Berghain
Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.
“Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” [What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.] -- Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning
Under a full moon, with Mercury in retrograde, on a weekend so inauspicious it's nicknamed the Ides of March, I spent 30 glorious hours dancing, sweating, hallucinating, and fever-dreaming.
Thirty hours may sound like a lot of time for a weekend, but I'm a relative neophyte compared to the hardcore who spend that much time in this revered club every weekend, week after week, year after year. And yet, due to the magic of Berghain's clockless nowever and a heady cocktail of full moon energy, lysergic acid, psilocybin, and good old C. arabica, I lived multitudes of lives within this 30-hour weekend.
What's more, the confluence of these supernatural, pharmacological, psychological, chronological and physiological forces has shaped this series of posts into what may be the weirdest review you've ever read of a dancefloor. I'll ease you into it -- it won't get truly weird until part four.
I count myself lucky that I live 5,800 (straight-line) miles away from Berghain's siren song, for I would surely splinter the ship of my body upon its hedonistic shores were I not tied by obligations to the mast of sanity back in my home state of California.
About four hours from the end of my time in Berghain, I stood on the steel balcony overlooking the main floor just taking it all in. Len Faki filled my ears, a properly fogged room shot-through with blue lancets of light seared after-images into my retinas, and the half-naked bodies in the room below writhed and bounced in perfect time with the beat. I couldn't stop grinning and I must have looked mad -- the occipitofrontalis muscle was cramping with the effort of holding a grin that would not leave my face. And yet, even as I smiled and bounced to the beat from my balcony perch, I found myself crying with gratitude and awe at the overwhelming beauty of this perfectly imperfect place, this den of moral sinfulness, this mountain grove that sits on flat land in a city, this Berghain.
Because I (of course!) obeyed Berghain's rules around no photography, I have no photos to remember Berghain by, but I took frequent breaks to take notes, and this review is the product of my notes. Some of the images are burned brightly into my mind's eye -- seared by the intensity and novelty of experience as surely as if a white-hot cattle brand had been thrust into my eye socket to directly sear the image onto my brain. I will never forget these scenes, and hope that I might be able to write about some of them here in a way that conjures them up for you.
I've divided this review into parts to make it more digestible. In total, I expect to spill some 20,000 words here, but some parts of this experience will remain unpublished, being saved for my book on magical dancefloors -- a first draft of which is due to be completed this year. I've also put two especially vulnerable parts of this review -- about the infamous dark rooms -- behind a paywall as a sort of doorman to bounce the unserious from touristically strolling through work that took immense courage and vulnerability to write.
Here's what you'll find inside. Each of these sections will be linked when the corresponding piece is published -- pieces will be spaced a few days apart for the next several weeks. Hit the "subscribe" button to receive a notification when each part goes live.
INTRO - You're here now
How to get in to Berghain (part 1)
Sweaty Panoramas
My dark room experience (part 1)
The Berghain floor
The Berghain experience
My dark room experience (part 2)
How to get in to Berghain (part 2)
THE DOOR
Imagine you're standing there now, on a chilly night under a full moon that silvers the edges of the mountainous building that stands alone in the distance. Warmly bundled supplicants queue in the cold, quietly shuffling forward on the hard-packed dirt path to meet their fate at the hands of its feared doormen whose names and nicknames are whispered by the lips and tapped out by the fingertips of those who obsessively discuss how not to get rejected by them -- Mischa, Septum, Lars, Braids, Beard, Mustache, Blonde, Matrix, and Sven.
This last one is the patriarch of the door crew. At age 63, he's been running the security team since Berghain opened its doors in 2004.
In interviews I watched before venturing to Berghain from Los Angeles, I remember my first reaction to hearing Sven's voice: he's a soft-spoken, thoughtful man whose slight lisp and higher vocal register undermine the tough exterior of tattoos and piercings.
Countless videos, blogs, articles, and tweets have been written about how to make it through the infamous door gauntlet to win admission to Berghain's hallowed grounds.
The obsession with Berghain's door seems warranted. It can be heartbreaking to buy into the hype of Berghain -- "best party on earth" and so on -- only to be turned away at the door. It can undermine an ego-fragile person's constructed identity -- are you really cool enough, sexy enough, queer enough, enough-enough if you were turned away at the door? Did you wear the right quantity of nihilistic ennui on your brow, and carry yourself with the correct quantity of je ne sais quoi in your step? Did you wear enough black?
I'll tackle these questions in the next post. But I don't want to sow doubt where none belongs: yes, of course you're enough. The door is great, but it's got an error rate, and that means people that belong get denied even as people who really shouldn't be there get admitted. More on this in the next post.
To wrap this intro up, I'll share some more info about the events I attended the weekend of March 13 - 16.
SOUND METAPHORS ANNIVERSARY PARTY
I was idly perusing the Berghain website one day when I spotted this event and sat upright in my chair because it was a rare ticketed event (read: nearly guaranteed entry) with a wonderful lineup. I figured the worst-case scenario is that I would fly from Los Angeles to Berlin to attend this event inside Berghain for a single night and I would come away with some understanding of what makes the place legendary, even if I failed to get in on the subsequent night.
On this night, I attended ~13.5 hours, from ~10:15PM Friday, March 13 to ~11:45AM on Sat, March 14. Most of my time was spent enjoying the work of these artists:
Suzanne Ciani
Palms Trax
ffan
Mad Professor
Pem & Mr. Sian
Sound Metaphors DJs
Konduku
69db
DJ Stingray 313
Interstellar Funk
A full review of this experience will be included in the subsequent posts of this series.
The following night, I attended Berghain's famous Klubnacht.
KLUBNACHT
This is the party Berghain's most famous for. I knew of only Len Faki, Quiet Husband, and Marie Montexier before setting foot in Berlin. I was mostly attending on faith that Berghain's booking team doesn't slip up.
For Klubnacht, I attended a total of about ~16.5 hours (from ~1:15AM to ~2:00AM on Sunday morning, again from ~3:30AM to 8:10AM on Sunday morning, and finally from ~8:10PM Sunday until 7:05AM Monday).
Most of these hours were spent in the company of these artists:
Len Faki
Gene on Earth
Paquita Gordon
Marie Montexier
Francois X
Again, I'll be writing too many words about my Klubnacht experience in a subsequent post here. I’ve got a couple days to get that post ready — stay tuned.
I'll conclude with one more note. I'm not here to help tourists or Instagram influencers get into Berghain. I'm writing this out of a deep love for this place that has changed me forever, and I'm writing it as part of my project to describe magical dancefloors of the world, of which Berghain is certainly one. My hope in writing about Berghain is that what I write here will inspire dancers to demand more from their dancefloors, teach organizers (the ones who bother to read this, anyway) something about what makes dancefloors magical, and perhaps even influence the future of dancefloors.
Tschuss! See you in a few days.
Whoop! Firstly, thank god you got in, and secondly, very much looking forward to reading!
I can't wait!!