A new Berlin is being invented here. This is neither the West Berlin of the 70s, the battleground of alternative culture that has left its signature on Ton Steine Scherben records and Seyfried comics, nor the dark Kreuzberg of the 80s, brought to global fame by the radical left, Mayday riots and the Einstürzende Neubauten; the incomparable village in the shade of the Wall that still showed the signs of the burden of history, which Sven Regener describes in his Berlin Blues. And it’s not the East Berlin of the 90s either, the adventure playground that graduated from gaudy dancers on walls to the backdrop of the Love Parade. It’s certainly not the Berlin of the Aggro rappers, the city of no mercy where everyone looks out for himself and crime lies in wait on every street corner. And it has nothing to do with the neo-Wilhelminian fantasies regularly raising their heads from soap-boxes since reunification.
This new Berlin that attracts thousands of clubbing tourists every weekend is the party capital of the Western world. It’s a city where the rents are low and the authorities are extremely liberal. Where the reality principle of other cities is suspended in favour of a comprehensive lust principle. No one here really has to work – apart from on some kind of art or music projects – new clubs are opening up all the time, and you actually spend all your time at parties. That especially.
Be it Berghain or Bar 25, Tresor or Watergate – the clubs in the new party zone have made Berlin a place of pop-cultural desire. A city that convinces a lot of people that it’s not everywhere that freedom has been sacrificed to security. That you can do things differently. […]
The Berghain has a number of similarities to a cathedral, not just in terms of architecture. It really is a temple to techno. And whether intentional or not, the long wait in the queue is the prelude to an initiation rite that continues with the inevitable tingling feeling as you shuffle closer to the door. You see people being turned away ahead of you. You try to work out the criteria. It’s usually fairly simple: groups of young lads always have it tough, even tougher if they’re tourists, heteros or obviously drunk. But these are just probabilities. No one can help laughing when a punk isn’t allowed in and shouts out a loud, ‘Fuck you, Deutschland! You’re a load of tossers! I’m from Vienna!’
You don’t want to party with just anyone, so you don’t shed a tear for any of those turned away; at the same time you pay for the exclusivity with the risk of not getting in yourself.
Identification with the tormentor mingled with excitement and fear – a whole lot of contradictory emotions come together on the way into Berghain. And it has to be that way; it’s the opening tension that lifts when you finally enter the club.
The initiation rite continues with the careful drug check you pass through in the lobby – a ritual cleansing. After that you make your offering, another religious act. Only to land up in the cloakroom, a huge room dotted with sofas and dominated by a giant mural by the Polish artist Piotr Nathan. It’s called ‘Rituals of Disappearance’. The light architecture underlines the feeling of an initiation: it’s dark outside, dimly lit in the lobby, bright in the cloakroom. Once you’ve stepped over the final threshold and entered the large hall from which you’ve already heard thumping beats, it suddenly goes dark again. You cross the room, walk up the large steel staircase, and even if you know what you’re letting yourself in for in the hours to come, it’s always a brief shock to stand by the dancefloor, shrieked at by the music. For a few seconds until your eyes have adapted to the flashing strobes, you stumble around half blind. It’s not unlike a slap in the face – not only do you have to shove your way more or less sober through a mass of sweating bodies that have all been here a few hours. The sound waves of the music assault you physically too.
Something to drink to start with.
There are a total of six bars on the three levels. One in the right-hand side room next to the large dancefloor, a room you can imagine like the side aisle of a gothic cathedral. Just as the old master-builders staged a clever interplay of windows and slim columns to emphasise the direct link heavenwards, the spotlights here are set to make the already high ceiling appear even higher. Another bar is slightly hidden to the left of the dancefloor, near the darkrooms. From there, a staircase takes you up to the Panoramabar, slightly smaller and slightly brighter than Berghain itself. Upstairs is house and hetero, downstairs is hard and gay. (…)
You go to Berghain late, sometimes very late: plenty of Berliners now come bright and early in the morning to avoid the tourist rush-hour up to eight a.m. And you stay a long time. Often, you can’t quite remember what you did in the hours in between. Not just because you may have been under the influence of various uppers and downers in the meantime – Berghain opens up its own space-time continuum. With other clubs, you go in, stay a while and then go somewhere else. Here, you stay. The rest of the world disappears. In Berghain, you’re out of area. You have to be into it. You can feel very lost as the only sober person in the middle of hundreds of people determined to get high. Especially as the place is huge – 3000 people probably get hustled through on a good night. But every room has such a confident underlying feeling for proportion that you feel – well, feeling at home would be overdoing it. Like a fish in water is more like it. You’re here precisely because it’s not home, after all....
Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound, Berlin Techno und der Eastyjetset Translated by Katy Derbyshire
Read more in city-lit Berlin, edited by Heather Reyes and Katy Derbyshire, £9.99 paperback, Oxygen Books.
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