This past weekend, the city of Berlin, and many publications around the world, celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Wall. (The Wall didn’t so much fall or collapse before a chorus of ram’s horns as it gradually crumbled and got dispersed, onto faraway shelves and mantles). People tended to focus on the geopolitical implications: the Cold War and its aftermath, and the rise of a unified Germany, the E.U. gorilla. There have also been stories about the cultural ferment that kicked in once the citizens of East Berlin and West Berlin were free to move about and mingle, amid an abundance of derelict space and good will. Peanut butter met chocolate, und wunderbar!
This version of Berlin, as a techno hotbed and a musical playground, has reached a certain level of maturity. In a recent review of “Berlin Now: The City After the Wall,” by Peter Schneider, Nicholas Kulish, the former Berlin correspondent for the Times, characterized the city’s present-day reputation for nocturnal (or, really, matinal) excess as such: “It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.”
I am one of many journalists who, in recent years, has tried to parse this reputation, and one of a perhaps smaller number to find that, despite an influx of crunkers and party hounds from all over the world, the sentiment isn’t quite fair, except for the bit about the weather. (Kulish also quoted Balzac, describing an earlier, blander incarnation of Berlin: “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert.”) Yes, people party in Berlin, but the partying there is different, enough so that even to use the words “partying” or “night life” or “clubs” seems somehow reductive. Berlin’s ardent, idiosyncratic techno culture, evolving amid what Schneider calls “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” has many roots, both momentous and mundane. A bender by the Spree owes as much to centuries of geopolitics as it does to the economics of easyJet or the sequencer on the Roland TR-909.
The division of the city, a function of a global struggle over territory and ideas, had a host of not only unintended but also widely unobserved local repercussions—bizarre neighborhood dynamics that affected the way young people spent their time and got access both to music and to spaces where they could listen and dance to it together. Over the weekend, two Berlin journalists, Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, self-published an English translation of their oral history “Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall.” It is a very granular, and at times bewildering, account of the music and dance-club scenes in Berlin from the eighties on. For a rockist like me, a descendent of what one commentator in the book disparages as “that lean-against-the-bar generation” (I’d like to see that coinage in German), many of the names and references are obscure. But there’s a decent glossary, and also the great music encyclopedia immedica, YouTube. There’s a lot to learn here about (for example) the hardcore East German break-dancing scene.
The portrait of the city, immediately before and after the breaching of the Wall, is nuanced. You assume, for example, that the Ossies were thrilled to get to the West, but many were at best ambivalent. One d.j. and bouncer from the East named Spezial deplored the enthusiasm with which East Berliners had celebrated being given bananas and chocolate upon their arrival.
There were snobs on both sides:
The book gives a sense of the birth of Berlin techno as both a historical inevitability and a freak outbreak. The book’s preface begins: “It was basically pure coincidence. This new, raw, stark machine music appeared—and then the Wall came down. In East Berlin, the administration collapsed; the former GDR capital became a ‘temporary autonomous zone.’ Suddenly, there were all these spaces to discover: a panzer chamber in the dusty no man’s land of the former death strip, a World War II bunker, a decommissioned soap factory on the Spree, a transformer station opposite the erstwhile Reich Ministry of Aviation. And suddenly, people were dancing at all these sites rejected by recent history, to a music virtually reinvented from week to week.” In the beginning, the scene was small—or, at least, Denk and von Thülen make it seem so with their insular cast. This wasn’t a city full of hipsters congealing around an idea. It was, as the title suggests, a family. The masses of bodies, and the global attention, came later.
There’s something at once thrilling and disquieting about a meticulous firsthand retroactive account of a new thing coming together and taking off. Depending on your frame of mind and your generation, you, or your forebears, may have experienced some mixture of wonder and jealousy when reading about bygone goings on at Andy Warhol’s, Ken Kesey’s, George Ripley’s, or Gertrude Stein’s. Oh, to have been at Max’s Kansas City, or else, forty years earlier, at the Reno Club, in Missouri’s Kansas City. This isn’t so much fear of missing out as regret over having missed out, and its corollary, resignation that you’re probably missing out on something else right now. I was in Berlin briefly after the opening of the Wall and had no clue about the parties I was missing. I was still leaning against the bar, looking for Nick Cave. Even contemporaneity, proximity, and a sympathetic sensibility aren’t enough to put you in the room. You need luck, the right friends, a ferocity of taste, perhaps even some courage. A great many circumstances need to align for people to come up with something new, to present it correctly, and to find it a following that insures its survival in the short term and its persistence in the long term. Cultural supernovas are accidents of history, and flukes of personality. You can’t will them or fund them into being. That said, desire and money don’t hurt.
