Poetry rains on Berlin
Berlin was bombed with poetry Saturday night as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 German and Chilean writers rained from a helicopter above the city’s Lustgarten.
The blitz, which lasted half an hour, was organized by the Chilean art collective Casagrande in protest of war and in celebration of Chile’s 200th anniversary of independence. The Berlin bombing was Casagrande’s fifth: the group had previously poetry-bombed Santiago de Chile in 2001, Dubrovnik in 2002, Gernika in 2004, and Warsaw in 2009 – all cities that have suffered aerial bombings in their histories.
The Guardian reports:
Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to “break the morale” of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing “‘builds’ a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way.”
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