Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? Pt. 2 (classic)

Hello! This is part two of our story about why two nice young American men were not permitted to enter Berghain, a famously exclusive German techno nightclub. If you haven't heard part one, please go back and listen. My body thinks that it's 2.30 in the morning, but I'm on a plane landing in Berlin where it's 7.30 in the morning. My body does not believe that. Please take a moment of time and remove your handgipings, including laptops. Your phones and tablets can be used to... Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. You're listening to the second part of our story, Why Didn't Chris and Dan Get Into Bergheim? In March, I found myself on a tarmac in Berlin, holding yet another book about the history of German techno, cramming, I suppose, for a very strange kind of test. It was all part of this crazy plan that a man named Lutz had described to me, and which I could not resist trying. Lutz had said that the real way into the most exclusive nightclub in the world, Berghain, famous for its four-hour-plus line, was to not wait in that line at all. It was instead to meet people in the Berlin techno crowd, gain a deep understanding of what the music meant to them, and in doing so, somehow melt into the scene. I am not socially adept. I don't speak German. I'm very new even to just dancing. Assuming this plan could work for someone, I'm pretty skeptical it can work for me. But I felt like I wanted to try. As someone who has known the joys of belonging and the pain of not, I've always been very curious about where I can make myself fit in and which places are a bridge too far. Could a poorly dressed American with a weird laugh, find even a temporary home in a severe German techno dungeon? I had less than a week to get an answer, but for once in my life, at least I knew it would be a definitive one. So on March 13th, I get off the plane, blink in the bright, cold sunlight, and start practicing some rudimentary German. How do you say it, bud? I'm cold. How are you? Hello. Hello. I'm there with my editor, Shruti, who, by some miracle, speaks the language. But other than that, I could not have been a more outside outsider to the city. It's our first day, and so we head to the neighborhood everyone had told me to start with. Friedrichshain. Friedrichshain is the neighborhood that contains Bergheim. Walking the streets, I feel this feeling of deja street view. I've clicked through the same blocks on Google Maps for my apartment at home. I can see the big sports arena that replaced Ostgut, Bergheim's previous incarnation. I can see the River Spree, which winds along the city streets. I have the sensation that I get sometimes when I'm in a restaurant where a celebrity has appeared. A little giddy. A little on edge. Act 1. The Portal. Late in the morning, I find myself en route to see a man named Sven von Thulen. Not the Bergheim bouncer Sven. There are many Sven's in Germany. This Sven, a DJ and a writer. The music studio where he asks to meet? A walk-up. A walk-up with a lot of stairs. I trail behind Shruti. Check, check. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hey, hi. Good to see you. Middle-aged, fashionable. A short red-brown widow's peak and a white t-shirt. Sven dresses to my eyes more like a rock guitarist than a techno DJ, but how does a techno guy dress anyway? This way? Oh, it's great. We sit down, and I tell Sven what I want him to help me try to understand today. I'm trying to understand a genre of music, techno, which for some reason Germans love and Americans mostly view as vapid. Why would the same sounds be heard so differently in two different countries? In America, it's like the two types of music you're allowed to say you hate are country music and techno music. Okay. That's always a problem when your idea of something is just that bullshit stuff that's mass marketed. Yes. Sven tells me he gets it. A lot of people's first exposure to electronic music is the worst of the genre. And he relates to that because when he first heard techno, he also hated it. His association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive, syrupy stuff that was sledging out of Europe in the 1990s. I was like a punk kid. I lived in a squad. And for me, it felt like techno is just like apolitical. It's just hedonism. It's very German. It's like all that I, you know, as like, you know, an angry 16, 17 year old. And I was like, yeah, I don't like any of that. To give you a sense of what angry young Sven was into, this is his old hardcore punk band, Abyss. Sven had no use for uns uns. And he didn't just hate techno. He hated the kinds of places that played it, at least in the town where he was from. I grew up in a small town close to Hamburg, called Bremen, they didn't have spaces, so they had to go in all the discotheques. And they looked like discotheques, so I could never relate to that. But then, in the mid-'90s, Sven moved to Berlin. And there, he found himself listening to techno in a different context, in different spaces. In Berlin, obviously, you had all these spaces that were basically, like, some of them were actually squatted, you know, like where you had illegal clubs, illegal parties. And even if it wasn't maybe not illegal anymore, it was still like rough, rough and ready kind of like real underground stuff. I would go to Trezor and it's like, oh yeah, I can totally relate to that. Now it makes sense to me. So it was seeing the places where the music was being played and understanding that they were like underground and sort of illegal. To you, part of what you were looking for as like a young like punk kid, it didn't feel so like clean and commercial and like whatever. Yeah, the DIY aspect of it. Because, you know, I was organizing concerts, and we did all kinds of, like, labels and fanzines and, like, all this stuff. So everything was kind of DIY. And in Berlin, everything was DIY as well. And it was, like, basically, we take over spaces and do something great. And it's, you know, for us and our friends. I remember having the same feeling as a teenager, but listening to punk music in Philly. When I tried to listen to it first as recorded music, I couldn't hear past its roughness. But then I went to my first shows. In some repurposed church basement, a DIY show where bands full of kids played for an audience of kids, all flying arms and spit and sweat. There, the music came alive for me. Likewise, Sven found he loved the people who he met at the squats and the empty warehouses where Berliners showed up to dance to this new music. Realizing, okay, here are all the misfits. All the misfits of society are here and feel, today you would say, safe here, welcome and all that. I had to see and experience that to fully, I understand that. And now I understand the music better as well. Sven was transformed in Berlin. From a hardcore kid to a raver. He became a DJ. He's actually DJed at Berghain. And he's written a history of brilliant techno called De Clang De Familia, The Sound of the Family. He's now a full participant in the techno scene. A subculture he wants that he hated. Okay, can you just tell me the origin story of techno music? Where is it born? Oh, God. So, techno music. So in 1988, there was a seminal compilation that was released by a British label, Ten Records. And that was the first compilation to basically showcase to the world the new dance sound of Detroit, which was techno. Why were people in Detroit, what was happening in Detroit that people were like, we should make music with synthesizers and dance to it? Like, why did that happen? Well, there's this famous quote by Derek May, who said techno is like craftwork and parliament stuck in an elevator. Techno is like craftwork and parliament stuck in an elevator? Huh. I've always tried to understand music, any music, by listening to the lyrics. It's part of why techno is actually hard for me to crack. It just doesn't have many lyrics. But I need to understand techno, because I've been told that that understanding is part of my mission, this plan to break into Berghain. And the story Sven has to tell me about techno, it's about all the meaning that gets imprinted into music without lyrics. It's about Detroit, this place that was in the 1970s, experiencing all this strange and inexpressible history, history that would somehow be encoded into techno as the music that was being invented here. So here's how that happens. At the end of the 1970s, the city of Detroit is in some trouble. The U.S. auto industry is beginning to sink, taking Motor City with it. But it's just the beginning of that decline. And Detroit still has something that was rare in American cities back then. A black middle class. In a Detroit suburb called Belleville, three of these middle class kids are obsessing about music. One of those kids is Derek May, who Sven just mentioned. The other two, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson. They're staying up late, listening to this very weird radio show, hosted by a mysterious DJ named The Electrifying Mojo. Awesome. 84. A tripped-out prototype of your musical future. The sound of sounds to come. It has long been the desire of a man to experience advanced sounds and concepts. compatible with the technological advances of our time. That voice belongs to the DJ. And the crazy thing is that all this hyped-up shit he's saying, the prototype of your musical future, the sounds of sounds to come, all of this is actually true. The electrifying mojo did see the future. Welcome to Awesome 84. A trip to the future of the music. Awesome 84. Awesome 84. Awesome 84. And he makes it all up. He would play whatever, the B-52s, Prince. He would play electronic music that came over from Europe. So you had Kraftwerk, obviously you had like the Belgium stuff like Telex, Italo Disco, and he would kind of create these narratives and he was kind of a mystical figure as well. So you've got the electrifying mojo, this unusual visionary mixing genres on the radio that tamer DJs kept on separate dials or off the air entirely. He's playing records for five hours at a time. And you have these three kids from Belleville who are listening to this strange radio program. And it's not just them. A bunch of other young Detroiters are listening. Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks. And these listeners decide to start making their own music, inspired by the sounds they're hearing. In 1985, Juan Atkins puts out a track called No UFOs. He's made it on an eight-track recorder and his Roland TR-909 drum machine. The track is synthy, like Kraftwerk. The beat is funky, like Parliament. There's also this doomed science fiction feeling to it. This dance track about UFOs over Detroit. This music isn't just imagining a future for Detroit. It also seems to be mourning its past. I hear that in this track, Temptation, by Final Cut. The four on the floor beats, they're construction sounds. The sounds of what the city is losing, bleeding into this music. It's been said like many times that being in Detroit at the time, kind of in a post-industrial city, the idea of the conveyor belt and the industrialness, that it all kind of played its role into how you approach making music. This new form of music, both enabled by technology and sometimes about technology, it ends up with an appropriate name, techno. Detroit would become known as the birthplace of techno, a metropolis where raves were thrown in grand abandoned buildings in the broken down city. Dancers entering spaces that didn't even have working lights, dancing while holding flashlights, catching glimpses of all sorts of strange human behavior in the dark. The feature of this music that I most notice is how it loops. It loops in a way that sounds, to some people meaningless, but to others, deeply meaningful. What can seem repetitive often isn't. The same pattern returns, but now it's been complicated. By some change in frequency or energy, an element added, an element removed. This is a stripped down, and it turns out for many surprisingly powerful kind of music. Techno would begin in Detroit, find homes in small pockets of cities in North America and Europe, perhaps most consequentially, Berlin. Berlin in the late 80s was still divided. It was still the GDR and West Berlin had a really small scene. It was really just like, I don't know, 100 people or something. Small, small. Yeah, small. Really, everybody knew each other by name, small. And there were music enthusiasts and dancers and all of that. And the music would obviously, you know, being played in like the two and a half clubs that West Berlin had at the time. And then for Berlin, the catalyst for everything was that the wall just came down. Act two, the wall. So where are we right now? We're on Warschor Straße. Behind us is Oberbaumbrücke, which is a beautiful bridge. It's 3 p.m. now, and Shruti and I are walking with Gazina Kuna. Gazina is a person we've been told to meet, because she seems like a perfect guide. A club kid, but also a radio reporter who's covered the scene here for years. And a DJ. I'd been picturing my stereotype of an intimidating Berghain scene star, clad in four shades of black with an asymmetrical haircut. Gazina, instead, is all smiles, wearing a lavender sweatsuit and these big glasses. She has the energy of an enthusiastic substitute techno teacher not yet burned out by the job. We're staying in Friedrichshain because I wanted to show you Berghain, which is, by the way, the name stems from Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. So the Berg from Kreuzberg and the Hein from Friedrichshain comes together in Berghain. Oh, so it's just, it's two neighborhoods, portmanteau smashed up together. Exactly. And so, blah. But this is the explanation of the name. How boring, hey? I do think it would be more something. Nah, it's not. It's very, very boring. Gazina tells me Burgheim is actually closed on Wednesday. So all we can do this afternoon is study the club's perimeter. I still have a few days to do all my research before Klubnacht begins on Saturday Burgheim sits near a cluster of clubs Small big discreet not tucked along the banks of the River Spree On the right side there the RAV Gel We call it R.O.B., where it's a nice flea market on Sunday and also certain little clubs, which are totally okay to start clubbing, or as a tourist, actually. But be careful. A lot of shady drug dealers around here don't buy from them because it's apparently not so good. Gesine has lived in Berlin most of her life. She was born just outside the city in East Germany while the wall was still up. We're going to go this way around because I want to show you the Todesstreifen. The death strip. The death strip, yes. Todesstreifen. Todesstreifen. Almost. Todesstreifen. Yes, and it's the strip of death. Let's just say the death strip. During the Cold War, East Germany built what we call the Berlin Wall, but which was actually two parallel walls with a big negative space between them. That negative space is the death strip, patrolled by guards with guns, dogs, surrounded by barbed wire. It was called the death strip because over 100 people were killed trying to pass. The death strip is Berlin's defining scar. But it's also crucial to our story today, weirdly because it's the cradle that will eventually birth the city's techno scene. But for Gesina, as a kid, before there's the music, there's just the wall. Her family lived in the Soviet-controlled East, the GDR. Gesina's father ended up on the wrong side of the secret police there, the Stasi, for what sounded to me like the dumbest possible reason. When he was 16, he was actually knocked down by an old Stasi guy because he said something about the GDR, like something not even nasty, but saying, well, in this shitty place, you can't even get a lemonade because it was summer and all the lemonades were out, which happened. And so he knew he always had this file and he couldn't move as he wanted to. He has a complaint about there being a lemonade deficit. Exactly. life. This stray complaint about lemonade, one time, it meant Gazina's family would always be surveilled, targeted. Reading about life under the Stasi gives me a deep chill. The Stasi tortured, they poisoned, but what they're most famous for today is the way they surveilled and smeared German citizens. Germany's commitment to privacy, its suspicion of internet companies and camera phones, I can't help but wonder if some of that traces back to this moment. The Stasi and their vast network of collaborators spied on everyone. They used secrets and rumors to destroy anyone in their way. Gossip, wielded by idiots, a weapon of mass destruction. Today, Germans talk about privacy the way we talk about free speech. But Gazzina's family, they actually found an escape from the East. In 1984, this door opened for them. Some East Germans were being allowed to go West, the West essentially paying the East for workers it needed. One day, Gizina's family found out. They'd been selected. But the opportunity had come out of nowhere, and her mother wasn't ready. She needed time to prepare. So they came up with a story. Her parents told Gizina, six years old at the time, to pretend to be sick, to buy the family a little more time or the Stasi monitored them. And we've been followed when we're driving around with the car. We've been followed by the Stasi all the time. And my parents always looked to the backseat and said to me, okay, when we arrive now, you're going to be sick again. You have to act sick. So I've been holding my stomach and acting all sick. And so we got, I don't know, a couple more weeks in the GDR so mom could finish up whatever she had to finish up. And then we left. But the day you leave, they cut your passport and you're not a citizen of anywhere. Like you don't have a passport, you don't have an identity anymore, pretty much. And the good thing was us being Germans, when we went to West Berlin, you're instantly a German citizen. So that was kind of good. But now being 46 or 40 years, 40 years later, actually, wow. I have to deal with that a lot. I'm actually trying to work through things because we're ripped out of our environment. And now slowly realizing how much harm it actually did. Ghazina's family moved to the part of West Berlin that was specifically for people coming in from the East. As she describes it, a quasi-refugee camp. Life there would end up being challenging. Her brother was badly bullied in school and turned around and bullied her. Her parents, who had been much more present in the East, now disappeared into work, leaving her and her brother home alone with a television. For her parents, life in the East was the bad memory. For Gesina, who left all that so young, it's the West. This strange new country that changed her family. That left a bruise that stuck around. Okay, so where are we? So this is part of the wall, which is like now a monument, East Side Gallery. With lots of different paintings along the wall. We're standing with our backs to what's left of the East Side of the Berlin Wall. It's covered in street art and graffiti now. Nearby, there's a field of grass and dirt, and then the river. Honestly, as far as monuments go, it's not much. The wall fell in November 89, and the two cities that had been kept apart rushed to join each other. It's strange to think that this place where we're talking, anyone standing here would have been shot. It's just a field. This would have been the death strip, because then the canal was also part of the wall, or of the no-go area, and then behind it is Kreuzberg on the other side. The size of this trip is pretty crazy. It's just so expansive. Yeah, we can walk towards the water. So here is where Bar 25 used to be and now it's like Katerblau and the whole area. But Bar 25 was also quite famous. Gazina starts pointing downriver to this spot. A decommissioned soap factory turned into a club, which closed and turned into another club. I know exactly the feeling she's having. Like anybody who's lived somewhere long enough, she's looking at the city, but she's seeing all the cities that used to be here underneath it. Berlin in the 1990s, a decade really of parties, many of them technically illegal, occupying spaces for a few years, maybe longer, before disappearing. A good party is typically about celebrating something, a birthday, a promotion. But the truly great ones, they're almost always about release. And the intensity with which Germans grabbed ahold of techno, the height of the fire of the scene they built here. This was a country with decades of awful, unspeakable history, trying now to find a way to move forward. I'm going to tell you the story of the one party that towered over all the others, a party that somehow tied all these strange threads of time and history together. After the break, I'm going to tell you the story of Tresor. Act Three, The Vault. In the 1910s, before the Nazis took over, the biggest department store in Europe was a store called Vertheim. Founded by George Vertheim, a Jewish man, his chain's flagship store was the one in Berlin. There's photos of it from before the destruction. It's worth looking them up. Honestly, store doesn't really describe it. Really, it's a cathedral, featuring an enormous light-filled atrium, beautiful frescoes, 83 elevators somehow. In 1933, the Nazis start picketing the store. There's a photo of them standing outside holding their signs. Don't buy from Jews. Wertheim is forced to hand his store over to non-Jewish Germans. He dies of pneumonia in 1939. The store itself is destroyed a few years later by Allied bombs. What's left is razed to make more room for the wall. The former Wertheim location, unfortunately, falls in the death strip. In the end, all that's left, some rubble and the old vault that was beneath the store. It's like every horrible decision Germany made for 50 years, they also made on this one building, Wertheim. And then the wall falls. Sven von Thulen, the DJ techno historian, picks up the story of Wertheim here. During the war, the building was destroyed, but the wall was still there. And then on top of the wall was just a kind of small bungalow, shack, whatever you want to call it. And it was situated right at the former death strip. This whole area, there was nothing. It was only like debris, sand. It was empty. So when they found the place by chance, Johnny Stieler from the east and Achim Kohlberger and Dimitri Hegemann from West Berlin, they were driving around like we want to open a club in East Berlin. And basically, by chance, saw this shack. It's like, well, what's that? So they parked their car, went in and the door was open. They kind of looked around and didn't look so special. But then they found this like doors like, where does this door lead? And then they opened the door and then it was just like dark, wet stairs going down into a basement and they were like, huh, okay. And so they had their lighters, went down around the corner and then they suddenly stood in front of these, like in a prison, like rusty steel bars and like a big vault steel door. And they were like, what is this? And they all knew it was empty for at least 30 years. There was nothing. Basically, the air they would breathe when they went down was kind of old. They all said it was kind of like a spiritual experience. They said when they got out, they didn't talk. They didn't talk for like half an hour because they were like completely like in this mixture of in awe, in shock. They all knew this is it. This is a place. This place would become the site of a club called Tresor, German for vaults, the jewel of the city's new techno scene, years before that title was seized by Bergheim. Tresor, a nightclub, but also a portal between Berlin and Detroit. One of the men in the car that day, Dimitri Hagemon, had already been flying to America, even signing some Detroit DJs to his label, getting their music into his West Berlin club before the wall fell. But now, Tresor would be where Detroiters like Derek May, Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, could now fly out and spin techno records for ecstatic Germans, sometimes quite literally ecstatic, MDMA, a large part of the scene at the time. These American DJs were finding that the techno they made at home meant something else here in Germany. This place that had been so stuck in its own history loved this music, whose power lay in how it looped. It looped in a way that sounded to some people meaningless, but to others, deeply meaningful. The music looped. Sometimes the stories about it did too. One of the Germans converted to techno in a sweaty dungeon of Trezor, Gazina Kuna. Although, before Gazina loved electronic music, she actually hated it. Her association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive, syrupy stuff that was sledging out of Europe in the 1990s. But then a friend of hers told her that there were these strange new underground clubs populating the empty parts of the city. And he invited her to come explore them. My best friend, Martin, who is such a soul in all kinds of ways, he started taking me to those places. And one was Tresor. Tresor was a turning point for Sven von Thulen, too. The site of his conversion. Do you remember just the first time you went to Trusor? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember the first time I went to Trusor. I went right down the basement. Downstairs was super interesting with the old compartments and the very famous Stahlgitter here. What do you have in a prison? What's it called? The steel bars, which looked like, you know, a cell kind of thing. It was full of, you know, fog and the strobe was going off. And you walked in there and there was the techno floor, that was the trezor floor where techno was played. And I was standing on the floor there and looking around me because I felt a bit uncomfortable because that was loud and strobe were lighting always a bit weird for my eyes. And then it became all dark. And I couldn't see anything. and the next thing I know I just fell because there was like a speaker on the ground and I was like, and then I went to the wall kind of like, where's the wall, where am I? And it took me a little bit to adjust. And I felt something wet dripping on my nose and I'm just like looked up, couldn't really see but then the strobe was started. I'm like, oh, that's like sweat from the ceiling. That's very interesting. and then the kick drum kicked in. So like pure bass in my stomach and I felt it in my stomach and that was such an amazing feeling. Like seriously, I was standing there a bit like I had an epiphany or maybe Jesus came to me. I was like, oh, I understand. I looked at Martin, I'm like, I understand now. Okay. And I didn't drink or anything back then. I was pure, pure energy of the music. Yeah, I'll never forget that. Funnily enough, I kind of started my DJing at Trisor as well because a friend of mine, she was cleaning Trisor at the time and I didn't have tour tables yet. So she was like, you know what, just come over while I clean. So I was there quite often on Saturday, Sunday afternoons, basically playing and cleaning. Okay. It's also, it's so, when, like, I've heard this week, we've spoken to people and, like, I've thought, like, I was aware of Berlin Wall fell as a historical event. I had not spent that much time really like thinking about the emotional reality of it and the strangest of its existence and the strangeness of its end. And there's something, the way you talk about that, it's a combination of like, it's so beautiful, like as an expression of like human freedom and joy. And so strange, like it's so strange to me that there would be a city divided where two different economic models were in competition with each other, where people had to live these very constrained lives and that when you set those people free, it turns out the thing that they're going to do is have computers make music for them and shake their asses in dungeon-y, bombed-out buildings. It's so strange. Yeah, I mean, you cannot make it up in a way. It just kind of coincided perfectly. There was this whole optimism, you know, like the end of the Cold War, the future is bright, like, ah, we had impending nuclear war. Like, all of that was like, oh, no, it's gone. And then you have all these possibilities suddenly. You have the spaces, you have zero economic pressure. You didn't have, you didn't pay taxes. You didn't do anything. You just, you just did, right? It felt like an exorcism for a lot of Germans, like the exorcism of the Second World War, Nazi Germany the separation all of that Even I have trouble sometimes finding words for the history I have within my body And having something like techno where everyone comes together and people with no agenda on both sides There were still, you know, conflicts and all that. But overall, whereas in the rest of German society, a lot of shit went down, a lot of infighting, you know, and a lot of like blame going back and forth between East and West and all of that. But it really wasn't an issue. in the club scene at all. It didn't matter if you're from the East or West. It was like reunification first started on the dance floor. For Sven, Trezor is where the new city began, where he learned to love techno music, where he found a path for his life in a former vault where sweat and chunks of plaster routinely dripped from the ceiling into people's drinks. And this was the scene that would over the years draw an international crowd. People from all over the world who had no real feelings about a unified Germany or the scars of the Cold War, but who could recognize a good party and who wanted to join one. Trezor would lose its original location. A lot of those early clubs would disappear. At some point, the egalitarian, anyone-can-join-the-party vibe would fade, replaced with something more exclusive. A new, intimidating club, which drew foreigners, even ones who didn't know very much about Teichnow, but who had just heard there was a room that was very hard to enter, a room they now wanted to try to get into. Berghain. Act 4. Portress. It's still Wednesday afternoon. Our stroll with Gazina, the DJ and radio reporter, continues. She's about to show us Berghain's outside, the castle's exterior. We leave the park and its remnants of the old Berlin Wall, and we walk towards our destination, just a few minutes away. We're going to get there from the side, which isn't maybe as... Cinematic? Yeah, bombastic, but I think you still get the gist of it. Okay. You can already see. Is that it? Yeah, you can already see part of Bergheim there. Oh, it's enormous. It's huge. Like, seriously, it's so, it's so, so big. Bergheim takes me by surprise somehow. We're walking down a side street, when suddenly the top of this massive building appears in the distance. It doesn't look like a power plant. It's palatial, with double-height, skinny, rectangular windows. Honestly, to my eye, it looks like an industrial version of Buckingham Palace, maybe one occupied by squatters. For Gesina, if Trezor was the site of her techno-conversion, Burgheim is the church she now visits most regularly. Can you tell me the first time you went to Burgheim? Yes and no, because when I start telling those stories to my a bit younger friends, when they ask you, what was your first time to Berkheim? How long? That's what they asked that question. No, no. It's like, how long have you been coming here? This is the question I get. I'm like, you know what? I've been going to Ausgut. This is how long I've been coming here. And this is where I say grandma is starting to tell stories from before the war. It's okay, grandma, let's get you to bed. So my first Berkheim experience was not Berkheim, it was Ausgut. Which is the predecessor to Bergheim. Richtig, exactly. Gesine says she went there to see one of her friends' DJ. The line was short back then, but Sven Markhardt was already manning the door. Two decades younger, his reputation already firmly established. When Ostgut morphed into Bergheim, it kept the same values, secrecy and privacy for its guests. Walking toward the club, Gesine explains that even today, when you enter, your phone is taken so its camera lens can be covered. No photos, so you get your stickers on. Can't take any pictures in there. It doesn't matter what kind of performance or whatsoever you're going, it's always stickered. Here, look. Oh, what's that? There's a little green sticker on the ground. Yeah, well, this is. Is that a Berghain sticker? This is this, yes. Oh, it goes right over the lens. Those are, like, I mean, like mostly neon colored. And you see, there's a yellow one. Yeah, there's a bunch. There's an orange one. There's Berghain shrapnel just a couple blocks away. Yeah. We pass through a small park, a former train lot, concrete and graffiti-covered benches. We pop around a corner, and now Shruti, Gazina, and I are standing by what seems to be the side of Berghain. I notice this unassuming metal door that looks like a service entrance, maybe. So the main line just goes this way, and then to the left. No, no, this is the door. This is the main door of Berghain. We're here, already. 4.30 p.m. on a Wednesday. The club is closed. No one's outside. A gray door, sealed tight and graffitied. This will be where the line ends on Klubnacht. In front of the door, a series of waist-high metal gates to corral that line. And overlooking it all, I noticed two prominent white security cameras. The scene does not feel like what you'd see outside of a nightclub. It feels like what you'd see in front of a tiny patch of the Berlin Wall. High security. I have a question, actually. So, is there a way to sneak in, i.e., has anyone snuck into Berlin? Not that I know of. Because, I mean, look at it. You have barbed wire, you have cameras there at the door. Gazina says, highly unlikely. Just given how tight the security is here, the sheer number of people who work the door. But she also uses the opportunity to point out, people sort of misunderstand these bouncers, these doormen, these gatekeepers. Everyone obsesses over and sometimes reviles. Let's talk about any bouncer in the city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the place that we're standing 10 feet away from. I know it's a very delicate topic. Very delicate because you select. And selecting people has a very bad ring to it. Very bad. Very, very bad. Also, the selector, calling it the selector, has a very Nazi ring to it as well. I've always thought that, yes. Really bad, yeah. So I don't want to say that term because it's nasty. And given our history, even worse. The thing is, which makes it so delicate, is that they decide about you within milliseconds. Not even seconds, but like less than that. Like in a very, very short amount of time. They look at you, they check you out, and then decide, do you fit tonight? Not just in general, do you fit tonight or not? Then they might ask questions. Hey, where are you coming from? How old are you or who's playing? They ask a lot, like, who's playing tonight? Just to see if they're really into the music. But they really decide how the party's going to turn out. The thing is, in my club life, I kind of grew up with bouncers. It's a weird thing to say, but I always felt like every part of the club is very important, not only the DJ. And I was always very fond of the bouncers. I always became friends with them, different clubs in the city. and stood there with them and realized how much trouble they have to go through, like how much hate they get. And that's why they also have to be a bit more strict and kind of the feel of being intimidating. But usually they're not. And usually, very, very important, a good bouncer is a very smart person, by the way. It's not a dumb, whatever, broad person and it was just casted out of the gym with big muscles. No, not at all. The best bouncers are super smart people. So standing here doesn't look so well. Like, does the line go much, much farther back? It's just going to lead the way to where the line sometimes goes to. Gazina walks us away from the door, away from Bergheim. We're now walking down a concrete path. We pass by a closed Imbiss, a German snack shop, whose entire business seems to be selling food to Berghain's lion supplicants. We walk, and we walk. This currently empty path that in a few nights will be filled with pilgrims. We walk to the end of the road, and then we turn around and behold the grandest view of Castle Berghain. I imagine for a moment the ghosts of Chris and Dan, making minor dance movements here, wondering if the club can perceive them and, if so, what it's thinking. So if you were here, how many, would it be like a couple hours? Yeah, probably. I mean, the longest my husband waited with his friends was seven hours. Seven hours? That was the day where two guys got rejected and he with his good friend got in. And so wait, they waited seven hours in line, half of their party was rejected, and he was like, I'm so sorry, I'll see you tomorrow? Well, yeah, you go in then. And like, you know, our favorite DJ was playing. So it was so funny because I was just, I was walking a friend to the train station and I came back and walked in just 20 minutes after him, after he had waited for seven hours. Because you were on the list? No, I wasn't on the list. Oh, really? That's the thing about knowing bounces quite well, you know? And belonging, I guess. Gazina talking about waltzing into Bergheim without waiting in line, without even being on a list, is a little funny to me. Elon Musk reportedly was not only rejected by a doorman here, but rejected despite being on a guest list. But Gazina, who is just a very normal adult Berliner, a person who owns zero electric car companies, actually stitches together a lot of jobs to make ends meet, for her, Bergheim is just the place she belongs. It reminds me of that conversation with Lutz from the last episode, where he explained how a nightclub is in fact a club, that here at least, you can't buy your way in. At this point, I make a confession to Gazina. I'm thinking myself about trying the door on Sunday. She looks at me and Shrutia praisingly. The thing is, I would say at the moment, Shruti would get in and you would be rejected. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You look so American. Yeah. They can sense you from miles away. And Americans are not, like, adored at Bergheim. Not really. Sorry. I get it. For the record, I want to say I am dressed badly, as is my custom. I've never really figured out pants. So it's not that I'm dressed frumpily, it's that I'm dressed Americanly? Yeah. Yeah. You just look very American. That's a tough one. Okay, but here's what's hard. So you say that. I totally agree. Totally agree. And I'm like, but like, if the club is supposed to... It's early evening when we say goodbye to Gazina and leave Friedrichshain. I'm still jet-lagged and a little confused. I eat a donor kebab at dinner with some American friends. They want to hit the bars. I try, but I find myself falling asleep into a gin and tonic. I tell myself, it's the first night, there will be others. I say goodbye, and my friends forge on in search of an adventure. which for them does not quite work out. What happens is they go from bar to bar, but then somewhat randomly end up outside the Kit Kat Club, a very famous fetish club where the dress code runs towards leather gear or else basically nothing. My friends show up at the door dressed in comfortable American tech worker fleeces. The bouncer is horrified. He looks at them and says, No, no, this is impossible. We are a fetish club. Peace. Go home. Read our website. The Americans seem to find this experience completely entertaining. A good story to take home. Through all of this, I am asleep. Despite visions of Berghain doorman Sven Markhardt, I have no nightmares. We'll be right back. Efficient hybrid options available, extending your overall driving range, and delivering great MPGs, meaning bigger savings at the pump without sacrificing power. And it means trading for more. The Tacoma and Tundra are ranked number one and number two in resale value over all vehicles according to Kelly Blue Book, which can mean thousands more than average when it's time to trade in. That's Toyota affordability. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. Shop Toyota.com or your local dealer for deals and details. Vehicle's projected resale value is specific to the 2026 model year. For more information, visit kellybluebookskbb.com. Toyota brand average resale value is 53% versus the average vehicle at 45%. Toyota, let's go places. Act 5. Intoxication. Thursday morning, I wake up still pretty jet-lagged. I go to get a table at a coffee shop in Friedrichshain. And standing, waiting, I behold a sight I'm pretty sure is a hallucination. I snap a photo just to be sure, and then go find Struthi to learn if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Can I show you a picture that I just took? Yeah. Look who is sitting at the cafe. Sven. Sven Markhart, haunter of my dreams. You want to talk to him? Not at all. It's a high-risk maneuver. Oh, come on. The recording stops here because I realize I'm about to debase myself and don't want to record it. I will just say, we have an argument, which I win, and the end result is, Shruthi has to go say hello. She compliments Sven on his photographs, which, if you haven't seen them, honestly are quite beautiful. Sven is gracious. No one spontaneously combusts, but he also does not hand Shruthi two secret golden tickets into Burgheim. My efforts to melt into this scene will have to proceed differently. I delete the photo from my phone, we leave the coffee shop, and we head to a very different part of the city to meet somebody connected to the techno scene. We're in Mitte now, the center of Berlin, one of the neighborhoods the wall used to divide. These days, Mitte is a place filled with expensive old buildings, the neighborhood where the lawyers work, and we are there, appropriately, to meet a lawyer. Hi. Yes, E.J. Hi, E.J. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. We settle into a meeting room. It's a nice one. Wayne's scouting for days. When did you arrive? Yesterday? Yesterday, yes. First things first, can you just say your name and what you do? My name is Philipp Schröder-Ringe, and I'm a lawyer. And what type of law do you practice? Event laws have many clients from the event industry, like clubs or organizers, festivals, etc. In a normal city, talking to a lawyer would not be a good way to break into or understand the techno scene. But we're in Berlin, where a lot of the grown-ups are former or not-so-former club kids. Philip says he grew up haunting West Germany's club scene, even through parties of his own. But that was then. He's been a lawyer for 15 or so years now. Philip, a handsome man, 45, but looks about a decade younger. Apparently dancing is good for you. He told me about the kind of work that a grown-up club lawyer finds himself engaged in. The typical problems where we could help with is, for example, noise issues. With the neighbors, for example, clubs are too loud or festivals, concerts need a noise permission. And we try to get these kinds of permission. We help the organizers to fight back neighbors that have an issue with these permits, and then we go to court. By the way, did you realize that Berlin Technoculture became a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage? Yesterday, right? It was yesterday. I'm not going to play all the times this moment happens in a recorded conversation this week. We're both better than that. But it's a lot. Over and over again, someone will ask me, have I heard about the UNESCO news? And it's true. March 13th, the day we arrive in Berlin, Berlin Techno is declared a UNESCO cultural heritage site. UNESCO World Heritage Sites include the Great Wall of China and the Acropolis. Berlin Techno is technically considered an intangible cultural heritage site. But still, Philip says, as a lawyer, this UNESCO designation will be useful ammunition in his ongoing battles Because when you have to outweigh the interests between neighbors and club owners it will be a bit easier to get the permits with this decision now. And it's a way of saying, like, basically all of these things amount to the same thing, which is, like, this city is constantly having to make choices about whether to favor the needs of a resident or a business. And what something like this does is it lets culture make its argument as well. to say, like, this might incommune to neighbor in this way, or this might prevent this other business from opening here, but we are deciding to preserve our culture. Exactly. The UNESCO designation may be a sign that Berlin's nightlife has won its multi-decade war for legitimacy, a war which Philip played a role in. Philip had been there in the 2000s, when this new generation of Berlin clubs had to fight against being wiped out by a proposed new tax designation. This was the story I'd heard in broad strokes before, from Lutz Likesenring in the last episode, but I wanted to hear it from Philip, who'd actually helped put the club's legal argument together. A refresher, just in case you need it. In the early 2000s, underground techno clubs in Berlin had been taxed mostly as concert venues, which pay pretty low taxes to the city. The tax authorities wanted to start charging the clubs at entertainment rates, to treat them all like garden-variety discotheques, which would mean almost 20% of all the club's earnings went to the city. And Burgheim and other clubs like it wouldn't just owe 20% going forward. They'd have to pay those taxes retroactively as well. For the club owners, was it like existential? Like were there clubs that were worried that they would go out of business if they had to pay this bill? Absolutely. Yeah, we're talking about like hundreds of thousands of euros. It would have been like an earthquake and it would have been dramatic. And I think there would have been some clubs that had to close the doors if they had to pay back all that money. So it was existential, absolutely. So in 2011, Phillips' law firm starts meeting with the club commission and certain club owners, he can't say which ones, but let's say some key players. They meet with the tax authorities to make their case. Bureaucrats and club owners in a room together, hashing it out. I remember it was at the top of the building, very impressive old building, and we were sitting there with older, gray-haired people that didn't look like they would go clubbing. And we sat there together with the different club owners. I can say who was there, but they also tried to dress up a bit and to behave seriously in that situation. These club kids in suits had to defend the thing they did at night as meaningful. Discussion ensued. And that was a very funny conversation because you have to agree on two things for the reduced taxes. First, it has to be a concert, so you need an artist. So we had discussions about the DJs being artists. Do they use instruments? What are they doing there? And the tax authorities were of the opinion that, no, this is not art. I mean, you put on a CD or LP and you just let it play, there's no art. So that's the first point of contention. Is a DJ an artist? The second point was, even if they are, is a DJ set really like a concert? One way you could define a concert would be, fans pay for tickets, and the price of the ticket is based on how famous the artist is and how close to the artist the fan gets to sit. The fiscal authorities, looking at a techno club, did not see that happening. And fiscal authorities, they said, oh no, we checked it, and you have bars, and you drink very much, and you have low entrance price, you make much more with drinks. So this holds against a concert. And what also holds against is that people don't know who's playing, who's the DJ. And the DJ is not like on a concert on a big stage, he's maybe in the corner, there's no light, and people move around and they don't really care who's playing there. And we went into all this, this kind of said, okay, come on, look, we have lower entrance fees because we want to provide the opportunity for many people to enjoy club life. But at the same time, the clubs pay a lot for the DJs. I mean, they have residents, they have international DJs, they are well-known. Of course, people come because they want to see these DJs. They celebrate the DJ. If he's doing a good job, then they're applauding, they are cheering. Slow down for a second. Like, these tax authorities who you're having these conversations with, are they people who are more used to, like, rock shows? Because if you just think about it, like, is there any reason why when a rock band plays, we all stand and watch them strum a guitar? We could celebrate it by standing away from the band and dancing. Like, it makes you think about the arbitrariness of how we celebrate music together in modern life. It's very strange. Yeah, it is like a very old school, maybe Prussian way of looking at concerts. like everybody has to sit in a row and be quiet and do nothing else but listen. And I had a good feeling after this conversation that we have the better arguments, obviously. Yeah, but the fiscal authorities and these people didn't agree. And instead, they went to court. The club that would fight the fiscal authorities in court was, of course, Bergheim. Or, as the Germans call it, the Bergheim. I was very happy that it was the Berghain, because it is like, it still is one of the most famous clubs of Germany. And if it wouldn't work here, it wouldn't work for other clubs. Similar arguments will be made in open court to the ones Philipp and his team had made behind closed doors. But here, those arguments seem to fall on more sympathetic ears. The court agrees. DJs don't just press play on CDs. They have synths and mixers and faders. They change the pitch and the frequency of their tracks. But then the tax officials argue, don't people just go to Burgheim and places like it to get intoxicated? And here, the club lawyer concedes the point. Yes, they do. But he had a question. Wasn't intoxication so often the point of listening to music? The lawyer's example. What was the feeling you were meant to have when listening to a piece by Gustav Mahler, if not intoxication? And if that was true, couldn't you just as easily feel intoxicated after hearing a track from planetary assault systems? September 2016, the verdict is announced. Bergheim wins. The court had sided with the club kids. Did people celebrate? Like, did people go out? If they did, I was not invited. I don't know. Does that mean there's a pressure on these clubs in the wake of these rulings to behave artistically, whatever that would mean? Or behave culturally, whatever that would mean? Does it push people towards a kind of conventions or rules with an eye towards the tax authority? I don't think that they changed the program or the culture. But what they are doing now is, of course, to do their paperwork. So they make sure that the running order is published before, like online or on social media, that they have scans of their flyers. And maybe you realize if you go out here, they might ask you if you know who's playing tonight. So this is also something they do since the discussion started to make sure that the people come to the club because of the resident and DJ or whatever. This was a story that I heard all the way in New York, that if you go to the door at a place like Berghain, you may be asked who the DJ is. And then later I'd heard rumors that this was partly as a result of German tax law. I love a good story. That seems crazy. Is that true, that you can draw a line from that tax decision to that question? Yeah, it starts from the discussion with the tax authorities, I'm sure. Act 6. Techno loops. The story's about a do-to sometimes. When I'd first heard this story from Lutz, I liked it, I thought it was funny, and I guess I understood it as a tale of the club kids being clever, outmaneuvering the tax people a bit. Here in Berlin, it settled on me differently. The conversation with Philip happened late in the afternoon. That night, I had really my first sublime Berlin dance floor experience. This tiny spot, no bouncer, is called Sous-Fargestern, Suite Was Yesterday. I don't record here. I don't record in any club. I'm trying to follow the rules of this place, that's so dead set against the casual surveillance we're all used to at home. But it's dingy and beautiful here. The dance floor, like a living room from Alice in Wonderland, maybe? Someone stapled a Persian rug to the ceiling. The floor is crowded. People really of all ages. For some reason, the room has an absurd amount of couches, but the dancers just clear all the furniture. I'm told that's how it happens every week. As I watch the DJ and the people around the DJ, I find myself thinking about Philip and the court case and about what's happening in this room. I think about Sven von Tulen, that hardcore kid turned techno DJ. Sven had told me at one point part of why he loved techno was the same reason he'd loved punk, that it was a genre that just did not care for rock stars. In the early days, in particular, he said the people dancing at the party were the main attraction. The DJ conducted them, but the DJ also kind of disappeared. It wasn't like a concert, where hundreds or thousands of people stare at one person in a kind of secular worship. This was something older, weirder. People losing themselves, becoming a mass. It's happening in this room tonight. And I think, maybe this is what the club kids were trying to say to those tax authorities. That this was worth defending. Valuable. Or, at least, cultural. Saturday night comes. The beginning of Klubnacht at Berghain. Instead of going there and braving the bouncers, staring down Sven, I go with my friends to a different Berlin club. This one sitting on the banks of the River Spree. The bouncer there, a stylish woman, asks our group if we speak German. The German speakers in our party try to cover, saying we all do. Her eyes fix directly on my cow-like, uncomprehending American gaze. And she asks in English, do you speak German? No, I confess. She starts laughing. Why would you lie to me? She lets us all in. Sunday morning, one final dance party. We show up at an old public German swimming area, this small lake outside of the city. In a shack on the water, all the windows have been covered in colored gels. So when the morning light comes in, it feels like you're inside a cathedral instead of a lean-to. It's so crushingly beautiful, so criminally Instagrammable, one of my American friends can't resist. He takes out his phone. Immediately, a German partygoer is on top of him, reacting the way someone would react if you took out an actual weapon in an American nightclub. Stay in the moment, she yells, or something to that effect. It's a little aggressive. But the phone is ultimately holstered. Sunday afternoon, a few hours later, a text arrives. Do I want to see Berghain? A person I'd met this week. Their friend is DJing today, so they're going to support them. They can take me along if my clothes aren't too bad. I'll still have to pass a bouncer, but I'll have a real Berliner offering me a halo. 3 p.m., the sun is shining at morning church-level strength. the line of petitioners outside Berghain is as long as ever. The line where Chris and Dan had found themselves, snakes from the entrance of the club, maybe 100 yards back. At the front, an open door guarded by two men. Inside, through the black rectangle of the door, Sven, watching a series of security camera monitors, presumably directing decisions from inside. I meet my Berliner friend, and we stand near the famous line. For a very, very long time, we just watch the line. It feels tense and electric to be here observing it, like I'm breaking a rule. And maybe I am. A bouncer from the door asks me, is everything okay? But I tell him, I'm just watching. And he nods. That's fine. Like everything in life, the line is not what I expect it to be. A woman in her 50s dressed for the airport? She's waved in. A Middle Eastern guy in his 30s alone wearing a functional hiker's backpack? he's also in. Two young Euro trash gentlemen, dressed for a visa, they get the not tonight. Most people today, though, are getting waved in. The ones who don't, they walk away looking like they somehow knew before they heard the words. The whole thing, it feels like watching something that's already happened, happen. Like the divorce papers or the marriage license that shows up in the mail a year later. Eventually, my friend takes me to the shorter line that they usually wait in, the list for regulars. It's much faster than the main one. I wait as people shuffle to the front for the bouncer's inspection. It's my turn now. I stand in front of a bouncer, not Sven, one of his underdoormen. I stand in front of the bouncer, and the bouncer looks at me, his face blank, blank like Anubis. My brain fills with a question that I realize always hums in the background, but now it's brighter and more intense than I've ever heard it. It's almost deafening. Do I belong? I wait to find out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone in the Koodle Moodle and Laura Somm and Kella Hassane. Thanks also to the labels, Ascuton and Tresor for letting us dip into their catalogs. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkati, and Hilary Sheff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on Search Engine, please email us, pjvote85 at gmail.com subject line advertising. You can also send us questions there. If you have a question you'd like to show to answer or feedback on anything you've heard. If you would like to remove ads from your version of Search Engine, there's a way to do it. You can sign up for Incognito Mode. That is our paid feed. It is $50 a year. You also get extra episodes, bonus interviews. You can sign up at the link in our show notes. Your contributions there are the way we are able to fund this show for everybody. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll be right back. Thank you.