The district office of Berlin Mitte and the Senate administration set up a memorial in the Grosser Tiergarten on 6 August 2026: a young maple and a bench painted in rainbow colours, near the Bellevueallee on the Ahornsteig, at the place where a man drove a vehicle into the crowd and attacked people with a machete at the closing rally of Christopher Street Day on 25 July. One woman was killed and 31 people were injured.
A groundskeeper found the bench destroyed at about eight in the morning on Tuesday 1 September 2026. All of the coloured wooden slats had been pulled out of the metal frame and the backrest had been broken off the rest of it. Police said massive force had been used and that the bench could not be repaired. It has been taken away completely. The photographs, flags and candles people had left at the spot were damaged as well.
Police have recorded a case of criminal damage, and the unit responsible is in contact with the Staatsschutz, the branch that handles politically motivated crime in Germany. Whether it is treated as an anti-queer offence depends on what the investigation turns up. No suspect has been named.
Berlin's queer commissioner Alfonso Pantisano called the place a site of mourning and said the bench would be built again, and again. The Tagesspiegel reported his reaction on the day the damage was found, and queer.de carried the police account.
If you are going to Berlin
The memorial is a few minutes' walk from the Brandenburg Gate, on the path where the attack happened, and people have been leaving flowers there since July. The bench is not there at the moment and no date has been given for a replacement, so a visitor going to look for it will find the tree and the flowers and an empty space.
We wrote about the attack itself the day after it happened, when the number of injured was still being counted. The city's next large queer date is Folsom Europe, from 10 to 13 September 2026, and the bars and clubs we list are on the Germany country page.
