The music was cut and the crowd was asked to leave without explanation, minutes after a vehicle drove into people in the Tiergarten.
Berlin’s Christopher Street Day ended early on Saturday evening, July 25, after a fatal incident in the Tiergarten. The stage programme at the Brandenburg Gate was stopped mid-flow.
The first instruction was to turn off the music. Drag queens who had been performing were led backstage. An announcement to the crowd followed shortly after.
“Unfortunately, we have to end the event prematurely due to a difficult situation,” the organiser said. The word “Evacuation” appeared on the screens behind the stage.
No explanation was given at that point, and deliberately so. Rather than describe what had happened and risk panic, the announcer asked everyone to leave calmly and immediately. “I ask you to calmly make your way towards the exit,” they said, telling people to avoid the route towards the Victory Column.
The instruction was repeated: “Please go home in this direction, calmly and in an orderly manner.” When someone in the crowd shouted “Why?”, the answer was simply: “Please go home now.”
What is known so far
Thousands had been at the Brandenburg Gate for music and a day built around queer visibility and solidarity. At around 10pm, a vehicle drove into a crowd in the southern part of the Tiergarten. A woman was killed and a number of other people were injured, some seriously.
Police opened a large-scale manhunt for the suspect. According to media reports, the search is focused on a 21-year-old man said to have links to ISIS.
Sarah Connor: “I’m speechless”
The backstage area was evacuated too. Sarah Connor was among those there, having performed “Vincent” and “Wie schön du bist” on the main stage at around 9:30pm.
Shortly after midnight she described the evacuation in an Instagram story. Her set, she said, had been one of the most beautiful moments she had experienced with those two songs, before the mood of the night changed completely. “I’m speechless. I think it’s awful,” she said, adding a message to the queer community and her fans: “All the more reason to be loud and stay loud.”
