The night I conquered Berghain Berlin's psyche breeds a perfect party

There are few things in life more satisfying than hearing your own voice blasted out of a giant sound system in the bowels of a German sex club. What a glorious scene to soundtrack. People being tortured in public for kicks. People having molten wax poured all over their genitalia by leather-clad pain merchants. Threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, slave markets, dwarf love and fisting. And you’re a part of it all. You get to be in on the action, omnipotent, God-like. I was up to no good in the bogs with a pal of mine last summer at Berlin’s notoriously shame-free KitKatClub and through the walls a familiar bass line began to seep: it was the sound of “Roberto’s Tumescence”.

Berlin is my favourite city. I relocate there every summer now. It always bothered me that the groups I’d been in found popularity in Paris, but not Berlin. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it left me feeling like an anachronism. Paris is where you go for fashion, for very long walks, to read or write, to have affairs and to eat red meat. It’s architecturally ill-equipped to support nascent music scenes. A nascent music scene requires a populace long neglected by their government, living in a kind of post-industrial tabula rasa, a DIY-or-die kind of pressure. Detroit, Manchester, Sheffield, New York before they cleansed it. Even though it’s been several decades since the reunification that spurred the city’s techno explosion — an explosion now sanctified by Unesco no less — Berlin still has that unfinished energy.

It doesn’t have a curfew either. There’s no infantilising call of “bedtime” from on high. If a club stays open for days, you can sort of “move in” over the weekend. You can learn a lot about yourself if you try this for a few days. Especially if that club is a throbbing, homosexual techno dungeon. Ironically, this governmental act of faith in the good behaviour of its populace came about not long after the fall of the Third Reich. Before the erection of the wall, a tit-for-tat extension of opening times had ensued between the western segment of the city and the Soviet.

In the west, last orders had been 9pm; in the east, 10pm. The moment the west upped the ante, the east responded in kind, until a hotelier named Heinz Zellermayer grew sick of the stand-off. Over a bottle of whiskey, he’s said to have told the commandant of the western sector that “mayhem only comes when the bartender has to say ‘closing time’”. He insisted that zero curfew wouldn’t just be good for business, but would also make for a fine demonstration of liberal values.

The Western powers voted 2–1 in favour of never-ending nightlife: France and America for, Britain against, claiming it would render the city “too rowdy”. I wonder how that same freedom might pan out here in London? For the most part, ours is a culture of post-pub living-room cocaine binges. We are one-room adventurers. Maybe that’s for the best? We lack the inherent love of “order” that underpins the German psyche. Where drink and drugs are concerned, we sprint. We cannot be trusted with a marathon.

The stakes are high in Berlin if you’re looking for a good time. It’s death or glory. You might stumble into transcendent communion with a group of strangers in a warehouse somewhere; you might just as easily stumble into a plague of self-doubt and misdirected recriminations. If you want to play, you also have to accept getting played — by the music and by the heroically cynical door policies.

At a good club everyone is the front person, and no one is the front person. Right at the moment you feel like you’re at the centre of the universe, you suddenly disappear. Through this barely human machine music, social atomisation is inverted, or repurposed, made good somehow. In Berlin, clubs aren’t just places you go to get out of your box — they’re like extra-moral zones where nature’s lack of design is put on trial. It’s fun, but it can also be kind of like graft. Taken too seriously, does pleasure become work? Nowhere is this question more pertinent than at Berghain.

To an extent, Berghain paints its self-portrait in the misery of its rejects, its mythos carved in a never-ending succession of random refusals. The door policy — much like the music played within — is an ode to ephemerality. It is EasyJet-set-proof. You never know when or if you’re ever going to set foot in the place again. The club, an isolating concrete monolith, looms over a stretch of wasteland shrouded in an aura of regal indifference. Its only code of conduct: hard glamour.

I’ve seen people turned away from Berghain who looked like they were born there, head to toe in tattoos, leather and Balenciaga, people who had just queued for three hours. Certitude is passé. The sovereignty of the club precludes all solidarity. It’s easier to think of the place as a kind of tyrannical decades-long immersive art experiment than a night spot. Once beyond the gauntlet, you’re met with a sense of “anything goes” that exists nowhere else on earth. You are met with perfectly tuned German chaos.

The door staff all but extinguished my “youth” on a Sunday afternoon at the tail end of the summer of 2022. A fifth rejection in a row all but broke my heart. It’d been 10 years since my one and only visit. All I’d wanted was for them to turn me into a techno androgyne again: an android allergic to anxiety, a machine that can process nothing save raw enthusiasm. I had it on good authority that my music was being played inside and had gone down well with a few of the residents there. My geisha-gimp alter ego was welcome; I was excluded.

But then, a year and half later, my band was booked to play the club’s 19th birthday party. This booking became the end point of my imagination: the title fight on the horizon. After this gig, I could retire or die or start writing pompous essays full-time. The gig meant closing the loop and paying my dues. Since my only visit, I would forever try to find my way back to a Berghain state of mind while up on stage. But things weren’t nearly filthy enough in the world of London indie.

I wanted to pay my dues, but of course, I also wanted vengeance. They had cast me aside with barely a shrug time and time again. They’d briefly pitted me against my dear friend Rob, whose resemblance to a demonic Phillip Schofield I blamed entirely for the mass rejection. They had taken a part of my dignity, and sent me back to London pregnant with shadow and self-doubt. I loved them; I had no choice but to love them. But now, it was their turn to love me. Sprawled semi-spread eagle across a monitor, wearing nothing save a half a tub of Vaseline, with one hand wrapped around a microphone, the other searching my own cavity, I think I won that love. I emptied myself entirely.

One great thing about getting asked to play Berghain is that you can bring a posse. They normally don’t let you in if you show up with a posse. They want you to show up alone. To be alone together. By showing up alone you can more readily disappear. Disappear into yourself. Which is where the first skirmish of their war on banality has to take place. That being said, on this occasion, I got to bring my laddish big bro, whom, by his own admission, “ain’t ever getting let into that fucking place”.

He couldn’t contain his excitement on the main floor later that night. He kept singing sped-up Cat Stevens lyrics over the world’s most elegant techno, much to the chagrin of the hot-pant-clad muscle Marys adjacent. When we got home to England, he summed the place up perfectly: “I miss it like a person, Lias, that club. My heart aches for it. We don’t want safety. We want salvation.”

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