Episode Transcript
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for watching. My
2:00
body thinks that it's 2.30 in the
2:02
morning but I'm on a plane landing
2:04
in Berlin where it's
2:25
7.30 in the morning. My
2:28
body does not believe that. Welcome
2:43
to Search Engine. I'm PJ Boat. You're
2:45
listening to the second part of our story,
2:47
Why Didn't Chris and Dan Get Into Birkheim?
2:52
In March, I found myself on
2:54
a tarmac in Berlin holding yet another book
2:56
about the history of German techno, cramming, I
2:58
suppose, for a very strange kind
3:00
of test. It was all
3:02
part of this crazy plan that a man named
3:04
Lutz had described to me, and which I could
3:07
not resist trying. Lutz
3:09
had said that the real way
3:11
into the most exclusive nightclub in the
3:13
world, Birkheim, famous for its four hour
3:15
plus line, was to not
3:17
wait in that line at all. It
3:20
was instead to meet people in the
3:22
Berlin techno crowd, gain a deep understanding
3:24
of what the music meant to them,
3:27
and in doing so, somehow melt
3:29
into the scene. I
3:32
am not socially adept. I don't speak
3:34
German. I'm very new even to
3:36
just dancing. Assuming this plan
3:38
could work for someone, I'm pretty skeptical it
3:41
can work for me. But
3:45
I feel like I wanted to try. As
3:48
someone who has known the joys of belonging and
3:50
the pain of not, I've
3:52
always been very curious about where I can make myself fit
3:54
in, and which places are a bridge too
3:56
far. Could a
3:59
poorly dressed American with a weird laugh,
4:01
find even a temporary home in
4:03
a severe German techno dungeon? I
4:06
had less than a week to get an answer, but for once in
4:09
my life, at least I knew it would be
4:11
a definitive one. So
4:15
on March 13th, I get off the plane, blink
4:17
in the bright, cold sunlight, and
4:20
start practicing some rudimentary German. Hello.
4:31
Hello. I'm there with my editor,
4:33
Shruti, who, by some miracle, speaks the language.
4:36
But other than that, I could not have
4:38
been a more outside outsider to the city.
4:40
This is a tag? Like, it's
4:43
our first day, and so we head to the
4:45
neighborhood everyone had told me to start with. Friedrichstein.
4:48
Friedrichstein is the neighborhood that contains Berghain.
4:51
Walking in the streets, I feel this feeling
4:53
of deja street view. I've clicked
4:55
through the same box on Google Maps for my apartment
4:57
at home. I can see
5:00
the big sports arena that replaced Ostgut,
5:02
Berghain's previous incarnation. I
5:04
can see the River Spree, which winds along
5:06
the city streets. I
5:08
have the sensation that I get sometimes when
5:10
I'm in a restaurant where a celebrity has
5:12
appeared. A little giddy. A
5:15
little on edge. Act
5:17
1. The portal. Late
5:21
in the morning, I find myself en route to
5:23
see a man named Sven von Tulin. Not
5:25
the Berghain bouncer Sven. There are many Svens
5:27
in Germany. This Sven, a
5:29
DJ and a writer. The music studio
5:31
where he asks to meet, a walk
5:34
up. A
5:37
walk up with a lot of singers. I
5:39
trail behind a truthy. Check,
5:42
check. Middle-aged,
5:52
fashionable. A short red-brown widow's peak
5:55
and a white t-shirt. Sven
5:57
dresses to my eyes, more like a rock guitarist than
5:59
a rock. he
8:00
found himself listening to techno in a different
8:02
context, in different spaces. Seeing
8:30
the places where the music was
8:32
being played and understanding that they
8:35
were underground and illegal, part
8:39
of what you were looking for as a
8:41
young punk kid, it
8:44
didn't feel so clean and commercial and
8:46
whatever? Yeah,
8:48
the DIY aspect of it. Because I
8:51
was organizing concerts and we did all
8:53
kinds of labels and fanzines and all
8:55
this stuff. So everything was kind of
8:57
DIY and in Berlin everything was DIY
8:59
as well. And it was like, basically,
9:03
we take over spaces and
9:06
do something great for
9:08
us and our friends. I
9:14
remember having the same feeling as a
9:16
teenager, but listening to punk music in
9:18
Philly. When I tried to
9:20
listen to it first as recorded music, I
9:22
couldn't hear past its roughness. But
9:25
then I went to my first shows. In
9:27
some repurposed church basement, a DIY
9:29
show where bands full of kids
9:31
played for an audience of kids,
9:33
all flying arms and spit and
9:35
sweat. There the music
9:37
came alive for me. Likewise
9:40
Sven found he loved the people
9:42
we met at the squats and
9:44
empty warehouses, where Berliners showed up to
9:46
dance to this new music. Realizing,
9:49
okay, here are all the misfits. All
9:52
the misfits of society are here
9:55
and feel, today, safe here,
9:57
welcome and all that. I
10:00
had to see and experience
10:02
that to fully, I understand that. And
10:04
now I understand the music better as
10:06
well. Sven was transformed
10:08
in Berlin from a hardcore kid
10:10
to a raver. He became
10:12
a DJ, he's actually DJ'd at Berghain. And
10:15
he's written a history of Berlin techno called
10:17
De Klang de Familia, the sound of the
10:20
family. He's now a full
10:22
participant in the techno scene. A
10:24
subculture he once thought he hated. Okay,
10:26
can you just tell me the origin story
10:29
of techno music? Where is it born? Oh
10:32
God. So, techno
10:34
music. So in
10:37
1988, there was a seminal compilation
10:39
that was released by a British
10:41
label, Ten Records. And
10:45
that was the first compilation to basically
10:48
showcase to the world the new
10:50
dance sound of Detroit, which was
10:52
techno. Why were people in
10:54
Detroit, what was happening in Detroit when the
10:56
people were like, we should make music with
10:58
synthesizers and dance to it? Like why did
11:00
that happen? Well, there's
11:02
this famous quote by Derek
11:04
May, who said techno is
11:06
like craft work and parliament
11:08
stuck in an elevator. Techno
11:12
is like craft work and parliament stuck
11:14
in an elevator? I've
11:18
always tried to understand music, any music by listening
11:20
to the lyrics. It's part of why techno is
11:22
actually hard for me to crack. It just doesn't
11:25
have many lyrics. But
11:27
I need to understand techno because I've been
11:29
told that that understanding is part of my
11:31
mission, this plan to break into burkheim. And
11:35
the stories Fen has to tell me about techno, it's
11:37
about all the meaning that gets imprinted into music
11:39
without lyrics. It's about Detroit, this
11:42
place that was in the 1970s, experiencing
11:45
all this strange and inexpressible
11:47
history. History that would
11:49
somehow be encoded into techno as
11:51
the music that was being invented here. So
11:54
here's how that happens. At the
11:56
end of the 1970s, the city of Detroit is in
11:58
some trouble. The US- auto industry
12:00
is beginning to sink, taking Motor City with
12:02
it. But
12:05
it's just the beginning of that decline. And
12:07
Detroit still has something that was rare in
12:09
American cities back then. A black
12:11
middle class. In a
12:13
Detroit suburb called Belleville, three of these
12:15
middle class kids are obsessing about music.
12:18
One of those kids is Derek May, whose
12:20
friend just mentioned, the other two, Juan Atkins
12:22
and Kevin Sonderson. They're
12:24
staying up late listening to this
12:26
very weird radio show hosted by
12:28
a mysterious DJ named The Electrifying
12:30
Mojo. Awesome. A before a
12:34
trip down prototype of
12:37
your musical future, the
12:39
sound of sounds to
12:42
come. It has
12:44
long been the desire of
12:47
the Metro to experience
12:50
advanced sounds and concepts
12:53
compatible with the
12:55
technological advances of our time.
12:59
That voice belongs to the DJ. And
13:02
the crazy thing is that all this hyped up shit
13:04
he's saying, the prototype of your
13:06
musical future, the sounds of sounds to
13:08
come. All of this
13:10
is actually true. The Electrifying
13:12
Mojo did see the future. Welcome
13:15
to Awesome 84. A
13:20
trip to the future of your
13:22
musical. Awesome 84. Awesome
13:26
84. Awesome
13:28
84. And
13:42
he makes it all up. He would play
13:44
whatever the B-52s, Prince, he
13:46
would play electronic music that
13:49
came over from Europe.
14:04
So you had Kraftwerk, obviously you had
14:06
like the Belgium stuff like Telex, Italo
14:08
Disco, and he would kind of create
14:10
these narratives and he was kind of
14:12
a mystical figure as well. So
14:16
you've got the electrifying mojo, this unusual
14:18
visionary mixing genres on the radio that
14:20
Tamer DJ has kept on separate dials
14:22
or off the air entirely. He's
14:25
playing records for five hours at a time. And
14:27
you have these three kids from Belleville who are listening
14:29
to this strange radio program. And it's
14:31
not just them, a bunch of other young
14:33
Detroiters are listening. Jeff Mills,
14:36
Mad Mike Banks, and
14:38
these listeners decide to start making their own
14:40
music, inspired by the sounds they're hearing. In
14:48
1985, Juan Atkins puts out
14:50
a track called No UFOs. He's
14:53
made it on an eight track recorder and his Roland
14:55
TR-909 drum machine. The
15:03
track is synth-y like Kraftwerk. The
15:05
beat is funky like Parliament. There's
15:08
also this doomed science fiction feeling
15:10
to it. This dance track about
15:12
UFOs over Detroit. This
15:25
music isn't just imagining a future for Detroit.
15:28
It also seems to be mourning its past. I
15:31
hear that in this track Temptation by Final
15:34
Cut. The four on the floor beats, their
15:36
construction sounds. The sounds of what
15:38
the city is losing bleeding into this music. It's
15:47
been said like many times that being
15:49
in Detroit at the time, kind
15:52
of in a post-industrial city,
15:54
the idea of the conveyor belt and the
15:56
industrialness, that it all kind of played
15:59
its role. into how
16:01
you approach making music. This
16:04
new form of music, both enabled
16:06
by technology and sometimes about technology,
16:09
it ends up with an appropriate name, Techno.
16:12
Detroit would become known as the birthplace of Techno,
16:15
a metropolis where raves were thrown in
16:18
grand, abandoned buildings in the broken down
16:20
city. Dancers entering spaces
16:22
that didn't even have working lights, dancing
16:24
while holding flashlights, catching glimpses of all
16:26
sorts of strange human behavior in the
16:29
dark. The
16:32
feature of this music that I most notice
16:35
is how it loops. It loops
16:37
in a way that sounds, to some people,
16:39
meaningless, but to others, deeply meaningful. What
16:42
can seem repetitive often isn't. The
16:44
same pattern returns, but now it's been
16:46
complicated by some change in
16:49
frequency or energy, an element added, an
16:51
element removed. This
16:53
is a stripped down, and it turns out
16:55
for many surprisingly powerful kind of music. Techno
16:59
would begin in Detroit, find homes in
17:01
small pockets of cities in North America
17:03
and Europe, perhaps most
17:05
consequentially Berlin. Berlin
17:10
in the late 80s was
17:13
still divided. It was still the
17:15
GDR and West Berlin had
17:17
a really small
17:19
scene. Like it was really just like,
17:22
I don't know, 100 people or something. Small,
17:25
small. Yeah, small, like really, everybody
17:27
knew each other by name, small.
17:30
And there were music enthusiasts and
17:32
dancers and all of that, and
17:34
the music would obviously be played
17:36
in the two and a
17:38
half clubs that West Berlin had at the time.
17:41
And then for Berlin, the catalyst for everything was
17:43
that the wall just came down. Act
17:50
Two, The Wall. So
17:53
where are we right now? Behind
18:00
us is Au Baba in Bricke, which is a beautiful bridge.
18:04
It's 3 p.m. now, and Sri and I are
18:06
walking with Gizina Kuna. Gizina
18:09
is a person we've been told to meet, because she
18:11
seems like a perfect guide. A club kid,
18:13
but also a radio reporter, who's
18:15
covered the scene here for years. And
18:18
a DJ. I'd
18:20
been picturing my stereotype of an intimidating Berghain
18:22
scene star clad in four shades of black
18:25
with an asymmetrical haircut. Gizina
18:27
instead is all smiles, wearing
18:30
a lavender sweatsuit and these big glasses. She
18:33
has the energy of an enthusiastic substitute techno teacher,
18:35
not yet burned out by the job.
18:37
We're staying in Friedrichshain,
18:40
because I wanted to show you Berghain, which
18:43
is, by the way, the name
18:45
stems from Kreuzberg and
18:47
Friedrichshain. So the Berghain from
18:49
Kreuzberg and the Hein from
18:51
Friedrichshain comes together in
18:53
Berghain. Oh, so it's just two
18:55
neighborhoods, Port Manteau, smashed up together. Exactly.
18:59
And so, blah, blah. This
19:02
is the explanation of the name. How boring, hey?
19:04
I do think it would be more something. Nah,
19:07
it's not. It's
19:10
very, very boring. Gizina tells me
19:12
Berghain is actually closed on Wednesday, so
19:15
all we can do this afternoon is study
19:17
the club's perimeter. I still have
19:19
a few days to do all my research before Klubnacht
19:21
begins on Saturday. Berghain sits
19:23
near a cluster of clubs, small,
19:26
big, discreet, not, tucked along the
19:28
banks of the river Spre. On
19:30
the right side, there is the Erävägerländer,
19:33
we call it Raup, where
19:36
is a nice flea market on Sunday
19:38
and also certain little clubs, which
19:41
are totally okay to start
19:44
clubbing, or as a tourist, actually. But
19:47
be careful. A lot
19:49
of shady drug dealers around here don't
19:52
buy from them because it's apparently
19:55
not so boring. Gizina has lived in
19:57
Berlin most of her life. She was born just
19:59
outside the city in Germany. in East Germany while the wall was
20:01
still up. We're gonna go this
20:03
way around because I want to show you the... The
20:06
death strip. The
20:08
death strip, yes. The death strip. The death
20:11
strip. The death strip. Almost.
20:14
Almost. The
20:16
death strip. It's
20:20
a strip of death. Let's
20:22
just say the death strip. During
20:24
the Cold War, East Germany built what
20:26
we call the Berlin Wall, but which was
20:28
actually two parallel walls with a big negative
20:31
space between them. That
20:33
negative space is the death strip, patrolled
20:35
by guards with guns, dogs, surrounded by
20:38
barbed wire. It was
20:40
called the death strip because over 100 people were killed
20:42
trying to pass. The
20:44
death strip is Berlin's defining scar, but
20:46
it's also crucial to our story today, weirdly
20:49
because it's the cradle that will eventually birth
20:51
the city's techno scene. But
20:53
for Gazina, as a kid, before there's the music,
20:56
there's just the wall. Her
20:58
family lived in the Soviet controlled East, the
21:00
GDR. Gazina's father ended
21:02
up on the wrong side of the secret
21:04
police there, the Stasi, for what sounded to
21:06
me like the dumbest possible reason. When
21:09
he was 16, he was actually knocked
21:11
down by an old Stasi guy because
21:13
he said something about the GDR, like
21:16
something not even nasty, but saying, well,
21:18
in this shitty place, you can't even
21:20
get a lemonade because it was summer
21:22
and all the lemonades were out, which
21:24
happened. And so
21:26
he knew he always had this file
21:28
and he couldn't move as he wanted
21:31
to because... You guys didn't
21:33
complain about there being a lemonade that was
21:35
out. Exactly. This
21:42
stray complaint about lemonade one
21:45
time, it meant Gazina's family
21:47
would always be surveilled, targeted. Reading
21:50
about life under the Stasi gives me a deep
21:52
chill. The Stasi tortured, they
21:54
poisoned, but what they're most
21:56
famous for today is the way they surveilled and
21:58
smeared German citizens. Germany's
22:01
commitment to privacy, its suspicion of
22:03
internet companies and camera phones, I
22:06
can't help but wonder if some of that traces
22:08
back to this moment. The
22:10
Stasi and their vast network of
22:12
collaborators spied on everyone. They
22:15
used secrets and rumors to destroy anyone in
22:17
their way. Gossip, wielded
22:19
by idiots, a weapon of mass
22:21
destruction. Today Germans
22:23
talk about privacy the way we talk about free
22:25
speech. But
22:28
Gazina's family, they actually found an escape from
22:30
the East. In 1984,
22:32
this door opened for them. Some
22:37
East Germans were being allowed to go west,
22:39
the West essentially paying the East for workers
22:41
it needed. One day
22:43
Gazina's family found out they'd been selected. But
22:46
the opportunity had come out of nowhere and her
22:48
mother wasn't ready. She needed time to
22:50
prepare. So they came up with a story.
22:53
Her parents told Gazina, six years old at
22:55
the time, to pretend to be sick, to
22:58
buy the family a little more time while the
23:00
Stasi monitored them. And
23:03
we've been followed when we're
23:05
driving around with the car. We've been followed
23:07
by the Stasi all the time. And
23:10
my parents always looked to the backseat and said
23:12
to me, okay, when we arrive now, you're
23:15
going to be sick again. You have to act sick. So I've
23:18
been holding my stomach and acting all sick.
23:22
So we got, I don't know, a couple more
23:24
weeks in the GDR. So mom could
23:26
finish up whatever. She had to finish up and then
23:28
we left. But the day
23:30
you leave, they cut
23:32
your passport and you're not a citizen
23:35
of anywhere. Like, you don't have a
23:37
passport. You don't have an identity anymore,
23:39
pretty much. And the
23:41
good thing was us being Germans, when
23:43
we went to West Berlin, you're instantly
23:46
a German citizen. So that was kind
23:48
of good. But now
23:50
being 46 or 40 years
23:52
later, actually, wow. deal
24:00
with that a lot. I'm actually like
24:02
trying to work through things because we're
24:05
ripped out of our
24:07
environment and now slowly
24:10
realizing how much harm
24:12
it actually did. Gazzina's
24:17
family moved to the part of West
24:19
Berlin that was specifically for people coming
24:21
in from the east. As she describes
24:23
it, a quasi-refugee camp. Life
24:26
there would end up being challenging. Her
24:28
brother was badly bullied in school and turned
24:30
around and bullied her. Her
24:32
parents, who had been much more present in the
24:34
east, now disappeared into work, leaving
24:37
her and her brother home alone with
24:39
the television. For
24:41
her parents, life in the east was the
24:43
bad memory. For Gazzina, who left all that
24:45
so young, it's the West. This
24:48
strange new country that changed her family. They
24:50
left a bruise that stuck around. Okay,
24:53
so where are we? So this is part
24:55
of the wall which is like
24:57
now a monument east side gallery with
25:00
lots of different paintings along the wall. We're
25:03
standing with our backs to what's left of the east side
25:05
of the Berlin Wall. It's covered
25:07
in street art and graffiti now. Nearby
25:09
there's a field of grass and dirt and then the
25:11
river. Honestly, as far
25:14
as monuments go, it's not much.
25:17
The wall fell in November 89 and the
25:19
two cities that had been kept apart rushed to join
25:21
each other. It's strange to think
25:23
that this place where we're talking, anyone
25:25
standing here would have been shot. It's
25:27
just a field. This would have been
25:30
the death strip because then
25:32
the canal was also part of the
25:34
wall or of the no-go
25:36
area and then behind it is Kreuzberg on
25:38
the other side. The size of this trip
25:40
is pretty crazy. It's just so expansive. Yeah,
25:43
we can walk towards the water. So
25:47
yeah, here is where Bath 25
25:49
used to be and now it's like
25:51
Carter Blau and the whole
25:53
area. But Bath 25 was also
25:55
quite famous. Gazina starts
25:58
pointing down river to the spot. A
26:00
decommissioned soap factory turned into a club,
26:02
which closed and turned into another club.
26:05
I know exactly the feeling she's having. Like
26:08
anybody who's lived somewhere long enough, she's looking
26:10
at the city, but she's seeing all the
26:12
cities that used to be here underneath it.
26:15
Berlin in the 1990s, a decade
26:17
really of parties, many of them
26:19
technically illegal, occupying spaces for
26:22
a few years, maybe longer, before
26:24
disappearing. A good
26:26
party is typically about
26:28
celebrating something, a
26:34
birthday, a promotion, but the
26:36
truly great ones, they're almost always
26:38
about release. And
26:41
the intensity with which Germans grabbed ahold of tech
26:43
now, the height of the fire of the scene
26:45
they built here, this was
26:47
a country with decades of awful, unspeakable
26:50
history, trying now to find a way to
26:52
move forward. I'm
26:54
gonna tell you the story of the one party
26:56
that towered over all the others, a
26:59
party that somehow tied all these strange
27:01
threads of time and history together. After
27:04
the break, I'm gonna tell you the story of
27:06
Trisor. A�
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29:31
3. The Vault. In
29:36
the 1910s, before the Nazis took over, the
29:39
biggest department store in Europe was a store
29:41
called Vertheim. Founded by
29:43
George Vertheim, a Jewish man, his
29:45
chain's flagship store was the one in Berlin.
29:48
There's photos of it from before the destruction. It's
29:50
worth looking them up. Honestly, store
29:52
doesn't really describe it. Usually
29:55
it's a cathedral, featuring an
29:57
enormous light-filled atrium, beautiful
29:59
frescoes, 83 elevators
30:01
somehow? In
30:03
1933, the Nazis start picketing the store.
30:05
There's a photo of them standing outside
30:07
holding their signs. Don't buy from Jews.
30:11
Wertheim is forced to hand his store
30:13
over to non-Jewish Germans. He
30:15
dies of pneumonia in 1939. The store itself
30:17
is destroyed a few years later by Allied
30:19
bombs. What's left is
30:22
raised to make more room for the
30:24
wall. The former Wertheim location, unfortunately, falls
30:26
in the death strip. In
30:29
the end, all that's left, some rubble
30:31
and the old vault that was beneath the store.
30:34
It's like every horrible decision Germany made
30:37
for 50 years, they also
30:39
made on this one building, Wertheim.
30:43
And then the wall falls. Sven
30:45
von Tüllen, the DJ techno-historian, picks up
30:47
the story of Wertheim here. During
30:50
the war, the building was destroyed,
30:54
but the wall was still there. And
30:57
then on top of the wall was like just a
31:00
kind of small bungalow
31:03
shack, whatever you want to call it. And
31:06
it was situated right at the
31:08
former death strip. This
31:10
whole area, there was nothing.
31:14
It was only like
31:16
debris, sand. It
31:20
was empty. So when
31:22
they found the place
31:24
by chance, Johnny Stiller from the east
31:26
and Achim Kolberger and Dimitri Hegeman from
31:28
West Berlin, they were driving around like
31:31
we want to open a club in
31:33
East Berlin. And basically
31:36
by chance saw this
31:38
shack. It's like, man, what's
31:40
that? So they
31:42
parked their car, went in,
31:45
and the door was open. They
31:48
kind of looked around and didn't look
31:50
so special. But then they found this
31:52
like door, like where does
31:54
this door lead? And then they opened the door and
31:56
then it was just like dark, wet
31:58
stairs going down. down into the basement
32:01
and they were like, huh, okay. And
32:05
so they had their lighters went down
32:07
around the corner and then they suddenly
32:09
stood in front of these, like
32:12
in a prison, like rusty
32:14
steel bars and
32:16
like a big vault
32:18
steel door. And
32:21
they were like, what is this? And
32:23
they all knew it was empty
32:26
for at least 30
32:31
years. There
32:34
was nothing. They basically, the air they would
32:36
breathe, like when they went down, it was
32:38
like kind of old. They
32:41
all said it was kind of like a spiritual
32:44
experience. They said
32:46
they, when they got out, they didn't talk. They
32:48
didn't talk for like half an
32:50
hour because they were like completely like in this
32:53
mixture of in awe, in shock.
32:56
They all knew this is it. This is
32:58
a place. This
33:02
place would become the site of a club called
33:04
Tresor, German for vault, the
33:06
jewel of the city's new techno scene, years
33:09
before that title was seized by Berghain. Tresor,
33:12
a nightclub, but also a portal between
33:15
Berlin and Detroit. One of
33:17
the men in the car that day, Demetri Hegemon
33:19
had already been flying to America, even signing some
33:22
Detroit DJs to his label, getting their music into
33:24
his West Berlin club before the wall fell. But
33:28
now Tresor would be where
33:30
Detroiters like Derek May, Jeff Mills, Juan
33:32
Atkins, could now fly out and spin
33:34
techno records for ecstatic Germans, sometimes quite
33:37
literally ecstatic, MDMA, a large part of
33:39
the scene at the time. These
33:42
American DJs were finding that the techno they made
33:44
at home meant something else here
33:46
in Germany. This
33:49
place that had been so stuck in its
33:51
own history loved this music, whose power lay
33:53
in how it looped. It
33:55
looped in a way that sounded to some
33:57
people meaningless, but to others deeply meaningful. The
34:00
music looped. Sometimes the stories about it
34:02
did too. One
34:04
of the Germans converted to techno in the sweaty
34:07
dungeon of Trisor, Gizina Cuna. Although
34:10
before Gizina loved electronic music, she actually
34:12
hated it. Her
34:15
association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive,
34:17
syrupy stuff that was sludging out of Europe
34:19
in the 1990s. But
34:22
then a friend of hers told her that
34:24
there were these strange new underground clubs populating
34:26
the empty parts of the city, and he
34:28
invited her to come explore them. My best
34:31
friend, Martin, who is such
34:33
a soul in all kinds of ways,
34:35
he started taking me to those places.
34:37
And one was Trisor. Trisor
34:40
was a turning point for Sven von Toulen, too,
34:43
the site of his conversion. Do you remember
34:45
just the first time you went to Trisor? Yeah,
34:47
yeah, yeah, I remember the first time I went
34:49
to Trisor. I went right down
34:52
the basement. downstairs was
34:54
super interesting with the old compartments
34:57
and the very famous style
35:01
guitar here. What would
35:03
you have in a prison? What's it called?
35:05
The steel bars, which looked
35:07
like a cell kind of thing. It
35:11
was full of fog and
35:14
the strobe was going off. And you walked
35:16
in there and there was the techno
35:18
floor, that was the Trisor floor where
35:20
techno was played. And I was standing
35:22
on the floor there and looking
35:25
around me because I felt a bit
35:27
uncomfortable because that was loud
35:29
and strobe lightening,
35:31
always a bit weird for my eyes.
35:33
And then it became all dark. And
35:36
I couldn't see anything. And
35:38
the next thing I know, I just fell
35:40
because there was like a speaker on the
35:42
ground. And I was like, oh, and then
35:44
I went to the wall kind of like,
35:47
where's the wall? Where am I? And it
35:50
took me a little bit to adjust.
35:54
And I felt something wet dripping on my
35:56
nose and I'm just like, looked up, couldn't
35:58
really see, but then there's straw was
36:00
started. I'm like, oh, that's like
36:02
sweat from the ceiling. That's
36:05
very interesting. And then the kick
36:07
drum kicked in. So
36:14
like pure bass in
36:17
my stomach and I felt in my
36:19
stomach and that was such an amazing
36:21
feeling. Like seriously, I was standing there
36:23
a bit like I had an epiphany
36:25
or maybe Jesus came to me. I
36:27
was like, oh, I understand.
36:29
I looked at my eyes and
36:31
I'm like, I understand. No. Okay.
36:33
And I didn't drink or anything
36:35
back then. I was pure, pure
36:37
energy of the music. Yeah,
36:49
I'll never forget that. Funnily enough, I kind
36:51
of started my DJing at Trissot
36:54
as well because a friend of mine,
36:57
she was cleaning Trissot at the time
37:00
and I didn't have turntables yet. So
37:02
she was like, you know what, just come over
37:04
while I clean. So I was
37:07
there quite
37:10
often on Saturday, Sunday
37:12
afternoons, basically playing and
37:14
cleaning. Okay.
37:16
It's also, it's so, when, when
37:18
like I've heard this week, we've spoken
37:20
to people and like, I've
37:23
thought, like I was aware
37:25
of the Bro and Woffel as a historical
37:27
event. I had not spent that much time
37:30
really like thinking about the emotional reality of
37:32
it and the strangeness of its existence and
37:34
the strangeness of its end. And
37:36
there's something, the way you talk about
37:38
that, it's a combination of
37:40
like, it's so beautiful, like as an expression of
37:43
like human freedom and joy. And
37:45
so strange, like it's so strange to
37:47
me that there would be a city
37:50
divided where two different
37:52
economic models were in competition with each other,
37:54
where people had to live these like very
37:56
constrained lives. And that when you set those
37:58
people free, it turns out the thing that
38:00
they're going to do is
38:03
have computers make music for
38:06
them and shake their asses
38:08
in like this dungeon-y, like
38:11
bombed-out buildings. It's so strange. Yeah,
38:15
I mean, it's, you cannot make
38:17
it up in a way. It
38:19
just kind of coincided perfectly. There
38:21
was this whole optimism, you
38:24
know, like the end of the Cold
38:26
War, the future is bright, like, oh,
38:28
we had impending nuclear war, like all
38:30
of that was like, oh, now it's
38:32
gone. And then you have all these
38:34
possibilities suddenly. You have the spaces, you
38:36
have zero economic pressure. You didn't have,
38:39
you didn't pay taxes. You
38:41
didn't do anything. You just,
38:43
you just did, right? It
38:45
felt like an exorcism for a lot
38:47
of Germans, like the exorcism of the
38:51
Second World War, Nazi Germany,
38:53
the separation, all of
38:55
that. Even I have trouble sometimes
38:58
finding words for the history I
39:00
have within my body and having
39:02
something like techno where everyone comes
39:04
together and people with no agenda
39:06
on both sides. There were still,
39:08
you know, conflicts and all that,
39:10
but overall, whereas in
39:13
the rest of German society, a lot of shit
39:15
went down, a lot of infighting, you know, and
39:17
a lot of like blame going back and forth
39:19
between East and West and all of that. But
39:22
it was really wasn't an issue
39:25
in the club scene at all. It didn't
39:27
matter if you're from the East or West.
39:29
It was like reunification first started on the
39:32
dance floor. For
39:38
Sven, Trisor is where the new city began,
39:40
where he learns to love techno music, where
39:43
he found a path for his life in
39:45
a former vault where sweat and chunks of
39:47
plaster routinely dripped from the ceiling into people's
39:49
drinks. And this was the scene
39:52
that would over the years draw an international crowd. People
39:54
from all over the world who had no
39:57
real feelings about a unified Germany or the scars
39:59
of the cold. but who could
40:01
recognize a good party and who wanted to join
40:03
one. Tresor would lose
40:05
its original location. A lot of those early
40:07
clubs would disappear. At some
40:09
point, the egalitarian anyone-can-join-the-party vibe
40:12
would fade, replaced with
40:14
something more exclusive. A
40:16
new, intimidating club, which drew foreigners, even
40:19
ones who didn't know very much about tech now, but
40:21
who had just heard there was a room that was
40:23
very hard to enter, a room they
40:26
now wanted to try to get into. Berghain.
40:29
Act Four. Portraits.
40:33
It's still Wednesday afternoon. Our
40:36
stroll with Gazina, the DJ and
40:38
radio reporter, continues. She's about to
40:40
show us Berghain's outside, the castle's
40:42
exterior. We leave the park
40:44
and its remnants of the old Berlin Wall, and we
40:47
walk towards our destination just a few minutes away. We're
40:49
gonna get there from the side, which
40:52
isn't maybe as cinematic as we thought it would
40:54
be. Maybe as...
40:58
Cinematic? Yeah, bombastic, but I think you
41:00
still get the gist of it. Okay.
41:03
You can already see. Is that it?
41:05
Yeah, you can already see part of
41:07
Berghain there. Oh, it's enormous. It's huge.
41:09
Like, seriously, it's so big. Berghain
41:12
takes me by surprise somehow. We're
41:15
walking down a side street when suddenly the
41:17
top of this massive building appears in the
41:19
distance. It doesn't
41:21
look like a power plant. It's
41:23
palatial, with double-height, skinny rectangular windows.
41:26
Honestly, to my eye, it looks like
41:28
an industrial version of Buckingham Palace, maybe
41:31
one occupied by squatters. For
41:33
Gazina, if Trazor was the site of her
41:36
techno conversion, Berghain is the
41:38
church she now visits most regularly. Can
41:41
you tell me the first time you went to Berghain? Yes
41:44
and no, because when I start telling those
41:46
stories to my younger friends,
41:48
when they ask you, what was your first time
41:50
to Berghain? How long? That's what they ask. No,
41:53
no. They're like, how long have you been coming
41:55
here? This is the question I got. I'm like,
41:57
you know what? I've
41:59
been going. to Osgood. This is
42:02
how long I've been coming here.
42:04
And this is where I say
42:06
grandma is starting to tell stories
42:08
from before the war. It's okay
42:10
grandma, let's get you to bed. So my first
42:15
Birken experience was not Birken, it was Osgood.
42:17
Which is the predecessor to Birken. Exactly.
42:21
Gesine said she went there to see
42:23
one of her friends DJ. The line
42:25
was short back then. But Sven Markeart
42:27
was already manning the door. Two decades
42:29
younger, his reputation already firmly established. When
42:33
Osgood morphed into Birken, it kept
42:35
the same values. Secrecy and privacy
42:37
for its guests. Walking
42:39
toward the club, Gesine explains that even today,
42:41
when you enter, your phone is taken so
42:44
its camera lens can be covered. No
42:46
photos, so you get your stickers on. Can't
42:49
take any pictures in there. It doesn't
42:51
matter what kind of performance or
42:53
whatever you're going, it's always stickers.
42:56
Here look. Oh
42:58
what's that? There's a little green sticker on the ground.
43:00
Yeah well this is. Is that a Birken sticker? Yes,
43:02
is this. Yes. Oh it goes right over
43:04
the lens. Those are
43:07
like mostly neon colored and you see there's a
43:09
yellow one. Yeah there's a bunch. There's an
43:11
orange one. There's Birken shrapnel just a couple
43:13
blocks away. Yeah. We
43:15
pass through a small park, a former
43:17
train lot, concrete and graffiti covered benches.
43:20
We pop around a corner and now Sruthi, Gesine and
43:23
I are standing by what seems to be the
43:25
side of Birken. I noticed this
43:27
unassuming metal door that looks like a service
43:29
entrance maybe. So the main line just goes
43:31
this way and then to the left. No no this
43:33
is the door. This is
43:35
the main door of Birken. We're here
43:37
already. 4 30 pm
43:39
on a Wednesday. The club is closed. No one's
43:41
outside. A gray door
43:43
sealed tight and graffitied. This
43:46
will be where the line ends on Klubnacht. In
43:48
front of the door a series of waist
43:51
high metal gates to corral that line and
43:53
overlooking it all I noticed two
43:55
prominent white security cameras. The
43:58
scene does not feel like what you'd see outside of a night It
44:00
feels like what you'd see in front of a tiny patch
44:03
of the Berlin Wall. High
44:05
security. I have a question
44:07
actually. So is there a
44:09
way to sneak in, i.e. has
44:12
anyone snuck into Percocut? Not
44:15
that I know of. Because, I
44:17
mean, look at it. You have barbed wire,
44:19
you have cameras there at
44:21
the door. Gazina says, highly
44:23
unlikely. Just given how
44:25
tight the security is here, the sheer number of
44:27
people who work the door. But
44:30
she also uses the opportunity to point out, people
44:33
sort of misunderstand these bouncers, these
44:35
doorman, these gatekeepers. Everyone obsesses over
44:37
and sometimes reviles. Let's
44:40
talk about any bouncer in
44:42
the city, not the place that
44:44
we're standing dead away from. I
44:46
know it's a very delicate
44:49
topic, very delicate, because you select.
44:52
And selecting people has
44:55
a very bad ring-shirt, very bad. Also,
45:00
the selector, calling it a selector, has a
45:02
very Nazi ring-shirt as well. I've always thought
45:04
that, yes. So
45:07
I don't want to say that term because
45:10
it's nasty. And given our history,
45:12
even worse. The
45:15
thing is, which makes
45:17
it so delicate, is that they decide
45:20
about you within milliseconds.
45:22
Not even seconds, but
45:25
less than that. In
45:27
a very, very short amount of time. They
45:29
look at you, they check you
45:32
out, and then decide, do
45:35
you fit tonight? Not just in general, do
45:37
you fit tonight or not? Then they might
45:39
ask questions. Hey, where
45:41
are you coming from? How old are you?
45:43
Who's playing? They ask a lot, like, who's
45:45
playing tonight? It's to
45:47
see if they're really into the music. But
45:50
they really decide how the party's going to
45:52
turn out. The thing
45:54
is, in my club life, I kind
45:56
of grew up with bouncers. It's a
45:58
weird thing to see. but I
46:01
always felt like every part of the club is
46:03
very important, not only the DJ, and I was
46:05
always very fond of the bouncers. I
46:07
always became friends with them, different
46:09
clubs in the city, and
46:12
stood there with them
46:14
and realised how
46:17
much trouble they have to go through, like
46:19
how much hate they get. And that's
46:22
why they also have to be
46:24
a bit more strict and kind of the
46:27
feel of being intimidating. But
46:30
usually they're not, and usually very, very important.
46:32
A good bouncer is a very smart person,
46:35
by the way. It's not a dumb,
46:37
whatever broad person that was just casted
46:39
out of the gym with big muscles.
46:42
No, not at all. The best bouncers are
46:45
super smart people. Standing here doesn't
46:47
look so hard. Does the
46:49
line go much, much farther back? It's just
46:51
going to lead the way to where the
46:53
line sometimes goes to. Gizina
46:56
walks us away from the door,
46:58
away from Burghain. We're now
47:00
walking down a concrete path. We
47:03
pass by a closed imbus, a German snack shop, whose
47:06
entire business seems to be selling food
47:08
to Burghain's line supplicants. We
47:11
walk, and we walk, this currently
47:13
empty path that in a few nights will
47:15
be filled with pilgrims. We
47:17
walk to the end of the road, and
47:20
then we turn around and behold the grandest
47:22
view of Castle Burghain. I
47:24
imagine for a moment the ghosts of Chris
47:26
and Dan making minor dance movements here, wondering
47:29
if the club can perceive them and, if
47:31
so, what it's thinking. So if
47:33
you were here, how many would it be, like a couple of
47:35
hours? Yeah, probably. I
47:38
mean, the longest my
47:40
husband waited with his friends was seven
47:42
hours. Seven hours? That
47:45
was the day where two guys got
47:47
rejected, and he, with his good
47:49
friend, got in. And so they
47:51
waited seven hours in line, half of their
47:53
party was rejected, and he was
47:55
like, I'm so sorry, I'll see you tomorrow? Well,
47:59
yeah. when
50:00
we say goodbye to Gazina and leave Friedrichstein. I'm
50:03
still jet lagged and a little confused. I eat
50:05
a Donor Kebab at dinner with some American friends.
50:08
They want to hit the bars. I try, but
50:10
I find myself falling asleep into a gin and
50:12
tonic. I tell myself, it's the
50:14
first night, there will be others. I
50:17
say goodbye, and my friends forge on in search of
50:19
an adventure, which for them
50:21
does not quite work out. What
50:23
happens is they go from bar to bar,
50:26
but then somewhat randomly end up outside the
50:28
KitKat club, a very famous fetish
50:30
club where the dress code runs
50:32
towards leather gear or else basically
50:34
nothing. My friends show
50:36
up at the door dressed in comfortable
50:38
American tech worker fleeces. The
50:41
bouncer is horrified. He
50:43
looks at them and says, no,
50:45
no, this is impossible. If
50:48
you're a fetish club, please go home,
50:50
read our website. The
50:52
Americans seem to find this experience completely entertaining,
50:54
a good story to take home. Through
50:57
all of this, I am asleep. Despite
51:00
visions of Berghain Dormann's Ben Marquardt,
51:03
I have no nightmares. You
51:28
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58:00
an intangible cultural heritage site. But
58:02
still, Philip says as a lawyer,
58:05
this UNESCO designation will be useful
58:08
ammunition in his ongoing battles. Because
58:11
when you have to outweigh the
58:13
interests between neighbors and club owners,
58:16
it will be a bit easier to
58:18
get the permits with this decision. And
58:21
it's a way of saying like basically all of these
58:23
things amount to the same thing, which is like the
58:26
city is constantly having to make choices about
58:29
whether to favor the needs of a resident
58:31
or a business. And what
58:34
something like this does is it lets culture make
58:36
its argument as well to say like, this might
58:38
inconvenience a neighbor in this way, or this might
58:40
prevent this other business from being here, but we
58:43
are deciding to preserve our culture. Exactly.
58:46
That UNESCO designation may
58:49
be a sign that Berlin's nightlife has won
58:51
its multi decade war for legitimacy, a war
58:53
which Philip played a role in. Philip had
58:56
been there in the 2000s, when
58:58
this new generation of Berlin clubs had
59:00
to fight against being wiped out by
59:02
a proposed new tax designation. This
59:05
was the story I'd heard in broad strokes before from
59:08
Lutz Leichsenring in the last episode, but I
59:10
wanted to hear it from Philip, who'd actually
59:12
helped put the club's legal argument together. A
59:15
refresher, just in case you need it, in
59:18
the early 2000s, underground techno clubs in
59:20
Berlin had been taxed mostly as concert
59:22
venues, which pay pretty low taxes to
59:24
the city. The tax authorities
59:26
wanted to start charging the clubs at
59:28
entertainment rates to treat them all like garden
59:31
variety disco tax, which would mean almost 20%
59:33
of all the club's
59:36
earnings went to the city. And
59:38
Bergein and other clubs like it wouldn't just
59:40
owe 20% going forward, they'd
59:42
have to pay those taxes retroactively
59:44
as well. The club
59:46
owners, was it like existential? Like
59:48
were there clubs that were worried that they would go
59:50
out of business that they had to pay this bill? Absolutely.
59:53
Yeah, we're talking about like 100,000 of
59:56
euros would have been like an
59:58
earthquake and it would have been dramatic.
1:00:01
And I think there would have
1:00:03
been some clubs that had to close the doors if
1:00:05
they had to pay back all that money. So
1:00:08
it was existential, absolutely. So
1:00:12
in 2011, Phillips Law Firm starts meeting
1:00:14
with the club commission and certain club
1:00:16
owners, you can't say which ones, but
1:00:18
let's say some key players. They
1:00:21
meet with the tax authorities to make their case.
1:00:23
Bureaucrats and club owners in a
1:00:25
room together hashing it out. I
1:00:28
remember I was at the top
1:00:30
of the building, very
1:00:32
impressive old building. And
1:00:35
we were sitting there with older,
1:00:38
gray haired people that didn't
1:00:40
look like they would go
1:00:43
clubbing. And we sat there
1:00:45
together with the different club
1:00:47
owners. I can say
1:00:49
who was there, but they also tried to
1:00:51
dress up a bit and to
1:00:53
behave seriously in that situation. These
1:00:55
club kids in suits had to
1:00:58
defend the thing they did at
1:01:00
night as meaningful discussion
1:01:02
ensued. And that was
1:01:04
a very funny conversation because you
1:01:07
have to agree on two things
1:01:09
for the reduced taxes. First, it has
1:01:12
to be a concert. So you need
1:01:14
an artist. So we had discussion about
1:01:16
the DJs being artists. How do they
1:01:18
use instruments? What are they doing there?
1:01:21
And the tax authorities was of the
1:01:23
opinion that, no, this is not art.
1:01:25
I mean, you put on a CD
1:01:28
or LP and you just let it play as no
1:01:30
art. So that's the first
1:01:32
point of contention. Is a
1:01:34
DJ an artist? The second point was,
1:01:37
even if they are, is a DJ
1:01:39
set really like a concert? One
1:01:41
way you could define a concert would be fans
1:01:43
pay for tickets and the price of the ticket
1:01:45
is based on how famous the artist is and
1:01:48
how close to the artist the fan gets to
1:01:50
sit. The physical authorities looking
1:01:52
at a techno club did not see that
1:01:54
happening. And physical authorities,
1:01:56
they said, I know we checked it
1:01:58
and you have bars and you drink.
1:02:00
very much and you have low entrance
1:02:03
price, you make much more with drinks.
1:02:05
So this holds against a concert. And
1:02:07
what also holds against is that people
1:02:09
don't know who's playing, who's the DJ.
1:02:12
And the DJ is not like on the
1:02:14
concert on a big stage, he's maybe in
1:02:17
the corner, there's no light and people move
1:02:19
around and they don't really care who's playing
1:02:21
there. And we went
1:02:23
into all this discussion and said, okay, come
1:02:25
on, look, we have lower entrance fees because
1:02:28
we want to provide opportunity for many
1:02:30
people to enjoy club life. But at
1:02:32
the same time, the clubs pay a
1:02:34
lot for the DJs. I mean, they
1:02:36
have resident, they have international DJs, they
1:02:38
are well known. Of course people come
1:02:40
because they want to see these DJs.
1:02:42
They celebrate a DJ. If he's doing
1:02:44
a good job, then they're applauding, they
1:02:46
are cheering. So down for a
1:02:48
second, like these tax authorities
1:02:51
who you're having these conversations with, are
1:02:53
they people who are more used to
1:02:55
like rock shows? Because
1:02:57
if you just think about it, like, is
1:02:59
there any reason why when a rock band
1:03:01
plays, we all stand and watch them strum
1:03:03
a guitar, we could celebrate it by standing
1:03:06
away from the band and dancing. Like it
1:03:08
makes you think about the arbitrariness of how
1:03:10
we celebrate music together in
1:03:12
modern life. It's very strange. Yeah,
1:03:15
it is like a very old
1:03:17
school, maybe Prussian way
1:03:21
of looking at concerts, like
1:03:23
everybody has to sit in a row
1:03:25
and be quiet and do nothing else,
1:03:27
but listen. And I had a good
1:03:29
feeling after this conversation that
1:03:31
we have the better arguments, obviously. Yeah,
1:03:34
but the fiscal authorities
1:03:36
and these people didn't agree. And
1:03:38
instead they went to court. The
1:03:43
club that would fight the fiscal authorities
1:03:45
in court was, of course, Berkein, or
1:03:48
as the Germans call it, the Berkein.
1:03:50
I was very happy that it was
1:03:53
the Berkein, because it is like a
1:03:55
dead, it's still one of
1:03:57
the most famous clubs of German.
1:04:00
and if it wouldn't work here, it wouldn't
1:04:03
work for other clubs. Similar
1:04:05
arguments will be made in open court to the
1:04:07
ones Philip and his team had made behind closed
1:04:09
doors. But here, those arguments
1:04:11
seem to fall in more sympathetic ears. The
1:04:15
court agrees. DJs don't just press play on
1:04:17
CDs. They have synths and mixers and faders.
1:04:19
They change the pitch and the frequency of
1:04:21
their tracks. But
1:04:23
then the tax officials argue, don't
1:04:26
people just go to Bergen and places
1:04:28
like it to get intoxicated? And
1:04:33
here, the club lawyer concedes
1:04:36
the point. Yes, they
1:04:39
do. But he
1:04:41
had a question. Wasn't
1:04:43
intoxication so often the point of listening
1:04:45
to music? The
1:04:48
lawyer's example, what
1:04:50
was the feeling you were meant to have
1:04:53
when listening to a piece by Gustav Mahler?
1:04:55
If not, intoxication. And
1:05:09
if that was true, couldn't
1:05:11
you just as easily feel intoxicated
1:05:14
after hearing a track from planetary
1:05:16
assault systems? September
1:05:23
2016, the verdict is announced. Bergen
1:05:28
wins. The court had
1:05:30
sided with the club kids. Did
1:05:33
people celebrate? Like, did people go out? If
1:05:37
they did, I was not invited. I
1:05:39
don't know. Does
1:05:47
that mean there's a pressure on these clubs to
1:05:50
get to the point where they're not going to be able to get to
1:05:52
the point where they're on these clubs in the wake of these rulings to
1:05:57
behave artistically, whatever that would mean, or
1:05:59
behave culturally? Really, whatever that would mean. Does
1:06:05
it push people towards a kind of
1:06:07
conventions or rules with
1:06:10
an eye towards the tax authority? I
1:06:15
don't think that they changed the program
1:06:17
or the culture, but
1:06:20
what they are doing now is, of course, to
1:06:22
do their paperwork. That
1:06:25
they have scans of their flyers,
1:06:27
and maybe you realize, if
1:06:30
you go out here, they might ask you if
1:06:32
you know who's playing tonight. So
1:06:35
this is also something they do since the discussion
1:06:37
started to
1:06:40
make sure that the people come to the club because of the resident did
1:06:42
and DJ or whatever. This
1:06:45
is a story that I heard all the way in
1:06:47
New York, that if you go to the
1:06:49
door at a place like Berghain, you may be asked who the DJ
1:06:51
is. I'm sure that this was
1:06:54
partly as a result of German tax
1:06:56
law. I love a good
1:06:58
story. That seems crazy. Is
1:07:01
that true? That you can draw a line
1:07:03
from that tax decision to that question? Yeah,
1:07:06
it starts from the discussion with the tax
1:07:08
authorities, I'm sure. Act
1:07:14
6. Technoloups.
1:07:17
The story is about a dutut
1:07:19
sometimes. I
1:07:22
had first heard this story from Lutz. I liked it.
1:07:24
I thought it was funny. And I
1:07:26
guess I understood it as a tale of the club kids
1:07:28
being clever, outmaneuvering the tax people a
1:07:30
bit. Here in Berlin, it settled
1:07:33
on me differently. The conversation
1:07:35
with Philipp happened late in the afternoon. That
1:07:38
night, I had really my first sublime
1:07:40
Berlin dance floor experience. This
1:07:42
tiny spot, no bouncer, it's called
1:07:45
Sussfahr Gestern. Sweet was yesterday. I
1:07:48
don't record here. I don't record in any club. I
1:07:51
don't like to follow the rules of this place that's
1:07:53
so dead set against the casual surveillance we're all used
1:07:55
to at home. But it's
1:07:58
dingy and beautiful here. The dance floor,
1:08:00
like a living room from Alice in
1:08:02
Wonderland, maybe, someone stapled a Persian
1:08:04
rug to the ceiling. The
1:08:07
floor is crowded. People really have all ages. For
1:08:09
some reason, the room has an absurd amount of
1:08:11
couches, but the dancers just
1:08:13
clear all the furniture. I'm told that's
1:08:15
how it happens every week. As
1:08:18
I watched the DJ and the people around the DJ, I
1:08:21
found myself thinking about Philip and the court case
1:08:23
and about what's happening in this room. I
1:08:26
think about Sven von Toulen, the hardcore kid
1:08:28
turned techno DJ. Sven
1:08:31
had told me at one point part of why
1:08:33
he loved techno was the same reason he'd loved punk,
1:08:36
that it was a genre that just did not care
1:08:38
for rock stars. In the
1:08:40
early days, in particular, he'd said the people
1:08:42
dancing at the party were the main attraction.
1:08:45
The DJ conducted them, but the DJ
1:08:47
also kind of disappeared. It
1:08:49
wasn't like a concert where hundreds or
1:08:52
thousands of people stare at one person
1:08:54
in a kind of secular worship. This
1:08:57
was something older, weirder, people
1:09:00
losing themselves, becoming a mass. It's
1:09:03
happening in this room tonight. And
1:09:05
I think maybe this is what
1:09:07
the club kids were trying to say to those tax authorities,
1:09:10
that this was worth defending, valuable,
1:09:13
or at least cultural.
1:09:17
Saturday night comes, the beginning
1:09:20
of Klubnacht at Berghain. Instead
1:09:22
of going there and braving the bouncers, staring
1:09:24
down Sven, I go with
1:09:26
my friends to a different Berlin club, this one sitting
1:09:28
on the banks of the River Spree. The
1:09:31
bouncer there, a stylish woman, asked our group
1:09:33
if we speak German. The German
1:09:35
speakers in our party try to cover, saying we all
1:09:37
do, her eyes fix directly
1:09:39
on my cow-like, uncomprehending American gaze.
1:09:42
And she asks in English, do
1:09:45
you speak German? No, I
1:09:47
confess. She starts laughing. Why
1:09:49
would you lie to me? She lets us all in. Sunday
1:09:53
morning, one final dance party. We
1:09:56
show up at an old public German swimming
1:09:58
area. This is small land. lake outside of
1:10:00
the city. In a shack
1:10:02
on the water, all the windows have been covered
1:10:04
in colored gels. So when the morning light comes
1:10:07
in, it feels like you're inside a cathedral instead
1:10:09
of a lean-to. It's
1:10:11
so crushingly beautiful, so criminally
1:10:13
Instagrammable. One of my American friends
1:10:16
can't resist. He takes out his phone. Immediately,
1:10:18
a German partygoer is on top of him,
1:10:20
reacting the way someone would react if he
1:10:22
took out an actual weapon in an American
1:10:24
nightclub. Stay in the moment, she
1:10:26
yells, or something to that effect. It's
1:10:29
a little aggressive, but the phone is
1:10:31
ultimately holstered. Sunday
1:10:34
afternoon, a few hours later, a text
1:10:36
arrives. Do I want to
1:10:39
see Berghain? A person I'd met this
1:10:41
week. Their friend is DJing today,
1:10:43
so they're going to support them. They
1:10:45
can take me along if my clothes aren't
1:10:47
too bad. I'll still have to
1:10:49
pass a bouncer, but I'll have a real Britliner offering
1:10:51
me a halo. 3
1:10:54
PM, the sun is shining at morning
1:10:56
church-level strength. The line of petitioners outside
1:10:58
Berghain is as long as ever. The
1:11:01
line where Chris and Dan had found themselves, snakes from
1:11:04
the entrance of the club, maybe 100 yards back,
1:11:07
at the front, an open door guarded by two
1:11:09
men. Inside, through the black
1:11:11
rectangle of the door, Sven,
1:11:14
watching a series of security camera
1:11:16
monitors, presumably directing decisions from inside.
1:11:20
I meet my Berliner friend, and we stand near
1:11:22
the famous line. For a very,
1:11:24
very long time, we just watched the
1:11:27
line. It feels tense
1:11:29
and electric to be here observing it, like
1:11:31
I'm breaking a rule. And maybe I
1:11:33
am. A bouncer from the door asks
1:11:35
me, is everything okay? But
1:11:37
I tell him, I'm just watching. And
1:11:40
he nods. That's fine. Like
1:11:42
everything in life, the line is not what I expected
1:11:44
to be. A
1:11:47
woman in her 50s dressed for the airport, she's
1:11:50
waved in. A Middle
1:11:52
Eastern guy in his 30s alone,
1:11:54
wearing a functional hiker's backpack, he's
1:11:57
also in. Two young Euro
1:11:59
trash, generally. dressed for Ibiza, they
1:12:02
get the not tonight. Most
1:12:04
people today, though, are getting waved in. The
1:12:06
ones who don't, they walk away looking like they somehow
1:12:09
knew before they heard the words. The
1:12:11
whole thing, it feels like watching something that's
1:12:13
already happened, happen. Like the divorce
1:12:16
papers or the marriage license that shows up in the
1:12:18
mail a year later. Eventually,
1:12:20
my friend takes me to the shorter line that
1:12:23
they usually wait in, the list for regulars. It's
1:12:26
much faster than the main one. I
1:12:28
wait as people shuffle to the front for the
1:12:30
bouncer's inspection. It's
1:12:33
my turn now. I stand in
1:12:35
front of a bouncer, Natsven, one of his
1:12:37
underdormen. I stand in
1:12:39
front of the bouncer, and the bouncer looks at me,
1:12:41
his face blank, blank like an ubus.
1:12:45
My brain fills with a question that I realize
1:12:47
always hums in the background. But
1:12:49
now, it's brighter and more intense than I've
1:12:51
ever heard it. It's almost deafening. Do
1:12:54
I belong? I
1:12:57
wait to find out. Search
1:14:07
Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw
1:14:10
Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt,
1:14:12
and Truthi Pinnimineni. And it was produced by
1:14:14
Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking
1:14:16
this week by Claire Hyman. Theme,
1:14:19
original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.
1:14:22
If you enjoyed this story, or if any
1:14:24
of our stories this season made you laugh,
1:14:26
or think, or gave you something to talk
1:14:28
about, please consider supporting our show. You can
1:14:30
do it at searchengine.show. It'll
1:14:32
help us plan our second season, which we are already
1:14:34
at work on. Our
1:14:36
executive producers are Jen-Aweis Berman and Leah
1:14:39
Reis-Dennis. Thank you to everyone
1:14:41
in the Koodle Moodle, and to Laura Somme
1:14:43
and Kelph Asane. Thanks
1:14:45
also to the labels, Ostko, Ton, and Trisor, for
1:14:47
letting us dip into their catalogs. We've
1:14:50
distilled our reading and homework into
1:14:52
a single techno playlist. I
1:14:54
will link to that playlist in my newsletter, which
1:14:56
you can also sign up for at searchengine.show. Thanks
1:15:00
to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney,
1:15:02
Rich Perillo, and John Schmidt. And
1:15:05
to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley,
1:15:07
Rob Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate
1:15:09
Hutchinson, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis,
1:15:11
Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schupp. Our
1:15:14
agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow
1:15:17
and listen to Search Engine for free on
1:15:19
the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your
1:15:22
podcasts. Thanks for listening.
1:15:24
Take care. Bye.
1:16:00
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