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.”
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