The first person I met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn’t print his name. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish-brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I’ll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg duelling garb. Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you’re fresh in town.
It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters, clubbers, and artists after the Wall came down and is now agleam with fancy restaurants, galleries, and shops. Transplants often describe Berlin’s neighborhoods as analogues of New York’s, to assess where they fit along the gentrification continuum. Mitte, they say, is SoHo. Like SoHo, it is often full of tourists. But this bar, an early post-Wall pioneer, had a gruff, local air.
The boar hunter stirred an espresso at arm’s length and regarded me with martial skepticism. He was a veteran of the city’s after-hours party scene, but he seemed weary of it. “Everyone knows about this,” he said. “You should write instead about black rhinos.” He’d recently bought fifteen thousand acres in Namibia, in a rhinoceros preserve, to help support a conservation program. He said, “I once shot an elephant.”
He had moved to Berlin from Düsseldorf in 1993. He was a philosopher by training (his business card had him as a “Dr.”) but an industrialist by trade: he’d inherited a manufacturing firm from his father, and had done well enough with it to pursue a life of pleasure and ease, though without ostentation, in keeping with the ethos of Berlin. He’d recently returned from a four-week surfing trip to the Basque coast, where he and a girlfriend—two, actually: one for the first half of the trip, and one for the second—had lived out of a VW bus. There were other women in his life, among them a physician’s wife, whom he’d met online. (“He gave her fake tits—Thank you, Mister!”) He described his plans for the following weekend: a day hunting wild boar in a forest on the city’s outskirts, then a “sex party” (which should never be said without a German accent) at an acquaintance’s apartment, where he’d arrive with one woman but pair up with others (“It’s a seedy thing”), and, finally, perhaps, just before Sunday dawn, Berghain.
Berghain is a night club that opened in 2004 in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. The name is a mashup of the last syllable of its neighborhood, Friedrichshain, and the one across the Spree, Kreuzberg, on what was once the other side of the Wall. It is the most famous techno club in the world—to Berlin what Fenway is to Boston—and yet still kind of underground and, as such, a microcosm of Berlin. The people I’d talked to who had been to Berghain—and there were many—conjured ecstatic evenings, Boschian contortions, and a dusky Arcadia that an American hockey dad like me had never even imagined wanting to experience.
Berghain’s renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the d.j.s who present it; the power and clarity of the sound system; the eyeball-bending decadence of the weekend parties, which often spill into Monday morning; the stringent and mysterious door policy, and the menacing head doorman, with a tattoo on his face; the majesty and complexity of the interior; and the tolerant and indulgent atmosphere, most infamously in its so-called dark rooms, where patrons, gay and straight, can get it on with friends or strangers in an anonymous murk. For some Berliners, Berghain is an elemental part of their weekly existence, a perfectly pitched and carefully conceived apotheosis of Berlin’s post-Wall club culture. To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder.
“It’s half art project, half social experiment,” a friend in New York had told me. “It’s the vampire night club to end all vampire night clubs. People want something like it here, but New York could never metabolize it.”
“It’s a social-political-economic achievement,” another friend said. “It’s such a fucking unicorn.”
“It’s dystopian and utopian,” a third said. “Prepare yourself.”
The boar hunter had been going to Berghain for years, mainly for the music and the sex. He said he preferred it to, say, the KitKatClub. “The sex clubs have bad music,” he explained. He avoided drugs, mostly. He drank alcohol and occasionally smoked damiana, a mild herbal stimulant that is thought to have some aphrodisiac effects. “It’s like pot, except it doesn’t make you stupid,” he said. Perhaps it was for this reason that he had a more prosaic affection for the place. He didn’t seem to see it in transcendental terms. He had a Teutonic bluntness with regard to sex. Typically, he’d dance and then go to the dark room. He explained that straight couples, in deference to the predominantly gay clientele in the dark rooms, often preferred the toilet stalls, but, for whatever reason, he didn’t like the idea of screwing on a toilet. He’d noticed in recent visits to the dark room that, to judge by wandering hands, the patrons were less interested in him than in the woman he was with. Also, he’d had two cell phones stolen. All this was a symptom of gentrification. “Berghain’s not as kinky as it used to be, not as eccentric,” he said. “There are the easyJet people—Spanish people, Italians. The black-leather homosexuals are gone.” Apparently, they patronized the club downstairs—Lab.oratory, which has a separate entrance and a more single-minded clientele. In Berlin, offhand references to instances of excess at Lab.oratory—oh, the things that men will do to each other!—are as commonplace as best-burger recommendations in New York.
After a moment, the boar hunter said, “We could go to Berghain now. Would you like to go?”
“Now?” I was jet-lagged. It was Sunday. He looked me up and down, the way Germans do when you walk into a restaurant. He didn’t think I’d get in. We made a plan to meet there in a week.
The next morning, the sidewalks in Mitte teemed with citizens on their way to work. Through the windows of an office building across the street from my hotel, you could see young people busy in their cubicles. Somehow, I’d assumed that on Monday mornings everyone in Berlin would be lurking in a club somewhere or else sleeping it off. But it turns out there is a Berlin of museums and gallery openings, of the Bundestag and the Chancellery, of Holocaust remembrance and Naziphilia, of Turkish immigrants and academics on sabbatical, and even of ordinary middle-class families going about their lives and escaping to Wannsee on weekends. It’s just that, if you are on techno time, you hardly see any of it. You can’t fathom that, a few U-Bahn stops away, Angela Merkel is busy presiding over the affairs of Europe.
This particular Berlin—cradle of techno culture, hotbed of lost weekends and lost minds—has been an object of international yearning and fascination for more than twenty years. Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.”
The First World War was a bracing infusion. Defeat, poverty, inflation, desperation: the celebrated cultural efflorescence and social tolerance of the Weimar years arose out of, or in spite of, a perhaps equally celebrated atmosphere of perversion and abandon. Berlin was the whorehouse of Europe. War widows, or their children, would do anything for a mark, even as a mark came to be worth practically nothing (four trillion to a dollar at one point in 1923). The Kaiser’s censors and police were gone. In came the Continent’s decadentsia, with their strong currencies and peculiar fetishes. Sally Bowles at the Lady Windermere, transvestites at the Eldorado, “sugar-lickers” (pederasts), Münzis (pregnant whores). Mel Gordon, in “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” cites the journalist Luigi Barzini: “The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and time-saving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterward.”
Apocryphal, one hopes, but such was the rep. In some respects, the notion of decadence was as integral as decadence itself. So people, in those Weimar years, also came to gawk, or to get close enough at least for the “mystery-magic of foreignness,” as Christopher Isherwood wrote, to rub off. A commodified, self-conscious version of the real thing existed even then. Isherwood cited Berlin’s “dens of pseudo-vice”: “Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Berlin was already a brand.
The Nazis closed the clubs, hounded and exterminated the homosexuals, and, in the end, brought ruin on the city. Bombed and desolate, traumatized by street fighting, starvation, and mass rape, and ultimately carved up, Berlin, after the war, barely heaved back to life. West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by East Germany, survived primarily as a political gesture, a flagpole in the sand and a thumb in the Politburo’s eye. There was very little industry, turnover, or travel in or out. No corporation could take the political risk or tolerate the barriers to commerce. To encourage people to move there, the West German government gave out stipends and exemptions from military service, so the city tended to attract the West’s mavericks and oddballs—hippies, homosexuals, political renegades—who shared the town with the elderly and the soldiers watching over them. In such hothouse isolation, a small but fervid club scene took root.
In 1988, the founders of a small record label, Interfisch, started throwing illegal all-night parties in their office. The space, in a Kreuzberg basement reached via ladder, had six-foot ceilings. It took on the name UFO. The year before, Dimitri Hegemann, one of the founders, had travelled to Chicago to arrange a licensing deal with another label. While there, he had idly browsed through its so-called white labels—rough demos, not ready for sale—and picked out something strange. It was techno from Detroit. Hegemann, a Westphalian, who had moved to Berlin in 1978, was a musicologist, a producer of British electronic music, a fan of American punk (especially the Dead Kennedys), and the founder of an experimental electronic-music festival called Berlin Atonal, but he had never heard music quite like this. He brought a stack of Detroit techno records back to Berlin.
Electronic music spans many genres, from the experimental bleeps and blurts that you might hear at the fringes of Berlin’s CTM Festival to the mega-popular sets performed by famous d.j.s like Skrillex and Avicii—which you won’t really find in Berlin. The genres for which Berlin is best known, house and, especially, techno, are mostly, as manifested there, noncommercial, rigorous, esoteric, and both experimental and orthodox. The music isn’t pop, although many elements of it derive from and inform pop. It isn’t punk, although it owes something to punk, in spirit and scene. It isn’t high art, either. It is, fundamentally, Gebrauchsmusik—“utility music,” as Paul Nettl, the Bohemian musicologist, described dance music, in 1921. The utility, in this case, is mostly that of providing succor and pleasure, a sense of direction and purpose, to addled bodies and minds. The most characteristic subgenre, which peaked in popularity about a decade ago and has been explored to the edges of tolerability ever since, is minimal techno, a spare distillation that people have sometimes likened to the knocking of spoons on pots but which others parse as though it were Brahms.
Techno is repetitive, relying on subtle changes over time to intrigue the ear. It eschews lyrics, melody, and, arguably, harmonics. It doesn’t resolve. You don’t get crowd-pleasing drops. Its essential element is a basic four-on-the-floor beat—a 4/4 dictatorship in which the bass drum, or its proxy, is struck on every beat, with a snare on each “and.” It sounds like “boots and pants, boots and pants.” Say it. Say it again. The pleasure comes in repetition, in sly referents, and in the nature of the sound—the depth and texture of the low frequencies or, in the case of acid house, the squelchy bass of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. House, which originated in the gay dance clubs of Chicago and (less so) New York in the eighties, often features a snare on the two and the four. “It’s to give people with no rhythm a way to hold on to it,” a d.j. friend, my techno rabbi, told me. “It’s the grandma handle in the shower.”
Purists object when you call this music E.D.M., though it is indisputably electronic music made for dancing. “Electronic dance music,” lowercase, used to be an acceptable catchall term for the entire range of genres (house, deep house, acid house, trance, techno, industrial, drum and bass, dubstep, brostep, hardcore, happy hardcore, jungle, garage, etc.) created and performed on computers and synthesizers. Shortened to E.D.M., however, the term has come to signify the party-crowd d.j. music that has been the biggest pop phenomenon of the past half decade—Skrillex in Vegas, bros in the house. “E.D.M. took all the gayness and blackness out of it,” my techno rabbi explained. “It’s fascistic, with the d.j. on a stage.” Some prefer to call it commercial electronic music. It doesn’t have much to do with Berlin, except to the extent that Berlin defines itself in opposition to it. The nomenclature is convoluted. To the dabbler, it can seem that there are more genres than there are differences between them.
Techno emerged in the early to mid-eighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class d.j.s who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio d.j. who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.
Techno was also developing on its own in West Germany, in the underground clubs of Frankfurt, as a logical extension of the early electronic music of Kraftwerk and of the rhythms and sounds to be mined from the records of synthpop acts like Depeche Mode. Juan Atkins, one of the godfathers of Detroit techno, says he lifted the term from the futurist Alvin Toffler, but it may have been in use in Europe before anyone in Detroit took it up, in record stores, as a designation for synthpop or for the sound that would come to be called electro. The debate goes on. The techno that would flourish in Berlin was the Detroit strand that Hegemann brought back.
As the pent-up underground energy of the West spilled into the empty wastes of the East, Hegemann and his partners, amid the rush to colonize derelict spaces, discovered a hidden depository in a Mitte basement beneath a former Wertheim department store near what had been the Wall. It had been vacant since 1945. They set up in the vault and called it Tresor. The space was symbolic of reconciliation: straddling East and West, packed with reunified Berliners—skinheads and soccer hooligans from the East in frenzied harmony with the gays and the hippies. The soundtrack was techno. In Detroit, techno had hardly left a mark, but in Berlin the music, and the Detroit d.j.s who made it, found a home. Hegemann has called techno “the most important musical movement of the last century.” In Europe, anyway, this statement does not necessarily seem hyperbolic. In some respects, techno—and its variants and relatives—represents a kind of post-Cold War folk music, endlessly adaptable, performable by anyone. As Hegemann has said, “We knew that the concept of the artist who drew all the attention from the audience was dead. Techno was all about anonymity. The artist became part of the public.” Not long ago, the Berlin d.j. Boys Noize tweeted, “If you see a d.j. that uses a mic and screams ‘put your hands up’ throw a banana at him.”
Most Berlin night clubs aren’t like the American kind. Security is light, rules are lax. Generally, there is no bottle service, no V.I.P. section, and, Berghain aside, no velvet rope. In this respect, they bear little resemblance to, say, Studio 54, which, glorious as it may have been, begat a stratified style that metastasized into the models-and-bankers Maybach-and-Cristal rat race that deflected a generation away from the clubbing life in the U.S.
Low-density neighborhoods make for lenient noise enforcement and therefore endless nights and powerful subwoofers; a liberal civic spirit means no blue laws or last calls. In Berlin, the authorities don’t especially mind your drinking on the street or on the subway. Actually, you can do pretty much anything on the street except jaywalk. It’s not a hierarchy town. There’s little compunction to network or to strive for entry into more élite social circles. “It doesn’t matter who you are here—or it matters less here, anyway, than elsewhere,” Robert Henke, a composer of electronic music who performs occasionally at Berghain, said.
Wednesday has always been a big night in Berlin, especially for resident d.j.s trying new things before a sympathetic crowd. Someone had told me to go to Farbfernseher, a small club in an old television store under the S-Bahn tracks on Skalitzer Strasse. To kill time beforehand, I wandered the streets of Kreuzberg, expecting to find bars and crowds, but on this bitter, windy night—I’d heard this weather system called the Siberian Whip—there was no one around. What bars I passed were all but empty. On my last visit to Berlin, in the spring of 1990, just after the Wall fell, a friend and I had driven from southern Poland, expecting a kind of punk paradise. Instead, we found a desolate sprawling half city with no center and no discernible scene. In other words, a punk paradise, but we didn’t have eyes to see it. Here I was in Berlin again, a generation later, still wondering where Berlin was.
Farbfernseher was a shuttered storefront on the ground floor of a graffitied apartment house with building sites on either side. I got there early, at around midnight, and claimed a spot along the wall by the bar, overlooking a small dance floor. The drink prices were listed in a Pong-era font on the screen of an old black-and-white TV. A few people sat on high benches along the walls, and a handful stood on the dance floor, watching the d.j. To my left, a stocky guy in a salmon-colored hoodie was bobbing and bouncing with great enthusiasm. His name was Ash. He and a friend, a d.j. and producer named J.P., were from Cambridge and were in town for four nights of clubbing. “Our main objective is to listen to lots of techno and get blasted,” Ash said. They were twenty-four and twenty-three. Mates, not dates. “This is what you might call introspective dancing,” Ash said, looking down at the floor. “This room needs some psychedelics.” They pointed out, with approval, the analog Atari mixing deck that the d.j. was using: old school. The display brought to mind an abacus. “It’s stuff like this that makes me question people who say electronic music is divorced from instrumentalism,” J.P. said. “That’s a keyboard, basically.”
At around 2:30 A.M., I left for Tresor. The walk was about a mile along deserted streets, past giant apartment blocks. It was like a zombie movie set in the outskirts of Helsinki. I tacked toward a pair of giant smokestacks, red lights blinking slow. The original Tresor closed in 2005, and eventually the land was sold to a developer. In 2007, Hegemann and his partners opened a new Tresor in a gigantic decommissioned power plant on Köpenicker Strasse, on the Spree. I had no trouble getting in. Inside, an assault of pounding primal techno lured me down a corridor of smoke and strobes, into a smoky basement, figures appearing and disappearing in it like ships in fog. It didn’t seem crowded, but everyone looked to be in a world of his own, some speedy, others half catatonic. The music was muscular, unrelenting. The d.j. stood behind steel bars, as though in a cell, and pressed buttons on two laptops. I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim. One could admire this music—the rigor, the noise, the industrial badassness of it—but after a while it began to seem absurd. Ash and J.P. appeared out of the fog, and we stood together awhile, watching. Scattered about were men in tight T-shirts making severe moves. “This is the solitary-rave, demolish-your-own-personality school!” Ash shouted. Later, he remarked, with something approaching admiration, “That was the single most oppressive club atmosphere I’ve ever encountered.” I lasted eighty-four minutes.
I returned the next day, in the late afternoon, having all but missed whatever daylight the Siberian Whip would permit. The offices were upstairs, shabby and pleasant, with a backstage vibe. Some gaunt young dudes skulked about. Hegemann, in a faded hoodie, was at his desk, nibbling from a bag of licorice and talking in German with a colleague over photos of the ruins of Detroit.
“I’m a space pioneer,” he said. “My mission is to transform industrial ruins into cultural spaces. I have ideas. We save cities, you know? We are like a consulting firm. I could save Detroit.”
Hegemann went on, “The music came to us from Detroit. We got the milk when the milk was fresh. Now I’m older, the music’s older. It’s not fresh. We have competition. Techno is known. It is nearly pop. But it has not lost the intensity.”
Downstairs, the techno vault, now without smoke, strobes, or aural assault, seemed no more remarkable than a fraternity tap room. The bank-vault boxes had been salvaged from the original Tresor. Their reincarnation here hinted at the creep of affectation and nostalgia in the techno culture of Berlin. We went up a stairwell and emerged into the main power plant—an old East German distance-heating facility that had served Mitte until 1996. It was now a vast empty cathedral of concrete, with towering pillars and vaults, arcane markings, and a trace of dusky natural light. Hegemann and his partners were calling this space Kraftwerk (natürlich) and didn’t know quite what to do with it. To get it up to code, for safety and fire, they’d need to invest millions of dollars that they didn’t have but hoped to pry from the City of Berlin, under the rationale of government support for an essential cultural industry and tourism draw. In the gloom, you could imagine the rhythmic clamor of the old turbines and pumps—the rudiments of techno.
The post-Wall abundance of derelict building and excess housing was decisive. “Empty spaces allowed there to be a club culture,” Robert Henke said. “With no empty space, you get a closed-at-2 A.M., restrictive-alcohol culture.” At first, the reclamation seemed slapdash, improvisational, anarchic, as squatters took over buildings and neighborhoods and set off a period of cultural ferment. But the powers that be had been dreaming up developments for years before the Wall came down, and now—amid a boom in real-estate speculation and investment (everyone spoke of the Swedes)—empty space, and the sense of wildness that comes with it, has become harder to come by. “Flats are getting more expensive,” Hegemann said. “But we still have many free spaces. This is the secret for why Berlin is still alive.”
Some empty spaces have completed their life cycles. One afternoon, I visited the old Reichsbahnbunker, a five-story fortress of reinforced concrete built by the Nazis in 1942 as an air-raid shelter. The Soviets turned it into a jail for P.O.W.s. Then it was used to store bananas and other tropical fruit. It was abandoned. In the nineties, it became an infamous techno night club, the Bunker. No ventilation, no fire exits. The government eventually shut it down. In 2003, an advertising executive and his wife bought the building and converted it into a museum to house their collection of contemporary art. They also built a glass-and-steel penthouse on the roof, to house themselves. Now the collection is open to the public, by appointment only. I joined a tour one afternoon. The guide, a young art student with a sweet monotone, took us into a cell-like space featuring giant manipulated photographs of the night sky, by Thomas Ruff, and explained that it had been the original dark room of Berlin. “It was very extreme,” she said. “It was hot, damp, loud, and dark. It was said to be the hardest club in the world. I’m sure you can imagine the things.” She gave a coy smile.
Except for Lisbon, Berlin is the cheapest capital in Western Europe. This despite being the capital of the continent’s richest country. Its population is still lower than it was at the outset of the Second World War. It’s a little like a mountain town with ski bums and trustafarians cycling through. The kids come to play, not to stay. Crammed into their WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, or “shared flats”), they luxuriate in cheap rents, idle hours, and a capricious and creative cohort. What had been a very German scene became, a decade ago, pan-European, with the rise of cheap air travel and subsidized unemployment. Then came the Americans. It can be hard to find young people willing to work more than three days a week. And yet it can also be hard for someone who is working three days a week, and who is earning the low wages that are typical of Berlin, to salt away enough money to leave—to afford, say, the first month’s rent in London or New York. So it favors those who have some money to spare or who don’t care. One ex-Berliner said, “It’s spring break for RISD kids.”
In recent years, there has been more in the way of regular employment. There are tech startups, which attract engineers. Berlin is Europe’s mobile-gaming hub, with the headquarters of Wooga. There are call centers, staffed by legions of young people pulling relatively arduous shifts, and a number of successful startups grounded in the electronic-music scene: SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments. Techno has quietly been professionalized, attracting private and government capital.
Ewan Pearson, a d.j. and producer, made his bones in the U.K. rave scene in the nineties and moved to Berlin in 2003, for a clubbing culture he found to be unpretentious and, if not temperate, then at least benign. “I’m from the West Midlands,” he told me. “Every time you went out, you were primed for danger.”
He and his wife, Caroline Drucker, a Bryn Mawr graduate who came to Berlin in 2003 to pursue a master’s in architectural theory, have what passes in Berlin for a bourgeois life. Most weekends, he travels around Europe for d.j. gigs. She helped to launch Vice Media in Germany, then moved to SoundCloud, and now she is an executive in the Berlin office of Etsy, the online retailer of vintage and handmade stuff.
Pearson was featured in “Feiern” (“Party”), a 2006 documentary about the Berlin club scene. After describing the vortex into which one can disappear on a strong night, Pearson, wry and already going a little gray (he’s forty-one now), remarks, “Don’t forget to go home.” The line gave the film its English title and became a catchphrase among the clubbers of his generation, a click of the slippers in this particular Oz. In a way, it’s an accidental mantra for the scene’s survivors, those who have fashioned a daytime life out of all those nights, and who have found a way to mellow a bit with age, without quitting entirely.
I’d been warned by a few adherents about what they called “the Berlin jade,” the cynicism of the locals, native or adopted, toward the naïve enthusiasms of outsiders. Nearly everyone I talked to considered Berlin’s peak—its finest, purest, most interesting, authentic, blissful period—to have occurred a year or two before he or she arrived. Newcomers perpetually catch the tail end and stake their claim to the remnants. Anytime an article comes out about what you might call the Berlingeist—how hip the city is, or no longer is—Berliners stick their fingers down their throats.
The writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus observed, in the Berlin chapter of “A Sense of Direction,” his 2012 pilgrimage memoir, “What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might have become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”
Each generation finds a Berlin to test that persistence. One night, I had a drink with two sisters from the suburbs of Chicago, Arielle and Adina Bier, formerly performance artists of a kind, who had recently settled in Berlin, which their grandparents were forced out of in the late thirties. Adina was interested in queer Berlin and liked to go to Homopatik—an all-weekend gay party at a club called Aboutblank—and the Sunday-night Pork party at Ficken 3000. (Its Web site: “Drink – Dance – Strip – Fuck. Music for prostitudes, indie anti-hits, pink noise, raw static, synth cherry pop, spunk rock, cock ’n’ hole, artcore + lo-fi 4 low lifes.”)
Arielle mentioned, with some disdain, an advertisement for Coca-Cola that had been making the rounds, in which a karaoke vender on a bicycle sets up his karaoke machine in Mauerpark, in Prenzlauer Berg, which is known for its flea market, and before long has an amphitheatre full of hipsters joyfully taking part. Later that night, I watched the ad a few times and wondered how the jaded Berliners had been persuaded to carry on like that for the Coca-Cola Company. The next day, I had coffee with Tilman Brembs, a very early visitor to Tresor. He worked for a casting agency, DEEBEEPHUNKY, one of the biggest in Berlin; it had a portfolio of a thousand young Berliners as models and actors for hire, and had done ads for Microsoft, IKEA, and McDonald’s. It turned out that he had cast that Coca-Cola campaign. He told me that the kids who appeared on camera were well paid. Goodbye, jade.
Brembs had come to Berlin in 1982—military-service avoidance. “The techno movement was like a second puberty for me,” he said. When he arrived at Tresor, he helped tend bar and clean up after the parties. “In the early years, there was no running water. We had buckets of water to wash with. It was a crazy time. It was magic. Everything was possible. There were not so many tourists. We had a lot of English from the Allied Forces. They got out of their bases at night and they were full of drugs. Then they came no more. Probably they were arrested. They brought a different style, the ravers, the Ecstasy, the big printed T-shirts.” At the clubs, he went on, “we had the hooligans, all these rough guys, together with the gays. There was no violence. Maybe it was the Ecstasy. There was a Wild East atmosphere. People robbed shops. The police, they drove Trabants and were not fast enough for all the Golf GTEs. We preferred to take speed. It was the speed users versus the coke users. The coke people were arrogant. But the drugs were not the motor of the movement.”
He’s been finding ways to capitalize on techno ever since. In the nineties, he was a sanctioned photographer at Tresor (“The Bunker was too hard for me”). He put ten thousand photos online in 2007, under the heading “Zeitmaschine” (“Time Machine”). He’d started a company with D.J. Tanith, an early techno pioneer in Berlin, selling camouflage fabrics and party gear. For a while, Brembs worked for the Love Parade, the street jubilee that was cancelled in 2010, after twenty-one people were killed in a stampede—the Altamont of techno. He is married to a woman from New Hampshire and living in Prenzlauer Berg (Park Slope), and for the most part no longer spends much time in the clubs.
In the nineties, two Bunker regulars, Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann, began throwing their own gay sex parties, called Snax, at various sites around the city. Around 1999, they opened a dance club in a train-repair depot in Friedrichshain, which they called Ostgut. It was essentially a gay club devoted to techno music, but it was mixed-friendly—open to women and straight men. Two years later, they started Panorama Bar, a separate space upstairs, which was straighter, and played house music and lighter techno. Downstairs were the burly, bare-chested men in camo pants and leather boots. Upstairs you had all kinds. The techno clubs of Mitte didn’t yet rely so much on the gay scene, and the gay clubs were less attentive to the quality of the music. Ostgut was a marriage of the two, and as such created something new—a gay club with mainstream appeal. It became a kind of distillation of the nineties scene. In many respects, Berlin’s queer culture is the city’s most essential and distinguishing element—the coagulant and the zest. It was thus in the twenties and in pre-1989 West Berlin, and remains so today. The clubs are its public face. No one in Berlin is made nervous or embarrassed by the idea of going to a gay club.
Ostgut closed in 2003, and the building was torn down to make way for a sports arena. A year later, Teufele and Thormann opened Berghain. Not much is known about them. Thormann is a former fashion photographer. They like ballet. They never give interviews or pose for pictures, in part because they value their privacy and in part because of a kind of underground code of silence, exile, and cunning—a combination, perhaps, of vestigial Stasi-era paranoia, punkish disdain for the media, and an embrace of the techno-culture virtue of anonymity. Whatever the case, it has added to the club’s mystique, and so one could understand their not wanting to change. By all accounts, they make a lot of money. It is remarkable, in a high-turnover town, that the place has been able to sustain the spell for so long.
People strain to explain Berghain’s appeal. The effort is widely deemed futile (to say nothing of blasphemous). This may be a by-product of psychotropic drugs and the ineffability of chemical transcendence. Tales of nights out are like other people’s recounted dreams.
You are not allowed to take photographs inside the club. If you so much as hold a smartphone up, you will likely be thrown out. The philosophy is that whatever happens here is for the moment and doesn’t exist outside of that moment or outside the club—a righteous stand, perhaps, in a social-media world. There aren’t any mirrors. The European press for years has obsessed over the difficulty of getting in. Blogs, and even apps, have tried to decode it: “Don’t look too glamorous; look queer; don’t act like a tourist; don’t look too young; don’t show up as a group of straight men or women; dress eccentrically; go alone.” Don’t speak English, don’t stand out, don’t act drunk or tweaked. The abiding idea seems to be don’t be a jerk.
No one dances to be watched. Fighting and aggression aren’t tolerated. Drug use must be discreet. If you’re wasted, they’ll kick you out. Generally, though, the security presence is subtle. Henke, the composer, told me, “There are lots of things you can do there, but there are things that you are not obliged to do. You don’t go to a fetish party and think, Maybe I’ll just have a drink and listen to some music. At Berghain, the architecture, and the social architecture, doesn’t force me into a ritual human behavior.”
I talked to a promoter who had had a lot of trouble getting into Berghain. Maybe he was too young. (“Older is better,” he said. “Kids are idiots.”) He was afraid of being quoted by name, because of the power that the Berghain owners have in Berlin. Playing there is such a privilege—not only for professional reputation but also for the sheer pleasure of playing extra-long sets in a wild and tasteful place—that no one wants to be subject to a Hausverbot. “A huge ingredient in their secret sauce is control,” he said. Henke, who knows the owners well, said, “They’re still not sure how to handle how this place became so popular.”
One way they’d handled it was by keeping journalists and other squares like me out. But my techno rabbi had got me onto the guest list of a d.j.
On wide, empty streets, I rehearsed my pidgin-Deutsch greeting—“Ich bin auf der Hausliste”—and walked past superstores that had sprung up in recent years on vacant lots. Before long, I fell in with a few other cloaked figures and came upon a line of taxis, then followed a muddy path along a metal grate toward the old power station, an industrial-deco block of stone and concrete. Berghain. Through the windows you could hear the kick drum and see flashing colored lights. The line wasn’t long: a few dozen bundled and murmuring souls. I circumvented it, as instructed, and waited by the entrance while the bouncer, a big square-jawed crewcut man in an overcoat, dealt with some supplicants. He was in intense but quiet conversation, as though about a medical condition, with two young men with the sides of their heads shaved. Turks, perhaps.
“In spite of this, we say no because we can say no,” he told them. “It’s just bad luck.”
For some reason, they were holding out their passports, open to their photos. “Please,” one said. “Please,” the other said.
“You’re not getting in,” the bouncer said gently. He ignored the passports and turned his back. They looked crestfallen. Next up was a group of five British men, probably in their early thirties, with a City of London polish about them. The bouncer explained that there wouldn’t be a place inside for them tonight, and one of them said something cheeky about Berlin being a backwater. The bouncer shrugged.
“I’m just joking,” the Brit said.
“I got it,” the bouncer said. He waited for them to go away and then he turned to face me.
“Ich bin . . .” The bouncer disappeared inside. I’d been told that the list was no guarantee. I also knew that they didn’t want me in their club. (“You’re an American,” I’d been told, “and to them that makes you a Puritan.”) After a moment, he came back out with two other bouncers. They looked me up and down, then motioned me in. Another man patted me down. Nearby, Sven Marquardt, the infamously intimidating tattooed bouncer, was talking and laughing with a group. He didn’t look so scary, at least compared with the others. At a ticket window, a man stamped my wrist and said, “See? Easy.”
Through a door was a big concrete hall. Coat check: the operation was brisk. For a chit, you got a dog tag to wear around your neck, so you wouldn’t lose it. I tried some doors and found them to be locked, and realized that Berghain proper wasn’t open until the following night. Tonight was just Panorama Bar, an evening billed as “Get Perlonized!,” a celebration of the music of Perlon, a small but beloved Berlin techno and house record label. I walked up some side stairs decorated with giant photo portraits of the resident d.j.s, who were all, it seemed, forbiddingly handsome, and, at a small bar half hidden behind a grate, ordered a Club-Mate—an herbal energy drink—into which, as is the custom, I poured a shot of vodka, and then went Carrawaying around.
A seasoned crowd: diverse in age, appearance, sexual preference, condition of mind. The vibe was laid-back, the look dishevelled, wild-eyed, attractive, louche. Bedhead, shaved head—intentional hair. Dark clothing, layers, leather, natural fibres, boots, scarves, piercings. The smell of tobacco and weed and sweat. Groups lounged on benches and in comfy chairs and on the floor. The bathrooms were buzzing with cokey conversation. Couples entered hand in hand and found stalls. While using one for its intended purpose, I heard laughter to one side and rustling to the other, and felt the embarrassment of my Puritanical roots. The main bar, three-sided and occupying the back half of the main space, was cleverly lit, with attentive bartenders and no risk of being overlooked. The prices were low. I walked behind the bar area, along a dark corridor of cubbies in which people were fooling around or spacing out, and tacked back toward the d.j., who was working at the front of the room. The d.j. table hung from the ceiling on chains. You couldn’t get very close, but there was space along the wall, where the floor was strewn with empty bottles—beer, water, Club-Mate—which people generally just toss on the floor. Now and then, a man came through with a crate and unobtrusively gathered some up, but as the night wore on the floor pooled up with broken glass—Berghain jetsam. The sound was loud and yet clean enough to allow conversation. A friend had told me, with regard to the evolution of minimal techno, “If you amplify it really loud, you need less music.”
Nothing to photograph here. I stayed until 7 A.M.
Saturday night, or really Sunday morning, is Klubnacht at Berghain. I was back at 3 A.M., this time in the main club, approaching peak tourist hour. Past the coat check, there was a giant concrete atrium, pretty much empty, with a bar in the corner. A few glass bottles rained down from above and shattered at my feet. A steel staircase led up to a big dance floor surrounded by various bars and nooks. The left side of the dance floor was dominated by muscular men, many shirtless, and a few doing a dance that I’d heard called, jokingly, Pressing the Dwarf. The straight crowd was to the right, but it seemed that most were up at Panorama Bar. Here and there were concrete plinths, upon which pretty people danced. Groups lounged on beds hanging from chains, gently swinging back and forth.
The dark rooms were around somewhere, but I didn’t go looking for them. Perhaps I’d wait for the boar hunter. Here and there stuff was going on, in plainish sight, yet I saw little to upset or titillate. The Caligula mystique, the stories of men defecating on each other or using frozen turds as dildos, seemed disproportionate. No one offered me so much as a glance, to say nothing of an Icy Mike. I had a shot of Jägermeister and an espresso and went out onto the dance floor and stood in front of one of the speakers. There were six of them, each about the size of a Trabant. The sound was revelatory, the deep bass tones like a drug. A d.j. named Mathew Jonson, from Vancouver, had taken over the booth for an improvisational turn with two others, who performed under the name Minilogue. The three men hunched over laptops and mixers as though herding tiny animals with their hands. Jonson had a curly mop of hair and a beard, and looked like some wild ape-man of electronica. The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it.
The hours passed. During a weekend, the clubbers come and go, as if to a tidal rhythm. A friend had likened the scene to a coral reef: various schools of multicolored fish, stubborn crustaceans, the occasional ray or eel gliding by, swimming in an ocean of techno. In the eddies, there were people who, though all but motionless, seemed caught up in something intense—you could see it in their eyes. “You are touched by the different frequencies,” the d.j. Ricardo Villalobos says in “Feiern.” “You start to think about your childhood.” Transcendence and transgression lurked just out of sight.
At one point, I went up to Panorama Bar, where a d.j. from Windsor, Ontario, was playing a set of Chicago house and Detroit techno. Her name was Heidi—Heidi Van den Amstel. She had curly peroxided hair, a white T-shirt, tattoos on her arms, and leather pants. She’d arrived from London shortly before her set, amid flight delays across Europe—an entire Continent of revellers vexed by a disruption to the techno supply chain. She was part of the generation of Windsorites who’d fallen hard for the dance music across the river, in Detroit. She moved to Europe a dozen years ago, living in London and Berlin. This was the first time she had played Panorama Bar in almost four years. She had been nervous, but now she was in the thick of it, dancing and tossing her hair as she worked the mixing console. She flipped through a binder of CDs and manipulated knobs, her pinkie out, as though she were drinking tea. Her agent brought her a shot of tequila, which she chased with a lemon wedge, and she shuddered. A voice in the music intoned, as though from a Zeitmaschine, “Can you feel it acid house acid house I was there.” People were jammed up in front of her dancing, some with Avalon Ballroom abandon. “I want you, I need you.” This was fun music, joyous music, not the austere minimal techno of downstairs, or the jazzy techno of Jonson and Minilogue, or the hardcore techno that would inspire one to press the dwarf. The bass rattled the empty tin record bins behind the d.j. I sent a text to the boar hunter, wondering if he was around. He replied, “KitKatClub.”
After a few hours, Heidi stretched her back and leaned into the climax of her set. Downstairs, the techno—and the crowd—had turned hard. Upstairs, the dingy gray light of another Baltic morning leaked past the edges of the louvred shutters at the windows. Soon the shades would flash open in synch with the music, to astonish the congregation with the insult of daylight.
Two d.j.s who go by the name Bicep took over. Heidi checked her face in her compact, gave herself over to the adulation of the dancers down in front, and then, after a moment, made her way to the bar with her boyfriend and her agent. I joined them for tequila shots and beers. Breakfast in Berlin. This went on for a while. Heidi had had a marvellous time—too much for words, really—but she didn’t want to talk about Berghain. She was afraid that if she did she’d never get to play there again. ♦
