Berlin had gone to the Messe.

This is not to suggest that a cramped, teeming city is the inner wish of those living in Berlin's sprawling and occasionally deserted "Bezirke." Rather, it is precisely the thinly-settled spaciousness that makes crowded events so fun here.

Unaccustomed to being packed in, Berliners experience an extra-cozy feeling when electing to join the celebratory mass. Crowds are comforting rather than unsettling because an empty side street is never more than five minutes away. This is Berlin’s luxury: Every member of the mob can walk the relievingly lonely route home.