Marcel Winatschek

The Tunnel

Dustin was seventeen when a girl died next to him at the Loveparade in Duisburg. He told the press: Next to me a girl died, and I can’t stop thinking about that sentence. The festival was supposed to be about music and joy and moving together. Nineteen people died in a tunnel. Over a hundred were crushed badly enough to need hospitals.

The thing that gets me is how preventable it was. The tunnel was obviously too narrow for that many people. Someone knew that. Someone made the choice anyway. When you’re organizing an event where thousands of people are moving through space together, you have an obligation to think about the geometry, to count, to know what happens when bodies get that dense.

A woman who escaped described what she saw: Everywhere there were people with blue faces. My friend dragged me over the bodies or we would have died too. I can’t forget those faces. The faces of dead people. That’s what she carries now. Not the music or the lights. The blue faces and the moment she realized it could have been her.

The gap between what someone should have known and what actually happened—that’s where those nineteen people died. In the gap of refusal. Someone routed the crowds through that tunnel anyway. The music played. The bodies compressed. And a boy named Dustin will never forget the moment the girl next to him stopped moving.