Just over 20 years ago, this part of Berlin echoed to the wail of alarm sirens and the howls of attack dogs guarding the Wall that split the German capital, the uneasy front line in the Cold War.
Now, the “Wall Park,” a strip once divided by the hated barrier, hums to the sound of people butchering Michael Jackson and Britney Spears hits as thousands of Berliners turn up every Sunday to enjoy a huge open-air karaoke show.
One spring Sunday last year, Joe Hatchiban, a 36-year-old Irish courier living in Berlin, fired up his laptop and a microphone and held an impromptu karaoke competition with just a scattering of people sitting in the park.
“I live here around the corner, so one Sunday I just came round here and set up the sound system. I just started singing a few songs with just five or six people,” he said.
The five or six participants on that first Sunday quickly became hundreds, then thousands, and more than a year later, what was impromptu has become an institution, a “must-do” event among Berlin’s young bohemians.
One recent Sunday, two skinny teenage girls gripped their microphones tightly and fought — unsuccessfully — to make their rendition of YMCA heard above the enthusiastic crowd.
“It’s fun to stay at the YMCA,” screams the colorful crowd, the women in flowery mini-skirts, the men with their oiled torsos swaying to the Village People dance.
The scene could hardly provide more of a contrast to the seven-hectare no-man’s-land that from 1961 to 1989 separated the West Berlin district of Wedding from Prenzlauer Berg in the East.
The barbed wire and watchtowers have been replaced by barbecues and trendy buggies.
As for the Irish organizer, he occasionally passes round an old tin for contributions, but the point was not to make money, he said.
“I didn’t put any thought at all into what would happen in the future ... I maybe just had the idea that something funny could happen out of it,” he said.
Axel Puell, head of the Friends of the Mauerpark association welcomed the attention the Irishman has brought to the area.
“With his karaoke, Joe has shown that you can succeed without any commercial logic behind you whatsoever,” Puell said. “There’s nothing to win, it’s free to take part and there’s no advertising for it.”
However, Puell worried that the success might have a limited shelf-life.
“One day, Joe might want to do something else and then it’s very likely that some commercial venture will come in its place,” he said.
For now, the murdering of classic hits continues unabated in the place where border guards once had shoot-to-kill orders.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS