In Berlin, the party is just getting started
City’s never-ending nightlife is a refreshing alternative to North American club culture
BERLIN— It is sometime after 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning inside a communist-era power plant in the former East German district of Friedrichshain.
The soothing groove of melodic techno pulses up through my feet as I flail my arms from side to side amidst a curious mixture of coed tourists and gay men, sporting outfits ranging from black jeans and T-shirts, gym shorts and tank tops, to leather bondage gear.
The crowd is all smiles as track after track blends into the techno-colour of the increasingly sunlit dance floor in Berghain’s Panorama Bar. It is the mellower upstairs portion of what is widely considered to be the best nightclub in the world.
In recent years, Berlin’s bacchanalian techno marathons have become like a porch light to a moth for expats and travellers looking to lose themselves in a sea of excess and experimentation. After spending a week getting to know the city’s clubs, culture and people, it is easy to see why.
Berlin’s vibrant and seemingly never-ending nightlife — and its extremely open attitudes toward sexuality, music, fashion and drugs — provide an intoxicating alternative to the dreariness of bottle service, overthe-top machismo and dress codes, which epitomize North America’s cookie-cutter club culture.
“What a wonderful city to be weird and not stick out,” Pablo Lucre, a 40-year-old gay man from Brooklyn, tells me in between sipping beer on Schlesische Strasse in the trendy area of Kreuzberg.
Indeed, in Berlin you are more likely to get turned away from a nightclub for sporting a dress shirt than for wearing a gimp mask.
When it comes to drugs, even though most remain illegal in Germany, most clubs will turn a blind eye to their consumption, so long as you do so discreetly in the washroom. The same goes for sex.
Berlin is much more than a city where the weekend gets started on Wednesday and ends on a Tuesday. Whether it’s the smell of hash rising from an anarchist commune in the middle of the city or the sight of 60 men sunbathing naked as you stroll through the Tiergarten on a sunny afternoon, you quickly get a sense that Berlin is fuelled by a kind of egalitarian undercurrent.
“There’s always been a feeling of welcoming people, no matter who you are,” says guide Brendan Nash, after taking me and a few other tourists on his walking tour of the late author Christopher Isherwood’s neighbourhood. Isherwood lived in Berlin and wrote Goodbye to Berlin, which became part of Berlin Diaries and the film Cabaret. The welcome mat was unceremoniously yanked from under the feet of Isherwood and company with the rise of the Nazis. Forty-four years of subsequent communist rule did little to help. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, all the repressed energy and pent up emotion was finally unleashed upon the city.
Inspired by a combination of bleak Detroit techno and the progressive electronic music of groups such as Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, Berlin’s techno scene flourished in the eastern part of the city in the years after the fall of the Wall, as a new generation transformed the derelict infrastructure, army bunkers and apartment complexes of the regime into squats and makeshift nightclubs.
“When you keep pressure inside a pot and you take off the cover and it explodes, there’s so much pressure that goes out,” explains Jean Herve Peron, founding member of the acclaimed krautrock group Faust, before performing at the Berlin Atonal Music Festival.
“Maybe that’s what makes Berlin so virulent, so active, so open, so creative.”
Most of the city’s pioneering venues have long been felled by the gradual creep of gentrification, only to be replaced by more tourist-friendly clubs. But Berliners’ fierce devotion to underground music and an anything-goes attitude lives on thanks to clubs such as Berghain and promoters such as Italian DJ Francesco de Nittis, who are driven to preserve the energy that made their city the party capital of the world.
“I try to always keep this spirit,” explains de Nittis, a.k.a. Mr. Ties, whose monthly Homopatik parties, at nightclub ://about blank have be- come a cult mainstay of Berlin’s extravagant party scene. “I want to keep this real Berlin vibe.”
As Sunday gives way to Monday, I find myself dancing robotically to primal techno, surrounded by a heaving mass of shirtless men in the shadow of the soaring cathedral walls of Berghain’s main dance floor.
Although almost everyone remaining in the 1,500-capacity nightclub seems to be high, there is a calmness that sweeps over the room as the bass forces itself out of the speakers with enough power to knock the wind out of a linebacker.
When I finally leave at about 8 a.m., most of the tourists have either gone home or congregated on the far side of the room. But for Berliners who come to worship here on a regular basis, the party is just getting started. Cody Punter is a Canadian freelance writer.