16 Amazing Creative Responses to the Pandemic from Berlin

This year was quite different, wasn’t it? There was a lot of crazy stuff happening, but we can all agree on what the most significant thing was: the pandemic. If you would have told me a year ago that this would happen, I probably would not have believed you. But here we are, 9 months into a global outbreak of an airborne viral disease that has turned the world upside down.

Of course, this pandemic brought us a lot of negative things, but I don’t want to focus on those – you can simply turn on the news for that. I want to focus on the things that were good, specifically on how people responded to the crisis in positive ways. While a lot of us were struggling with our lives, our work, and our mental health, some people gathered their creative energies to come up with great things to brighten the days of everyone else and show some optimistic spirit.

One of the first responses to the initial lockdown in March came from the nightlife scene. I was very impressed with how quickly the United We Stream project emerged from the Berlin club scene and how it spilled over to Germany and the rest of the world. It gave the party people something to hold on to while the clubs were closed and it generated a lot of money for those nightlife makers that were suffering.

The next group of people from the cultural scene that was affected by the lockdown that came out with something amazing was the dancers, led by the Staatsballet Berlin and followed by many other companies and independent dancers. They came out with wonderful performance videos shot at their homes or in nature.

We also received a lot of submissions by visual artists that created photo series dealing with the lockdown or other aspects of this new reality, one of the most beloved the one from Lovis Ostenrik who shot people stuck in their houses during the first lockdown in their windows.

Last but not least there were your own stories that you shared with us and that we compiled into a mini-series of articles we called Quarantine Diaries. We loved to read about how you dealt with the situation and we hope it also made a couple of other people not feel so alone in isolation.

Below you’ll find our collection of articles about these amazing creative pandemic responses from Berlin that gave us a lot of hope and inspiration this year.