All the times I did not get into Berghain

An accumulation of nameless energies

I

So there's a guy in here, you've heard, this topless guy, and he comes to Klubnacht every weekend and his whole thing is that he chains himself to the floor of the urinals and waits there expectantly in case you’d maybe like to piss in his mouth. This might not appeal to you on an instinctual level but consider: piss is a waste product, it would appear that he has a stronger utilitarian claim on it than you currently do, and (not to get too lost in the weeds here but) for how long are you in possession of a stream of urine once its left your body? At what exact point in the Berghain toilet does ownership transfer from the pisser to the pissee? Would it really harm you to just… give him a cheeky little spray? 

This is a good time to remind yourself that this is a city with its own atmosphere, its own time-zone, its own lurid ecosystem and a bespoke set of codes and conducts which apply here and precisely nowhere else in the world. Here, you can piss on whomsoever you want to and you are absolutely free to stare down a video camera and say, for example, ‘Berlin is a naughty babymamma who just wants to ride.’ You may come here and subsist for many days on a single slice of watermelon, a bottle of Evian and a pill that you’ve been informed is named Dom Pérignon. Sometimes, when you are watching a Boiler Room set, you see pale, bug-eyed individuals who have not known what day of the week it is, every day, for eight consecutive years. People who have jettisoned every social norm and live by the ancient pull of gravitational tides, people from every corner of the world who wash up on the shores of the River Spree and find themselves here, in this queue, in this burned-out patch of industrial scrubland in a dusty hinterland between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain - these people, you feel, are surely - your people. 

But right now you have an issue. Your companion is wearing a short-sleeved polyester shirt and what you might be tempted to call loafers. He looks like a recruitment consultant on a sabbatical. He looks like your dad after having been urged to ‘make an effort’ for an upcoming parents’ evening. It is not his fault. He has never heard of Berghain before today and he has therefore not read one of the many hundreds of thousands of articles which speculate in agonising detail about what you absolutely must and must not wear if you are to stand any chance whatsoever of actually, you know, getting in. He is a chef from Argentina and you met him three days ago at your German language course. He bounds around the classroom with the energy of a beloved family dog and you are far too agreeable to turn him down when he offers to join you for the evening. But know this - when you get to the door and meet Sven’s inscrutable gaze with him by your side you are absolutely fucked. And so it goes.

II

You should wear black, everyone says. Except, no, only the despised Easyjet-set would be so gauche as to actually wear black, real Berliners wear whatever the fuck they want - which just so happens to be black. 

n.b: it is very pitiful and conformist that you have Googled ‘what do I wear to get into Berghain’ and this has led you to a Quora page where someone has written ‘i dunno just wear black & look indifferent’ and you have proceeded to take this advice from a total stranger at face value and now you find yourself alone in the queue trying to sustain a facial expression of what you hope comes across as brooding / detached / sexually-charged but actually does not come across like this because a) no one is looking at you or your facial expression and b) you have absolutely no balls and no individuality and you don’t even deserve to be within a five mile radius of Panorama Bar and c) these bouncers will take one look at you and swat you away like the household pest that you truly are. I mean, you do realise that Sven is a notable street photographer and there are entire coffee table books written about his personal philosophy of style, right? And what is that you’re wearing, a £16 t-shirt from the H&M premium range? What are you, Olly Fucking Murs? Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back until you can be less of a disgrace to yourself. Go on. Out of the queue. All the way out. Shoo. 

No, yeah - was feeling quite anxious this time around, to be fair. Didn’t get in. 

III

You are in the queue again. You are participating in what Don DeLillo might call an accumulation of nameless energies. There are not many famous queues in the world, but this is certainly one of them. Maybe if you just.. sublimate yourself to the queue. Silence the voices in your mind and consider yourself like a camera, just processing images and textures and sounds - noticing them without judgement or paranoid meta-commentary. Heraclitus says that no man can step in the same river twice, and so it is here - the queue is now a patchwork of many different souls, some old, some young - everyone with a life as vivid and complex as your own. Just allow yourself the space to breathe. 

Look. Here is a young Irish man walking backwards down the length of the queue having been turned away at the door. He is visibly agitated, his hands aloft like a footballer protesting a yellow card. He is wearing double-denim and his downy, blonde hair reminds you of one or maybe all of Westlife. “Fuck the Berghain!” he is shouting, sticking his middle fingers up now, “Fuck youse all…. fuck youse all!” The queue does not acknowledge this man. He is to the queue what an unwashed street-beggar is to a crowded S-Bahn carriage. Here is a lesson: if you are rejected by the oracle, you nod gratefully and walk away into the night. If you fail to do so, you will be de-personed. 

Tonight you are here with three other people and at least one of them is beautiful. She is German and has been here many times before. She refers to Berghain as, simply, ‘church’ and talks about the venue in the plain language of the devotional, as though many generations of her family have found salvation through these doors. She says there are stained glass windows in Panorama Bar, and as the sun rises in the morning their thick wooden shutters are sometimes opened and swiftly closed again so that the dancefloor is drenched in a paradise of red and indigo light. She says the DJ booth is so high above the floor that it resembles a pulpit, and that the congregated masses are drawn here through a shared faith in music and the restorative power of compassion and humanity. She says that to hear the soundsystem for the first time is a religious experience: you feel the bass only as a sensation in your sternum, the hi-hats as crisp as the swishing of a thousand proximate insect wings. She says that when you stand on the upper platform and gaze down on the gathering that they resemble a shoal of fish, moving as one. Before she turns to talk to someone else she looks into your eyes and says, quite plainly, that Berghain is the best experience available to her on Earth and that she will find the time to attend for the rest of her natural life. 

You are nearing the front of the queue now and you are over-awed by the scale of the building itself. You remember this feeling from when you first visited Barcelona and saw La Sagrada Familia, uplit and transcendent against the inky, late-summer sky. She speaks to Sven in words that you cannot yet understand, placing a hand on his hip as she enters through the door. You are reminded of the final scene of The Truman Show - you have lived all your life on this side of the door; now your sole desire is to experience life on the side of the unknown. But life is not always fair. You nod gratefully and walk away into the night. 

IV

You are nauseous, wet and shivering and your hollow, empty, body craves nothing but sleep and nutrients. You have been at Sisyphos for more hours (days?) than you can remember and it is time to go home. However, Berghain is en route home. You depart from your friends and you get off the U-Bahn at Warschauer Straße. 

Sometimes, you think, it seems as if the city is just a vast, open wound - a century of terror and oppression etched in the bullet holes that scar the arches underneath Friedrichstraße and the sandstone pillars of the Atles Museum. Sometimes, in winter especially, it's like a giant lid has been placed over the city and the air becomes suffocating and granular and static - you walk with your head bowed against the sleet, insignificant in your smallness against the backdrop of rows and rows of Soviet era mid-rise apartment complexes. They appear to you as black and sinister shapes, their outlines scarcely visible through the dense, stubborn clouds. These motherfuckers, you think. If they don’t let me in I’m gonna… the thought drifts away, incomplete. 

There are no more than twenty people in the queue. They look dazed and forlorn and sickly, like gremlins waiting to be executed. But look, they are letting them all in. They are letting everyone in. It is 8am on a Sunday morning in the pouring rain and this, in itself, constitutes its own form of proof. Your heart threatens to escape from your chest. Is this it? You do not dare to ask yourself the question. Just shut the fuck up. Shut up. You round the metal railing and step up to the entrance. You meet the steely glare of the bouncer with a steely glare of your own. He holds your gaze for another half second and then nods. You take a step inside. You remove your phone from your pocket and a small, round sticker is placed over the camera lens. 

You are now free.