The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (35 page)

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 website: “Drink—Dance—Strip—Fuck. Music for prostitutes, 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 vendor 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 amphitheater 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 10,000 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 canceled in 2010, after 21 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 DJ.

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 DJs, 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 disheveled, wild-eyed, attractive, louche. Bedhead, shaved head—intentional hair. Dark clothing, layers, leather, natural fibers, 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 DJ, who was working at the front of the room. The DJ 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 DJ 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.