A coffee when the drums burst
They say it's one of the most exclusive and mysterious techno clubs in the world. Neither Elon Musk nor Britney Spears have managed to get in, and YouTube and TikTok are full of videos with advice on how to dress and what attitude to display in line to get in. There are even a couple of mobile apps and virtual simulators with facial recognition ( Enter the Club and Berghain Trainer ) that young people from all over the world download to train themselves. But getting in isn't a result of your face matching an algorithm; it's a mixture of things that no one but the human bouncers understand. The Berghain myth has been woven into literature and television fiction for 20 years (one of the most recent appearances was in Sorogoyen's The New Years ), and its star bouncer, Sven Marquardt, is now as famous as the club itself, as shown in the documentary Berlin Bouncer . In fact, many people go just so Sven can say no, even if they have to wait in mile-long lines in the rain.
We walked in, dressed in the basics (a black T-shirt and pants) on a Sunday afternoon at coffee time, after three hellishly-faced doormen told us to " have fun ." Up front, they'd been seeing off half the crowd with a curt " not today ." I wanted to know if it's true that you can have a coffee while the drums blast off the walls and the bodies dance ecstatically around you, dog-headed, naked, and studded. It is. A coffee, a tea, an ice cream, or a mocktail . Although the best thing about Berghain is everything that can't be told because it has to be experienced.
Techno was born in Detroit in the mid-80s, but as Felix Denk and Sven Von Thulen write in Der Klang der Familie (Alpha Decay, 2015), it found the homeland it never found in its cradle in Berlin. It also found its family: a group of excited young people who, after the fall of the Wall, woke up in a city that needed to be redefined. The rest of the magic came from the spaces that were available for its transformation: a vault, a World War II bunker, an old electrical substation...
In Berlin, it's almost impossible not to end up dancing at a rave . Even if you don't want to. The music calls to you from both sides of the Spree River. Last year, UNESCO recognized Berlin techno and clubbing as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. When you enter one of their legendary clubs, you understand what they're preserving. They're museums of moving figures, exercises in extreme freedom.
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