Berghain (2/8): getting in

How to stop worrying and love the door

Photo by Michael Mayer via flickr.com/photos/michael_mayer/

(This is part two of an eight-part series that begins with this article.)

THE WALL AND THE DOOR

Erected overnight, the Berlin Wall divided Berlin, kettling East Germans inside a communist "workers paradise" that was so restrictive, surveilled, and difficult that about 100,000 people risked their lives to find a way over, under, or through the wall. About 5,000 people -- or 5% -- made it through. More than 100 died, shot by border guards during their attempts.

There are echoes of the wall in Berghain's famous door. Beyond the door lies an Eden of sorts. The door keeps the rest of the world kettled in its dreary workaday world characterized by omnipresent surveillance capitalism, restrictive anti-nudity regulations, and an oppressive hetero-normative gender regime. About 12 milllion tourists visit Berlin each year, but Berghain only admits around 2,000 lucky souls per weekend to enter its walled garden where a better life can be found.

Is it any wonder, then, that the single most-asked question about Berghain is how to get in?

To be clear, I don't know the answers. But I did manage to piece together a few things before getting on a plane from Los Angeles to spend three nights inside this garden of earthly delights. I'll share here part of what I figured out.

Hieronymus Bosch — Garden of Earthly Delights

For the attention-span-deprived, here's the short answer on how to get in. I'm going to skip past the basics you've probably already heard (wear black, don't go in large groups, don't be loud or noisy in the queue, etc.) and instead skip to the advanced tactics.

In a nutshell, here's the formula for how to get in:

1. Tattoo your face and neck in at least two places

2. Spend at least $2,000 on a full-body latex suit

3. Wear authentic German Rave Kandi

Once you've knocked this todo list out, you can go queue up in Berlin. No need to continue reading. Give Sven a cheery "Hallo!" from us.

Ok, now that we've sent the short attention-span folks off to do their shopping and body modifications and it's just the real ones, let me explain that the path to Berghain is littered with the bodies of folks who have followed guides on how to get in. Some of the guidance is not terrible, but most of it fails to start with perhaps the most important advice about getting in, which is to get your head on straight about why you want to attend at all.

WHY ARE YOU GOING?

There's no one right reason to go. There are multiple legitimate reasons, and there are multiple illegitimate reasons. I believe the bouncers are basically trying to admit folks that are there for the right reasons and reject those that are there for the wrong reasons.

My reasons for attending were twofold.

First and foremost, I love a good dance party and have found that specific dance parties have transformed my life in positive ways. I needed to dance for hours and hours in Berghain, and would not be deterred from this mission. I have questions about life and what the fuck I'm doing here, and dancing to music provides me with the answer.

Second, I'm writing a book about dance music and about those rarified events that are so good that they achieve that ineffable quality of "magic." I had heard that Berghain is a magical place, but needed to see it directly to write about it, because -- for all the ink spilled on the topic -- there's not a lot of writing that meets my bar in terms of detail, verisimilitude, and emotion. In reviewing what had been written, I sensed a hole that I could uniquely fill with my pen and the ink that would surely gush out of it after a stimulating weekend in Berghain.

THE SNAKE AND THE DECISION

As people get close to Berghain, there's a section of queue called "the snake" where, it's said, the door team starts to eye those who would gain entry. As folks snake through the queue, the door staff are able to evaluate dress, demeanor, behavior, and energy. They can suss out whether someone's too drunk or high already, whether a large group has split into multiple groups to increase their chances of getting in, and whether folks seem comfortable in their own skins, or whether they're tugging uncomfortably at the costumes they wore for this moment.

Then it's your turn. You stand some 10 feet from the doorman and he asks you a couple of questions in German or English (your choice). He wants to know how many are in your party. He might also ask which artist you're here for. Then you'll be allowed in or receive a verbal rejection -- often in the form of "heute leider nicht" ("Unfortunately not today").

The bouncers have the job of figuring out who fits and doesn't fit the vibe that they're trying to create inside the club. To do this, they'll run through a list of criteria that nobody on the inside has ever spelled out, but that can be pieced together by observing the anecdotes and history of decisions.

Easy rejections include:

• too drunk

• too rowdy

• rude or disrespectful behavior while in queue

These are the sorts of rejections any decent bar or club should have at the door. Then we get into the realm of much more subjective criteria: what you're wearing, how you carry yourself, whether you seem to be a fit for the vibe of the club, and so on. Even though this is a much more subjective set of criteria, there are still some obvious faux pas signals that one can send:

source: Ultra Miami 2024 Official Aftermovie

• Wearing some poorly-made, ill-fitting getup you purchased on Amazon or Shein and that you're clearly uncomfortable in -- i.e., a costume that's not authentic to who you are

• Wearing stereotypical kandified "rave festival outfits" (the EDC / Tomorrowland / Ultra look) that are just culturally miles away from the vibe of Berghain

A recent academic paper summarized the door in a flowchart that boils the "selection" process (the right-most branch in the diagram to:

• assess customer readiness

• assess fit to social atmosphere

• assess unique contribution to the customer cohort

Source: “Curating the Crowd: How Firms Manage Social Fit to Stage Social Atmospheres” — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222429251328277

They're not looking for a bunch of clones, all dressed in black, all wearing the same look of nihilistic ennui, all smoking the same hand-rolled cigarettes. They're looking to assemble a party with diversity and tension. They're looking to keep the place true to its roots as a club for gay men, and (more broadly) gay and queer folk.

Most of the advice you'll encounter online completely misses the point as it focuses on appearances. You can't fake a lifestyle, and if we dress a pig in leather harnesses, it's still obviously a pig. Please permit me to torture this metaphor for a second. The pig would stand a better chance at the door if it owned the sexiness of its body, the fatty belly lined with 10 pairs of pencil-eraser pink nipples, even the pleasure of the bacon it might offer should it wish to submit to the lusty pleasure-seekers who invited it to the Berghain BBQ. It shouldn't pretend to answer the doorman's questions in German, it should politely and confidently oink.

It's no accident that at least two of Berghain's doormen -- Mischa Fanghaenel and the aforementioned Sven Marquardt -- are photographers. Photographers who exhibit, who are good enough to earn a living from their art, who do black and white portraiture (this describes both of them) are more likely to have an eye that can pierce the facade in order to see into the heart of a person.

"When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” -- Ted Grant, photojournalist

I believe the photographer's eye wielded by these two doormen (and perhaps others within the security team) give them the ability to assess whether each person before them might make a "unique contribution to the customer cohort," as the flowchart puts it.

When manning the door, Mischa has said as much, "I only get a brief glimpse of a person at the door and hope to see beyond their exterior to create a great environment."

Photo credit: Lennart Sydney Kofi for Sleek-Mag.com

Sven has said something similar, though in different words, "I don’t mind letting in the odd lawyer in a double-breasted suit with his Gucci-Prada wife. If they make a good impression, let them in. We also take guys in masks and kilts, or Pamela Anderson blondes in run-of-the-mill high-street outfits who tag along with bearded blokes, licking the sweat off each others’ armpits.”

I believe they're putting together a party -- and a good party is like a good zoo -- full of exotic animals ready to fuck or (nonviolently) eat each other, or at the very least sniff each other's butts between stops at the communal watering hole. They're looking for snakes to crawl in the cracks of the place, apes to swing from the rafters, graceful gazelles, ungainly giraffes, and the occasional tough-as-nails rhinocerous, with the swagger and confidence of a horn that can impale anything.

"It is celebrating our differences and the feeling of everyone being together, completely unprejudiced. That is electronic music to me. It doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are," said Mischa.

Of course Berghain's heritage requires ongoing respects paid (by the door selectors) to the fact that Berghain emerged from Berlin's gay culture, so a heaping quantity of gayness is part of the door selection process, resulting in this wonderful feeling (on the inside) that being gay is the norm, and anybody that's not gay is an outsider, even after they've been let in.

"I feel like I have a responsibility to make Berghain a safe place for people who come purely to enjoy the music and celebrate—to preserve it as a place where people can forget about space and time for a little while and enjoy themselves. The club evolved from the gay scene in Berlin in the nineties. It’s important to me we preserve some of that heritage, that it still feels like a welcoming place for the original sort of club-goers. If we were just a club full of models, pretty people all dressed in black, it would be nice to look at for a half an hour, but god, that would be boring. It would feel less tolerant, too." -- Sven Marquardt in GQ

ERRORS OF THE DOOR

All that idealism aside, the door has an error rate big enough to drive a panzer packed with clowns through it -- those are the false positives -- the absolute clownish assholes who know how to get in, but don't know how to behave once they're inside. You'll read more about some of these folks in subsequent entries in this series because a good many found their way in via the ticketed event, while far fewer made their way past the door on the following night (Klubnacht), when the door policy was in effect.

In a recent, alarming example of a false positive that made headline news, a man with a "big Berghain tattoo on his neck right above his Adam's apple" allegedly raped someone in the Panorama Bar toilets on Sunday, March 2, 2025, according to a Reddit thread that soon snowballed into a police investigation. Rapists don't look a certain way, so it's not realistic to for any of us to expect the folks at the door to somehow see their dark souls and keep them out, but perhaps that very prominent tattoo was a factor in his admittance -- suggesting that at least one sexual predator has figured out how to crack the door game in the way that the sexual predators of the Catholic Church learned that if they wore the vestments of the sheep they could wolvishly run rampant amongst their flocks.

And then there are the false negatives -- folks rejected despite seeming to be a great fit. For example, one DJ who played Berghain three times was subsequently rejected. As another example, Felix da Housecat was denied entry. Sometimes folks who are a fit are rejected simply because too many people who look just like them had already entered that shift. Sometimes frequent attendees are regularly rejected by one bouncer (e.g., Matrix) but never by another bouncer (e.g., Mischa). If there were consistency to the policy, this sort of pattern wouldn't happen.

Felix da Housecat

Not that famous folks should have an automatic in -- the fact that they face the same egalitarian selection process is a credit to Berghain, but it's still a bit strange that being good enough to DJ Berghain doesn't make you cool enough to actually party in Berghain. We should expect that venn diagram to overlap nearly 100% if the talent booking team and the door team are on the same page. Which they can't be, because it's ultimately a very subjective process.

It's also entirely possible that some of the rejections of famous folks are the result of the famous showing up to the door with a sense of entitlement or having not made enough of an effort to present themselves in a culturally sensitive way. Take, as my favorite example of this, the story of David Blaine's rejection at Berghain's door, as shared by Redditor xaphextwinx:

"So my boyfriend and I reach the front of the line and as we approach the very front position, waiting on the bouncer to wave us in or away, none other than DAVID BLAINE approaches the guest list line. For those who don’t know, David Blaine is this American magician (yes like card tricks and bunny out of a top hat) who had his own show on national television. I would say about 75% of Americans know who the man is.

The bouncer sees him come up and immediately says, “man I told you not to fucking come back, we don’t want you or your money tricks."

David Blaine then holds up a deck of cards and holds them in the bouncer's face and says, “this isn’t money, these are cards.”

I had to try so hard not to laugh and am sure I am visibly shaking.

The bouncer replies with, “TAKE YOUR CARDS AND SHOVE THEM UP YOUR ASS."

So at this point the bouncer calls on his other bouncer backup friends and the bouncers are just getting closer and closer to David, looking as if they’re about to forcefully remove him. The main bouncer, distracted, then turns around to me, barely even looks at me, doesn’t say a word and waves us in.

I have pondered writing David Blaine a thank you note."

And sometimes, people are just so culturally foreign that the door doesn't know how to read them.

In what I believe is an example of the latter, Brian Behlendorf, the guy who founded hyperreal.org (an important entity in West Coast rave culture in the 1990s), a leader in the open source software movement, and a DJ himself for decades, looks like a stereotypical California tech hippie with his ponytail, sunless complexion, and clean-shaven babyface. He was rejected at the door, according to a Tweet he made (and has since removed). I'm no doorman, but based on my review of his contributions to rave culture, I'm fairly certain that Behlendorf knows how to to party and would have been an add to Berghain's party on the night he tried to enter. But he didn't look the part -- which I'm guessing led to the false negative.

There's simply no way for a cursory evaluation at the door to make perfect decisions every time.

And yet ...

The door is a key element of what makes Berghain truly wonderful. I was lucky enough to attend Berghain on a night with no door policy and the following night when the door policy was in full effect, and the difference between these two nights was massive, as I'll be detailing in the rest of this series of articles.

LEGITIMACY

I mentioned earlier that there are legitimate and illegitimate reasons why someone should want to go to Berghain.

Legitimate reasons to go to Berghain: to perform as a DJ, to dance to the music, to enjoy a great party, for the freedom of being in a gay, sex-positive space, to lick armpits, to cruise the dark room, to fuck or be fucked on the dancefloor, to do drugs in the bathroom stalls with friends, to introspect, to trip, to make new friends, to deepen your relationship with existing friends, to make up for lost time, to come out in the most spectacular way possible, to have sex with 20 strangers in a weekend, to piss into a stranger's mouth, to combine any or all of these activities into a single weekend. It's a wild party and there's no one right way to party.

But there are wrong ways to party, and the list of illegitimate ways to do Berghain includes: to take photographic souvenirs for the social media clout race, to gawp at gays having sex, to be a tourist rather than a participant, to stand on the dancefloor with your nose in your phone messages, to take rather than give, to rape or assault, to spike drinks, to harm yourself or others, to vandalize or break shit, to steal others' possessions, to bring others down.

One of the reasons "how to get in to Berghain" articles are so hated is that they increase the chances that someone looking to engage in illegitimate behaviors will sneak past the door. This is obviously problematic -- if these guides worked, writing and sharing them would be the equivalent of throwing open the gates of Troy to people who not only aren't invited, but are almost certainly going to fuck the vibe up for everyone inside -- those that appreciate what a truly special place Berghain is.

One of the most salient worries is the ratio of straight people to gay people. As more straight folks make their way in, the less free the space feels, the less vibrant the party, the less Berghain. This anecdote from a Reddit post illustrates the peril of allowing people that are too straight to gain entry to Berghain:

"A few months ago I was dancing on the plateau at Berghain and one guy (I assume) was giving the other a BJ right next to me. I couldn’t care less but the girl next to me said, 'Eeewww, what are they doing? There are spaces to do that!' My answer, 'This is literally the time and place to do it. Especially because this club is actually a gay club!' She turned away and kept on dancing."

I'm not trying to make that problem worse -- because I fell in love with Berghain and felt it to be a truly free and freeing environment. On the other hand, I know that anybody that's hung in there for the 4,000 words (so far) of this post is literate, open-minded, and not likely to be the problem.

Back to the formula, I facetiously shared above:

1. Tattoo your face and neck in at least two places

2. Spend at least $2,000 on a full-body latex suit

3. Wear authentic German Rave Kandi

There's an underlying truth to each of these items. I'll now translate the formula to make these truths more evident:

1. Face tattoos demonstrate real commitment to living outside normie boundaries. In his GQ interview, Sven said, "I’ve never regretted [my face tattoos]. I mean, it was pretty much clear I wasn’t going to go into banking." You don't need a face tattoo, but I believe that the door crew are looking for some credible sign of commitment that can't be purchased on Shein or Amazon.

"Untitled," 1980 graphite on paper by Tom of Finland via Tom of Finland Foundation

2. The truth is that there are multiple sub cultures within Berghain, and if you legitimately belong to one of these subcultures, be it Tom of Finland-style leather daddies or the head-to-toe latex crew, or the pups who wear vinyl dog masks, you'll likely find your door rate to be much higher because legitimate involvement in sub-cultures isn't something that can be easily faked. People might be able to "buy the look" wholesale, but the outfit won't sit easily on them, and you can believe that anybody with a sharp eye -- such as the doormen who are also photographers -- will see right through the flimsy facade. Of course there's no guarantee that the glint of latex peeking out from under your coat will stay the doorman's execution of your ego, but your odds are much, much better.

3. German Rave Kandi, as opposed to the cheesy American version, isn't plastic beads strung together for some sort of PLUR ritual. It's face piercings, ball closure rings accentuating your nipples through your tshirt, a Prince Albert barbell distorting the fabric of your short shorts, stainless steel chokers, and chunky rings on your fingers. At least, that's what Instagram's advertising algorithm started showing me ads for once it had recorded my location as Berghain.

In short, the answer to "how to get in to Berghain" is to be culturally aware and to make an effort to fit in -- not out of a desire to pretend to be what you're not, but out of respect for the scene. To get in, be true to who you are, and if your truth isn't aligned to one of the legitimate uses of the space, then expect to be rejected.

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In a few more days, I'll post part three, about my experience in and around Berghain's Panorama Bar. Please subscribe to receive notifications. If you enjoyed this article, please like it, comment on it, or even share it with a friend. Your engagement tells the the almighty algorithm that this is work that others should see. Thank you!