In a city gearing up to celebrate the anniversary of its open borders, it is the one place where the door often remains emphatically shut.
Berghain, a Berlin nightclub celebrating its 10th birthday this year, has become notorious not just for the dark industrial techno it serves up from Friday nights until Monday afternoon, nor the sexual fantasies lived out in the “darkrooms” inside this former power plant, but also for its strict and enigmatic door policy.
Web sites and forums promise to spill the secret of how to get past the grim-faced bouncer at what might be the world’s most famous nightclub. Turning up in big groups is said to be a no-no, as is chatting in the queue.
A new “How to get into Berghain” app promises updates on the length of the queue outside the super-secretive venue with the motto “We decide with whom we want to party.”
However, for its anniversary, Berghain is opening its gates to reveal a gentler side. For a start, there is no face control at the art exhibition in one of the industrial halls, which includes paintings, photographs and videos inspired by the venue, historic graffitied toilet doors and an aquarium filled with urine, lit in melancholy hues.
A memoir by the club’s bouncer Sven Marquardt reveals the tattooed and pierced figure as a sensitive soul who used to look for love on the streets as a gay punk in east Berlin.
“Even when I was a punk, my motto was always: Mothers and the elderly first,” Marquardt writes in Die Nacht ist Leben (“The Night is Life”).
At the book’s launch party, the feared Berlin legend claimed that at 52 he was “fast on my way toward age-related mildness.”
Marquardt, who trained as a photographer, started his doorman career at Snax — a Berghain predecessor that had the tag line: “For pervy men only.”
Being a bouncer, his book argues, is all about the “right mix.”
“I don’t mind letting in the odd lawyer in a suit with his Gucci-Prada wife,” he said. “We also take guys in masks and kilts, or Pamela Anderson blondes who tag along with bearded blokes, licking the sweat off each others’ armpits. That, for me, is Berghain.”
This week, broadsheets and online forums have been filled with odes to the “Berlin Philharmonic of electronic music.” Many credit Berghain — a compound of districts Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain — with a key role in reinventing the German capital.
For many of the 3,000 clubbers on a typical night, it is the main reason for coming to the city.
“Berghain has become the ultimate symbol of the ‘new’ Berlin,” said Tobias Rapp, author of Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno and the Easyjetset. “When I wrote my book in 2009, only people in the techno scene knew about Berghain. Now my father-in-law is begging me to take him there.”
Bouncers such as Marquardt were crucial to protect subcultures like those flourishing at Berghain, Rapp said.
His advice for getting through the door is: “Don’t be afraid. People who are afraid usually aren’t very good at partying.”
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS