Berlin, Berlin, Where Did Our Love Go? Love Parade Has Moved On

A little tough love at the 2006 Love Parade in Germany. And it's some parade.

Achtung, Baby. Dance music’s most famous street party is moving to the beat of a different city. Europe-bound revelers this summer will need to hop to Essen, in the west of Germany, to catch the Love Parade that previously had been held in Berlin.

Love Parade organizers cited a bureaucratic song and dance, namely the city of Berlin’s failure to grant written approval, as the reason for the switch. The event in Essen will take place on August 25.

In case you’ve never shared the love, or the dehydration and gratuitous nudity, the Love Parade is a daylong festival that draws hundreds of thousands to celebrate tolerance, respect and understanding through techno music. It started as a political statement just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and since then, offshoots have grown to spread the message of love to far-flung locations such as Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Cape Town and San Francisco.

Berlin gets the shaft and more on the Love Parade after the jump.

This love in has drawn free spirits in the hundreds of thousands in the past.

During the Love Parade, some of the world’s best DJs blast techno music from about 50 floats, which are moving trucks with gargantuan sound systems. When the event was held in Berlin, the trucks would assemble for a grand finale at the Victory Column statue, aka the Siegessäule, just before the entire city transformed into a giant club.

Although the Love Parade in Berlin was canceled due to sponsorship struggles in 2004 and 2005, it returned with a roar last year when it collided with World Cup fever in the city.

It appeared as if Berlin would get a party reprieve when a rival group announced its plan to hold the B-Parade on July 21. Now, insiders report a sorry fate for that event.

At least Berlin still has Knut, the pathologically cute polar bear cub that was born in the zoo in December. Watch him get his love groove on here.