BERLIN — All the stories about Berghain have already been written, the best ones long ago. This turns out to provide relief when you go there again to write another one.
Only now, the occasion demands it: this techno club has now existed for 20 years, and this past weekend it celebrated Friday to Monday (Dec. 13 to Dec. 16), which is actually the usual routine — Berghain celebrates every weekend. But this weekend the line was guaranteed to be exceptionally long. But it’s also guaranteed to be efficiently processed by the bouncers.
This is all part of the Berghain myth, even before you enter: the queue and bouncers, the fear of being rejected. And with Berghain, the word “myth” is for once not misplaced
It’s 4:45 p.m. Saturday. Waited in line for a scant three-quarters of an hour, guest list only for friends of the house. As a journalist, it’s better not to make a fool of yourself by asking for a guest list spot at Berghain beforehand.
No one with Berghain experience lines up in front of this place in the evening or at night, as you would do for any other club. Because at that time there’s even more going on — at Berghain there’s always too much of everything, and that’s what makes it unrivaled among the world’s techno clubs.
“Have you been here before?” asks the bouncer.
“For the first time 18 years ago,” I say.
“But you haven’t been here for a while, have you?”
He looks at me, more at my face than at my clothes, he’s simply a professional. The people who work for Berghain have always been exclusively — and in nightlife, this is an absolute compliment — professionals.
“Nope,” I say.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, then come in. Have fun.”
It’s an act of grace, or at least generosity. Right before me, the bouncer had sent away a few women and many men who were definitely sexier, better-looking, younger, and more eager to party.
But probably it helped that I could answer in German and could cite a personal history.
The most famous club in the world
The sentence about the 18 years just tumbled out of my brain, and it wasn’t even a lie. If there was one thing you could always rely on at the door of Berghain, you accept their judgments silently and resignedly and keep your mouth shut.
Inside, everything is like it used to be.
The American woman and her silent companion behind me in the queue, for example, had to think of another way to spend their day. Yet the loud American woman had apparently (I had enough time in the queue to involuntarily listen to her chatter) even rebooked a flight especially for the Berghain anniversary.
Alright then, now let’s go in.
Berghain is rightfully still probably the most famous club in the world. A huge block of a building, the former machine house of the Friedrichshain heating plant, which was built in the early 1950s and, among other things, supplied the nearby residential and commercial buildings of the then Stalin Allee (today Karl-Marx-Allee) with heating. The heating plant was shut down in 1988, then operated for another decade as a so-called district heating transfer station until its final complete shutdown in 2002.
Inside the machine hall
On Dec. 18 2004, the techno club Berghain opened in the former machine hall. Two months earlier, the Panorama Bar had opened its doors to the public on the floor above, in the former control room. The latter is something like the house club of Berghain, where somewhat more pleasant dance music is played compared to the super-hard booming downstairs in the machine hall.
Inside, everything is like it used to be.
First, the small anteroom for the security check, empty pockets, body pat-down, have your phone camera covered (the eternal story: nothing should get out from inside Berghain, especially no photos), the cash register, wow, you can now pay by card … 55 euros for the anniversary weekend, okay.
Then the already huge anteroom with the wardrobes and lockers, a bit like in a swimming pool. The state of undress of the visitors getting rid of their things is already about the same as after changing at a swimming pool.
Only in a swimming pool, there wouldn’t be a written request to better write down your number somewhere — things tend to get lost in Berghain: cloakroom bands, but also orientation and a clear head.
And instead of swimsuits or bikinis, people in Berghain wear shorts or skimpy fetish clothes or string tangas and otherwise rather nothing but shoes on their feet, in case of doubt heavy boots or light sneakers.
1990s Berlin
The prehistory of Berghain goes back to the gay parties of the Snax Club in the early 1990s in the former Reichsbahn bunker Friedrichstraße, continued in their own club Ostgut at Ostbahnhof, which was closed in 2003 due to the impending demolition (it was, naturally, turned into a parking garage).
The former heating plant at Wriezener Bahnhof has now belonged to the operators of Berghain since 2011. Should the place ever close, it would probably be the result of a conscious, free decision and presumably not one to which external circumstances would force them, as was the case with Ostgut.
Just like techno, it exists alongside the present in a parallel universe.
In principle, Berghain can always go on. Just like techno — whose time is over on the one hand; on the other hand, it’s here to stay — it exists alongside the present in a parallel universe.
Just like Berghain — one of the success stories of East Berlin.
Now out of the anteroom, upstairs. Already audible: the booming of the basses from the machine hall, from Berghain, the announcement of the imminent shaking, the physical experience.
Then up the winding wide steel staircase, the never-fails stunning first view into the incredibly high hall and the twitching bodies in the thunderstorm of strobes and other lighting effects, the screamingly loud beats and how they pull you in and repel you at the same time, the brief moment of hesitation, the slight (really!) threshold anxiety.
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A religious experience?
A visit to Berghain has been and is repeatedly compared to a religious experience, a service to God or rather idols, and the cathedral-like nature, the sheer dimensions of the building suggest this interpretation.
But it is fundamentally wrong, at least in the observable and self-perceived user reality: It’s about the opposite of a spiritual awakening, namely the reduction of the human to the body. Here, you are supposed to forget what or who you are or believe to be, beyond your mere physicality.
This may be a liberation for many who want to escape constraints and seek their supposed authenticity or at least a side of themselves that they can’t or perhaps aren’t allowed to show in so-called normal life.
It is also a sport: endurance is required, and fitness.
But outside, outside Berghain, there is freedom, at least for most people. There are basically no immaterial chains that would be handed in at the checkroom with the street clothes. In a society that may have prejudices against some sexual or gender self-attributions, but no longer sanctions them, what happens in Berghain is, above all, an activity of pure leisure.
It is also a sport, in a certain sense: endurance is required, and fitness. Besides the equalizing, also somehow democratizing transformation of the individual into a part of the mass, the exposure of bodies has something enormously trivializing that robs all of their secrets. These massive exposed male upper bodies, highly trained muscle flesh, uniformly shaved or waxed, are at the same time impressive and completely trivial when they appear in such numbers.
Earlier, I think I remember, there was less skin in Berghain and no topless women, who now occasionally mingle among the shirtless men — but maybe memory deceives.
Time has not passed
I go, as before, relatively quickly up to the Panorama Bar, with its minimalist beauty. Everything is unchanged.
You land from the intermediate corridor directly on the dance floor, the friendly radiance of the dancers, you push past them to the black rubber-coated bar, behind it Wolfgang Tillmans pictures on the wall, on the counter as always the large glass vases with fresh lilies — the flower of death or rather flower-turner-reminder of the finitude of all existence, a friendly reminder so to speak: it doesn’t go on forever after all.
I at least have always understood the lilies as a reminder also of those who have gone, of those who no longer dance or can dance, should there be no heaven with a dance floor in it.
Gay clubs, and at its core Berghain is still one, have always been places over which hung a sense of mourning since the eighties and the then absolutely deadly AIDS epidemic (but maybe that’s just my interpretation, I was largely club-socialized in gay places in the eighties).
The time aspect has always been the essential thing about Berghain: a paradox that in this club time seems both suspended and totally connected to you. The hours and days pass differently inside than outside, normal timing doesn’t apply here: what counts is every second of the presence of bodies, now, now, now, in the tempo of the beats, whose uniformity in turn seems thought of as a stretch, you go in and with and forget time, are sucked into something that has no name and above all no end and no course, it is there.
That was so 18 years ago on my first visit and is still the same today.
And just as the music is reduced to its pure functionality in Berghain, so are the spaces, which beyond the preserved steel and concrete power plant architecture are geared towards satisfying needs, and that applies not only to the darkroom downstairs, which some frequent in between, the cuddle capsules behind the Panorama Bar, the smoking areas on the back stairs, the dance floors, the bars, the communal toilets for all gender identities. Everything is well thought out and washable and well maintained by the staff.
Time can do nothing to Berghain in this sense. Time has passed this club without a trace: whatever has happened outside in the past 20 years has had no influence, or hardly any, on what has happened and is happening inside, precisely because time remains suspended inside.
Forever standing
This and the clear ownership make Berghain isolated to what is happening to other clubs in Berlin right now. Many are shutting down. But Berghain is not the normal case, clubs were actually never institutions designed to last, time passed over them, especially in Berlin, and then they disappeared.
I, for example, have had to say goodbye to a bunch of clubs I also liked to go to in the almost 20 years I’ve lived in this city. Whoever talks about clubs dying in Berlin today either has no historical consciousness or has a rather new understanding of clubs as permanent cultural institutions to be maintained if necessary with state funding.
Who will still want to dance here in 20 years?
This time, I only stay a few hours in Berghain. When leaving, nobody says goodbye, you wind your way past the bouncers, the queue outside has grown even longer by now. If you take a closer look now, you see that time does play a role. Previously, everything here except the Metro wholesale market next door was wasteland at Wriezener Bahnhof. But now the concrete skeletons of what will soon be half a dozen large buildings stand around Berghain.
The present or rather a promise for the future of Berlin as a city is moving closer to Berghain. Who will still want to dance here in 20 years? Who will still be able to remember?
But an end to Berghain is not foreseen, not foreseeable, not imaginable.
Berghain, this heating plant converted into a techno machine, once built in the style of socialist classicism, will remain standing, even if Berlin should one day run out of promises or the whole world should end. The music cannot die, it will remain, in Berghain, in the nothingness of time.
