A philosophical text after the attack on Berlin Pride on 25 July 2026 — on love, queer visibility, and the permeability of being.
I recently saw a cardboard sign online bearing the sentence:
Love is a terrible thing to hate.
It remained with me after the attack near Berlin Pride on 25 July 2026. One woman was killed, and 31 people were injured. The attack was directed at a place where queer people and those connected with them had gathered publicly.
In everyday language, the sentence is immediately understandable. People were attacked because of whom they love, how they live, how they understand themselves, or because they appeared together with others who refuse to hide these parts of their lives.
What Love Means in This Conceptual System
In the language of this work, however, love means something more fundamental.
Love is not only a feeling between people. It is not approval, affection, sexuality, solidarity or moral agreement. Love is the precondition of encounter. It is the communicative field in which anything can appear in relation to anything else at all. It cannot be chosen because every choice already takes place within it.
This changes the meaning of the sentence.
Perhaps love itself cannot be hated. What can be hated is that love leaves the world open to forms of life that another person cannot control. What can be hated is the appearance of difference without submission: the fact that another person exists, becomes visible and enters the shared world without first requesting permission to be what they are.
Pride and the Permeability of Being
Pride makes this visible.
People appear in different bodies, identities, relationships, histories and forms of self-understanding. They do not become identical by gathering together. Their differences remain. Yet these differences do not have to become absolute separation.
This is where love and the permeability of being meet.
Permeability does not mean that there are no boundaries. Without boundaries, there would be no recognizable form, no individual life and no encounter. Permeability means that a boundary does not have to declare itself absolute. A life can differ from another life without ceasing to belong to the same world. Difference can remain difference without being converted into exclusion, degradation or destruction.
The Attack on Berlin Pride
The attack in Berlin attempted precisely such a conversion.
It turned the visible difference of queer lives and queer community into a target for physical violence. It asserted that certain forms of appearance should not be allowed to remain in the world. The violence did not merely oppose a political demand or reject a private feeling. It created an actual boundary: one life ended, bodies were injured, and a public space of encounter was violently narrowed.
Love Is Not a Promise of Protection
No philosophical sentence can reverse this.
Love is not a promise that violence will fail. It is not a force that automatically protects the living. It is not a moral reward distributed to those who act correctly. To speak of love as the condition of encounter must therefore never diminish the reality of the attack, the responsibility of the attacker or the suffering of those affected.
Nor is “love” an adequate answer when it becomes only a reassuring slogan.
To say that love will win would pass too quickly over the fact that someone was killed. The previous state cannot be restored. Those who survived, witnessed the attack or now reconsider their own public visibility inhabit a changed present.
Reversivity in a Changed Present
Yet the attack does not become the whole truth of that present.
It has altered the conditions under which encounter takes place. It has produced fear, grief and a real loss of possibility. But it has not made queer life, public visibility or renewed encounter conceptually impossible. Reconnection cannot undo what happened. It can only begin under changed conditions, while keeping the violence and its consequences visible. That is the meaning of reversivity: not a return to what was, but renewed connection within a present that can no longer be the same.
When Difference Becomes Absolute Separation
“Love is a terrible thing to hate” is therefore more than an appeal for tolerance.
It names a contradiction.
Hatred depends on the same field of relation that it tries to close. Violence reaches another person only because there is already a world in which both appear. It uses encounter to destroy encounter. It uses difference to declare separation absolute.
The answer cannot be to abolish difference.
It must be to preserve the permeability through which different lives can remain visible, recognizable and connected without surrendering their distinct forms.
Love does not erase the boundary.
Love carries what appears within it.
And permeability keeps the boundary from becoming the whole world.
© 2026 Andersen Storm
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