A month ago I was in Duisburg, the Ruhrgebiet city in Germany that is today a scene of tragedy following the death of 19 attendees at the Love Parade, an event held in Berlin for almost twenty years after the fall of the Wall. A tunnel to the festival ground in a former railyard became choked with people and a stampede led to death and hundreds of injuries. The event will never happen again, and an inquiry is beginning. The human tragedy is paramount, but it also represents a setback for a city that was beginning to reinvent itself. The Duisburg I saw this June was very different from the city I saw in 1982 and 1986, when it was still in the throes of the loss of heavy industry, coal and smokestacks that built it. It was dark and plain, and even the commercial center had few felicities. In 2010 the center is marked by the city’s new icon, a Niki Saint-Phalle that is more colorful than anything I remember from the 1980s. Continue Reading

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