Search Engine - Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? Pt. 2 (classic)

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

We travel to Germany to trace techno’s history from Detroit to Berlin. The story of how, after the Wall fell, Berlin exorcised its brutal past with a very strange, decade-long party. A mission that takes us all the way to the gates of Berghain.Music Credits: Original composition in this episode by Armen Bazarian. Additional Tracks: Game One - Infiniti, Dead Man Watches The Clock - Marcel Dettmann & Ben Klock, The Call - Marcel Dettmann & Norman Nodge, Quicksand - Marcel Dettmann. Full playlist here.Sven von Thüle: https://soundcloud.com/svt // Der Klang der FamilieGesine Kühne: https://soundcloud.com/wannadosomething Become a premium member!

Hello. This is part two of our story about why two nice young American men were not permitted to enter Bergheim, a famously exclusive German techno nightclub. If you haven't heard part one, please go back and listen. My body thinks that it's 2.30 in the morning, but I'm on a plane landing in Berlin where it's 7.30 in the morning. My body does not believe that. Welcome to search engine. I'm PJ Vote. You're listening to the second part of our story. Why didn't Chris and Dan get into Burkheim? In March, I found myself on a tarmac in Berlin holding yet a number. another book about the history of German techno, cramming, I suppose, for a very strange kind of test. It was all part of this crazy plan that a man named Lutz had described to me, and which I could not resist trying. Lutz had said that the real way into the most exclusive nightclub in the

world, Bergheim, famous for its four-hour-plus line, was to not wait in that line at all. It was instead to meet people in the Berlin techno crowd, gain a deep understanding of what the music meant them, and in doing so somehow melt into the scene, I am not socially adept. I don't speak German. I'm very new even to just dancing. Assuming this plan could work for someone, I'm pretty skeptical it can work for me. But I feel like I wanted to try. As someone who has known the joys of belonging and the pain of not, I've always been very curious about where I can make myself fit in and which places are a bridge too far. Could a poorly dressed American with a weird laugh find even a temporary home in a severe German techno dungeon?

I had less than a week to get an answer, but for once in my life, at least I knew it would be a definitive one. So on March 13th, I get off the plane, blink in the bright, cold sunlight, and start practicing some rudimentary German. I'm there with my name about it. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I'm there with my editor Shruti, who by some miracle, speaks the language.

But other than that, I could not have been a more outside, outsider to the city. This is it tag? Like good. It's our first day, and so we head to the neighborhood everyone had told me to start with. Friedrich Seine. Friedrich Seine is the neighborhood that contains Bergheim. Walking the streets, I feel this feeling of Deja Street View. I've clicked through the same box on Google Maps for my apartment at home.

I can see the big sports arena that replaced Oskut, or against previous incarnation. I can see the river Spree, which winds along the city's streets. I have the sensation that I get sometimes when I'm in a restaurant where a celebrity has appeared. A little giddy, a little on edge. Act 1. The Portal. Late in the morning, I find myself en route to see a man named Sven Bontoulin.

Not the Bergheim Bouncer Sven. There are many Svens in Germany. This Sven, a DJ and a writer. The music studio where he asks to meet, a walk-up. A walk-up with a lot of stairs. I trail behind Shruti. Check, check.

Middle-aged, fashionable, a short red-brown widow's peak and a white t-shirt. Sven dresses to my eyes more like a rock guitarist than a techno-d-d-jay, but how does a techno guy dress anyway? This way? That's great.

We sit down, and I tell Sven what I want him to help me try to understand today. I'm trying to understand a genre of music, techno, which, for some reason, Germans love, and Americans mostly view as vapid. Why would the same sounds be heard so differently in two different countries?

In America, it's like the two types of music you're allowed to say you hate our country music and techno music. Okay, that's always a problem when your idea of something is just that bullshit stuff that's mass marketed. Yes. Sven tells me he gets it. A lot of people's first exposure to electronic music is the worst of the genre. And he relates to that because when he first heard techno, he also hated it. His association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive, syrupy stuff.

It was sledging out of Europe in the 1990s. I was like punk hit. I lived in a squad. And for me, it felt like techno is just like apolitical. It's just hedonism. It's very German. It's like all that I, you know, as like, you know, an angry 16, 17-year-old. I was like, I don't like any of that.

To give you a sense of what angry young Sven was into, this is his old hardcore punk band, Abyss. Sven had no use for Unz-Ons. And he didn't just hate techno. He hated the kinds of places that played it, at least in the town where he was from. I grew up in a small town close to Hemmocont, Bremen. They didn't have spaces,

so they had to go in all the discothex. And they looked like discothex, so I could never relate to that. But then, in the mid-90s, Sven moved to Berlin. And there, he found himself listening to techno in a different context, in different spaces. In Berlin, obviously, you had all these spaces that were basically, like some of them were actually squatted, you know, like where you had like illegal clubs, illegal parties.

And even if it wasn't maybe not illegal anymore, it was still like rough and ready kind of like real underground stuff. I would go to Trezor and it's like, oh yeah, I can totally relate to that. Now it makes sense to me. So it was seeing the places where the music was being played in. understanding that they were like underground and sort of illegal. To you, part of what you were looking for as like a young punk kid, it didn't feel so like clean and commercial and like whatever. Yeah, the DIY aspect of it.

Because, you know, I was organizing concerts and we did all kinds of like labels and fanzines and like all this stuff. So everything was kind of DIY. And in Berlin, everything was DIY as well. And it was like, basically, we take over spaces and do something great. And it's, you know, for us and our friends. I remember having the same feeling as a teenager, but listening to punk music in Philly. When I tried to listen to it first as recorded music, I couldn't hear past its roughness.

But then I went to my first shows. In some repurposed church basement, a DIY show where bands full of kids played for an audience of kids. all flying arms and spit and sweat, there the music came alive for me. Likewise, Sven found he loved the people who he met at the squats and the empty warehouses, where Berliners showed up to dance to this new music. Realizing, okay, here are all the misfits.

All the misfits of society are here and feels, today would say, safe here, welcome and all of that. That, I had to see and experience that to fully, I understand that. And now I understand the music better as well. Sven was transformed in Berlin, from a hardcore kid to a raver. He became a DJ. He's actually DJed at Bergheim.

And he's written a history of Berlin techno called Declong de Familia, the sound of the family. He's now a full participant in the techno scene. A subculture, he wants that he hated. Okay, can you just tell me, like, the origin story of techno music? Like, where is it born? Oh, God. So, Techno Music.

So in 1988, that was a seminal compilation that was released by a British label, 10 records. And there was the first compilation to basically showcase to the world the new dance sound of Detroit, which was techno. Why were people in Detroit, what was happening in Detroit that people were like, we should make music with synthesizers and dance to it? Like, why did that happen? Well, there's this famous quote by Derek May, who said techno is like craftwork and parliament stuck in an elevator. Techno is like craftwork and parliament stuck in an elevator? Huh.

I've always tried to understand music, any music, by listening to the lyrics. It's part of why techno is actually hard for me to crack. It just doesn't have many lyrics. But I need to understand techno, because I've been told that that understanding is, part of my mission, this plan to break into Birkheim. And the stories Sven has to tell me about techno, it's about all the meaning that gets imprinted into music without lyrics. It's about Detroit, this place that was in the 1970s, experiencing all this strange and

inexpressible history, history that would somehow be encoded into techno, as the music that was being invented here. So here's how that happens. At the end of the 1970s, the city of Detroit is in some trouble. the U.S. auto industry is beginning to sink, taking Motor City with it. But it's just the beginning of that decline. And Detroit still has something that was rare in American cities back then. A black middle class.

In a Detroit suburb called Belleville, three of these middle class kids are obsessing about music. One of those kids is Derek May, who Sven just mentioned. The other two, Juan Atkins and Kevin Sanderson. They're staying up late listening to this very weird radio show, hosted by a mysterious DJ named The Electrifying Mojo. Awesome. 84.

A tripped out prototype of your musical future. The sound of sounds to come. It has long been the desire of the metro to experience advanced sounds and concepts compatible with the technological advances. That voice belongs to the DJ. And the crazy thing is that all this hyped up shit he's saying, the prototype of your musical future, the sounds of sounds to come.

All of this is actually true. The electrifying mojo did see the future. Welcome to Awesome, 84. A trip to the future of the music. Awesome, 84, awesome. 84. Awesome. 84. And he mixed it all up. He would play whatever the B-52s, Prince. He would play electronic music that came over from Europe.

So you had craftwork, obviously, you had like the Belgium stuff, like Telex, Italo disco. And he would kind of create these narratives. And he was kind of a mystical figure as well. So you've got the electrifying mojo, this unusual, visionary mixing genres on the radio that tamer DJs kept on separate dials or off the air entirely. He's playing records for five hours at a time. And you have these three kids from Belleville who are listening to this strange radio program. And it's not just them. A bunch of other young Detroiters are listening. Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks, and these listeners decide to start

making their own music, inspired by the sounds they're hearing. In 1985, Juan Atkins puts out a track called No UFOs. He's made it on an eight-track recorder and his Roland TR-909 drum machine. The track is synthi like craftwork. The beat is funky like Parliament. There's also this doomed science fiction feeling to it. This dance track about UFOs over Detroit. This music isn't just imagining a future.

for Detroit, it also seems to be mourning its past. I hear that in this track Temptation by Final Cut. The four on the floor beats, their construction sounds. The sounds of what the city is losing, bleeding into this music. It's been said, like many times, that being in Detroit at the time, kind of in a post-industrial city, the idea of the conveyor belt and that industrialness, that it all kind of played its role into how you approach making music. This new form of music, both enabled by technology and sometimes about technology, it ends up with an appropriate name, Techno.

Detroit would become known as the birthplace of Techno, a metropolis where raves were thrown in grand abandoned buildings in the broken down city. Dancers entering spaces that didn't even have working lights, dancing while holding flashlights, catching glimpses of all sorts of strange human behavior in the dark. The feature of this music that I most notice is how it loops. It loops in a way that sounds to some people meaningless, but to others deeply meaningful. What can seem repetitive often isn't. The same pattern returns, but now it's been complicated by some change in frequency or energy, an element added, an element removed. This is a stripped down, and it turns out for many surprisingly powerful kind of music.

Techno would begin in Detroit, find homes in small pockets of cities in North America and Europe, perhaps most consequentially, Berlin. Berlin in the late 80s was still divided. It was still the GDR and West Berlin had a really small scene. It was really just like, I don't know, 100 people or something. Oh, like it. Small, small. Yeah, small. like really everybody knew each other by name small

and they were music enthusiasts and dancers and all of that and the music would obviously being played in like the two and a half clubs that West Berlin had at the time and then for Berlin the catalyst for everything was that the wall just came down Act 2, the wall so where are we right now?

On Barreuxe Street there's back and behind us is which is a beautiful bridge. It's 3pm now, and Shrithy and I are walking with Gazina Kuna. Gazina is a person we've been told to meet, because she seems like a perfect guide, a club kid, but also a radio reporter who's covered the scene here for years,

and a DJ. I'd been picturing my stereotype of an intimidating Bergheim scene star, clad in four shades of black with an asymmetrical haircut. Gazina instead is all smiles, wearing a lavender sweatsuit and these big glasses. She has the energy of an enthusiastic substitute techno teacher, not yet burned out by the job. We're staying in Friedrichstein because I wanted to show you Berkhein,

which is, by the way, the name stems from Kreuzberg and Friedrich Seine. So the berg from Kreuzberg and the hei from Friedrich Sein comes together in Berghein. Oh, so it's just its two neighborhoods, portmanteau, smashed up together. Exactly. So, blah, but this is the explanation of the name. How boring, hey? I do think it would be more something. Nah, it's not.

It's very, very boring. Gazina tells me Bergheim is actually closed on Wednesday, so all we can do this afternoon is study the club's perimeter. I still have a few days to do all my research before Klubnacht begins on Saturday. Berghine sits near a cluster of clubs, small, big, discreet, knot, tucked along the banks of the River spray. On the right side there is the RAW Gelenda, we call it raw, where it's a nice flea market on Sunday and also certain little clubs, which are totally okay to start clubbing or as

a tourist actually. But be careful. A lot of shady drug dealers around here don't buy from them because it's apparently not so good. She has lived in Berlin most of her life. She was born just outside the city in East Germany, while the wall was still up. We're going to go this way around because I want to show you the toadestreifen. The death strip?

The death strip, yes. Trodes streifes? Almost. Tord? Streifer. It's a strip of death. It's a strip of death. Let's just say the death strip.

During the Cold War, East Germany built what we called the Berlin Wall, but which was actually two parallel walls with a big negative space between them. That negative space is the death strip, patrolled by guards with guns, dogs, surrounded by barbed wire. It was called the death strip because over 100 people were killed trying to pass. The death strip is Berlin's defining scar, but it's also crucial to our story today, weirdly because it's the cradle that will eventually birth the city's techno scene. But for Gazina, as a kid, before there's the music, they're just a little. the wall. Her family lived in the Soviet-controlled East, the GDR.

Kizina's father ended up on the wrong side of the secret police there, that Stasi, for what sounded to me like the dumbest possible reason. When he was 16, he was actually knocked down by an old Stasi guy because he said something about the GDR, like something, not even nasty, but saying, well, in this shitty place, you can't even get a lemonade because it was summer and all the lemonade's were out, which happened. and so he knew he always had this file and he couldn't move as he wanted to.

He doesn't complain about their being out of lemonade. Exactly. This stray complaint about lemonade one time, it meant Gazina's family would always be surveilled, targeted. Reading about life under the Shazi gives me a deep chill. The Shazzi tortured, they poisoned, but what they're most famous for today is the way they surveilled and smeared German citizens.

Germany's commitment to privacy, its suspicion of internet companies and camera phones, I can't help but wonder if some of that traces back to this moment. The Stasi and their vast network of collaborators spied on everyone. They used secrets and rumors to destroy anyone in their way. Gossip wielded by idiots, a weapon of mass destruction. Today, Germans talk about privacy the way we talk about free speech. But Gzina's family, they actually found an escape from the east. East. In 1984, this door opened for them. Some East Germans were being allowed to go West,

the West essentially paying the East for workers it needed. One day, Gazzina's family found out they'd been selected. But the opportunity had come out of nowhere, and her mother wasn't ready. She needed time to prepare. So they came up with a story. Her parents told Gazzina, six years old at the time, to pretend to be sick, to buy the family a little more time while the Stasi monitored them. And we've been followed when we're driving around with the car. We've been followed by the Stasi all the time. And my parents always looked to the backseat and said to me, okay, when we arrive now, you're going to be sick again.

You have to act sick. So I've been like holding my stomach and acting all sick. And so we got, I don't know, a couple more weeks in the GDR. So mom could finish up whatever. She had to finish up. And then we left. But the day you leave, they cut your passport and you're not a citizen of anywhere.

Like, you don't have a passport. You don't have an identity anymore, pretty much. And the good thing was us being Germans. When we went to West Berlin, you're instantly a German citizen. So that was kind of good. But now being 46 or 40 years later, actually, wow. I have to deal with that. a lot. I'm actually like trying to work through things because we're ripped out of our environment

and now slowly realizing how much harm it actually did. Gazzina's family moved to the part of West Berlin that was specifically for people coming in from the East, as she describes it, a quasi-refugee camp. Life there would end up being challenging. Her brother was badly bullied in school and turned around and bullied her. Her person, her Her parents, who had been much more present in the East, now disappeared into work, leaving her and her brother home alone with the television. For her parents, life in the East was the bad memory. For Gazina, who left all that so young, it's the West, this strange new country that

changed her family, that left a bruise that stuck around. Okay, so where are we? So this is part of the wall, which is now a monument, Eastside Gallery. lots of different paintings along the wall. We're standing with our backs to what's left of the east side of the Berlin Wall. It's covered in street art and graffiti now. Nearby, there's a field of grass and dirt, and then the river. Honestly, as far as monuments go, it's not much.

The wall fell in November 89, and the two cities that had been kept apart rushed to join each other. It's strange to think that this place where we're talking, anyone standing here would have been shot. It's just a field. This would have been the death strip because then the canal was also part of the wall

or of the no-go area and then behind it is Kreuzberg on the other side. The size of this trip is pretty crazy. It's just so expansive. Yeah, we can walk towards the water. So here is where Barf 25 used to be and now it's like

Kata Blau and the whole area. But Bar 25 was also quite famous. Gazina starts pointing downriver to this spot. A decommissioned soap factory turned into a club, which closed and turned into another club. I know exactly the feeling she's having. Like anybody who's lived somewhere long enough,

she's looking at the city, but she's seeing all the cities that used to be here underneath it. Berlin, in the 1990s, a decade really of parties, many of them technically illegal, occupying spaces for a few years, maybe longer, before disappearing. A good party is typically about celebrating something, a birthday, a promotion, but the truly great ones, they're almost always about release.

And the intensity with which Germans grabbed a hold of techno, the height of the fire of the scene they built here, this was a country with decades of awful, unspeakable history, trying now to find a way to move forward. I'm going to tell you the story of the one party that towered over all the others. a party that somehow tied all these strange threads of time and history together. After the break, I'm going to tell you the story of Trussor. Act 3. The Vault. In the 1910s, before the Nazis took over,

the biggest department store in Europe was a store called Vertheim. Founded by George Verdeheim, a Jewish man, his chain's flagship store was the one in Berlin. There's photos of it from before the destruction. It's worth looking them up. Honestly, store doesn't really describe it. Really, it's a cathedral. Featuring an enormous light-filled atrium, beautiful frescoes, 83 elevators somehow?

In 1933, the Nazis start picketing the store. There's a photo of them standing outside holding their signs. Don't buy from Jews. Wertheim is forced to hand his store over to non-Jewish Germans. He dies of pneumonia in 1939. The store itself is destroyed a few years later by Allied bombs. What's left is raised to make more room for the wall. The former Vertheim location, unfortunately, falls in the death strip.

In the end, all that's left, some rubble, and the old vault that was beneath the store. It's like every horrible decision Germany made for 50 years, they also made on this one building. Vertheim. And then, the wall falls. Sven von Toulin, the DJ techno historian, picks up the story of Vertheim here. During the war, the building was destroyed, but the wall was still there. And then on top of the wall, it was like just a kind of small bungalow shack, whatever, I want to call it. And it was situated right at the former Death Strip.

This whole area, there was nothing. It was only, like, debris, sand. And it was empty. So when they found the place by chance, Donny Steele from the East and Achim Kolberger and Dimitri Hegemann from West Berlin, they were driving around like we want to open a club in East Berlin. And basically by chance saw this shack. It's like, well, what's that?

So they parked their car, went in and the door was open. and they kind of looked around and didn't look so special. But then they found this, like, doors. Like, where does this door lead? And then they opened the door, and then it was just like dark, wet stairs going down into a basement. And they were like, huh, okay. And so they had their lighters, went down around the corner,

and then they suddenly stood in front of these, like in a prison, like rusty steel bars and like a big, vault, steel door. And they were like, what is this? And they all knew it was empty for at least 30 years. There was nothing. They basically, the air they would breathe

when they went down, it was like kind of old. They all said it was kind of like a spiritual experience. They said they, when they got out, they didn't talk. They didn't talk for like half an hour because they were like completely like in this mixture of in awe, in shock. They all knew this is it.

This is a place. This place would become the site of a club called Trezor. German for vaults, the jewel of the city's new techno scene, years before that title was seized by Bergheim. Tresor, a nightclub, but also a portal, between Berlin and Detroit. One of the men in the car that day, Dimitri Hagemont had already been flying to America, even signing some Detroit DJs to his label,

getting their music into his West Berlin club before the wall fell. But now, Trussor would be where Detroiters like Derek May, Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, could now fly out and spin techno records for ecstatic Germans, sometimes quite literally ecstatic. MDMA, a large part of the scene at the time. These American DJs were finding that the techno they made at home meant something else here in Germany. This place that had been so stuck in its own history loved this music, whose power lay in how it looped. It looped in a way that sounded to some people meaningless, but to others deeply meaningful.

The music looped. Sometimes the stories about it did, too. One of the Germans converted to techno in the sweaty dungeon of Trezor, Gazzina Kuna. Although before Gazzina loved electronic music, she actually hated it. Her association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive, syrupy stuff. It was sledging out of Europe in the 1990s. But then, a friend of hers told her that there were these strange new underground clubs populating the empty parts of the city,

and he invited her to come explore them. My best friend, Martin, who is such a soul in all kinds of ways, he started taking me to those places. And one was Trezor. Trezor was a turning point for Sven Van Toulin, too, the site of his conversion. Did you remember just the first time you went to Dresor?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember the first time I went to Trisora. I went right down the basement. Downstairs was just super interesting with the old compartments and the very famous stahl guitar here. What do you have in a prison? What's called the steel bars, which looked like a cell kind of thing? It was full of fog and the strobe was going off.

And you walked in there and there was the techno floor, That was the treasur floor where Technovas played. And I was standing on the floor there and looking around me because I felt a bit uncomfortable because that was loud and strobeer, lightning, always a bit weird for my eyes. And then it became all dark. And I couldn't see anything. And the next thing I know, I just fell. Because there was like a speaker on the ground.

And I was like, oh. And then I went to the wall kind of like, ugh. With wall, where am I? And it took me a little bit to adjust. And I felt something wet dripping on my nose and I'm just like looked up, couldn't really see. But then the strovo started and I'm like, oh, that's like sweat from the ceiling.

That's very interesting. And then the kick drum kicked in. So like pure base in my stump. and I felt it in my stomach. And that was such an amazing feeling. Like, seriously, I was standing there a bit like I had an epiphany, or maybe Jesus came to me. I was like, oh, I understand.

I looked at Martin, I'm like, I understand now. Okay. And I didn't drink or anything back then. I was pure, pure energy of the music. But yeah, I'll never forget that. Funny enough, I kind of started my DJing at Trezor as well because a friend of mine, she was cleaning Trezor at the time. And I didn't have turtables yet.

So she was like, you know what, just come over while I clean. So I was there quite often on Saturday, Sunday afternoons, basically playing and cleaning. Okay. I just say it's also, it's so, when, like, I've heard this week we've spoken to people and, like, I've thought, like, I was aware of Berlin Wall fell as a historical event. I had not spent that much time really, like, thinking about the emotional reality of it and the strangest of its existence and the strangeness of its end. And there's something, the way you talk about that, it's a combination of, like, it's so beautiful, like, as an expression of, like, human freedom and joy. And so strange. Like, it's so strange to me that there would be a city divided where two different economic models were in competition with each other, where people had to live these, like, very constrained lives.

And that when you set those people free, it turns out the thing that they're going to do is have computers make music for them and shake their asses in, like, dungeon-y, like, bombed out buildings. It's so strange. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, you cannot make it up in a way. It just kind of coincided perfectly. There was this whole optimism, you know, like the end of the Cold War, the future is bright. Like, oh, we had impending nuclear war. Like, all of that was like, oh, no, it's gone. And then you have all these possibilities suddenly.

You have the spaces, you have zero economic pressure. You didn't have, you didn't pay taxes. You didn't do anything. You just, you just did. right? It felt like an exorcism for a lot of Germans, like the exorcism of the Second World War, Nazi Germany, the separation, all of that. Even I have trouble sometimes finding words for the history I have within my body

and having something like techno where everyone comes together and people with no agenda on both sides. There were still conflicts and all that, but overall, whereas in the rest of German society, A lot of shit went down, a lot of infighting, you know, and a lot of like blame going back and forth between East and West and all of that. But it really wasn't an issue in the club scene at all. It didn't matter if you're from the East or West. It was like reunification first started on the dance world.

For Sven, Trezor is where the new city began, where he learns love techno music, where he found a path for his life in a former vault where sweat and chunks of plaster routinely dripped from the new city began. where he learns love techno music, where he found a path for his life in a former vault where sweat and chunks of plaster routinely dripped from the ceiling into people's drinks. And this was the scene that would over the years draw an international crowd. People from all over the world who had no real feelings about a unified Germany or the scars of the Cold War, but who could recognize a good party and who wanted to join one. Trezor would lose its original location. A lot of those early clubs would disappear.

At some point, the egalitarian, anyone can join the party vibe would fade, replaced with something more exclusive. A new, intimidating club, which drew foreigners, even ones who didn't know very much about tech now, but who just heard there was a room that was very hard to enter, a room they now wanted to try to get into. Bergheim. Act 4. Portress.

It's still Wednesday afternoon. Our stroll with Gazina, the DJ and radio reporter continues. She's about to show us Bergheim's outside, the castle's exterior. We leave the park and its remnants of the old Berlin Wall, and we walk towards our destination just a few minutes away. We're going to get there from the side, which isn't maybe as... Cinematic? Yeah, bombastic.

But I think you still get the gist of it. Okay. You can already see... Is that it? Yeah, you can already see part of Bergen. Oh, it's enormous. It's huge. Like, seriously, it's so, so big.

Berghine takes me by surprise somehow. We're walking down a side street when suddenly the top of this massive building appears in the distance. It doesn't look like a power plant. It's palatial, with double-height, skinny, rectangular windows. Honestly, to my eye,

it looks like an industrial version of Buckingham Palace, maybe one occupied by squatters. For Gazina, if Trezor was the site of her techno-conversion, Berghine is the church she now visits most regularly. Can you tell me the first time you went to Burghai? Yes and no, because when I start telling those stories to my bit younger friends, when they ask you, what was your first time to back? How long?

That's supposed to ask that question. No, no. It's like, how long have you been coming here? This is the question I got. I'm like, you know what? I've been going to Osco. This is how long I've been coming here. And this is where I say grandma is starting to tell stories from before the war.

It's okay, grandma, let's get you to bed. So my first Berkheim experience was not Berkheim was Osgood. Which is the predecessor to Berkheim. Ritech, exactly. Gazina said she went there to see one of her friends, DJ. The line was short back then, but Sven Markhart was already manning the door. Two decades younger, his reputation already firmly established. When Ostgood morphed into Bergheim, it kept the same values, secrecy and privacy for its guests.

Walking toward the club, Gazena explains that even today, when you enter, your phone is taken so its camera lens can be covered. No photos, so you get your stickers on. Can't take any pictures in there. It doesn't matter what kind of performance

or whatsoever you're going. It's always stickered. Here, look. Oh, what's that? There's a little green sticker on the ground. Yeah, well, this is... Is that a Birkin sticker? Yes, is this.

Yes. Oh, it goes right over the lens. Those are, like, I mean, like, mostly neon. colored and you see there's a yellow one. Yeah, there's a bunch. There's an orange one. There's Birkheim's shrapnel, just a couple of blocks away. We passed through a small park, a former train lot, concrete and graffiti-covered benches.

We pop around a corner and now Shrutti, Gazzina, and I are standing by what seems to be the side of Berghine. I noticed this unassuming metal door that looks like a service entrance maybe. So the main line just goes this way and then to the left. No, no. This is the door of Berghine. We're here already. 4.30 p.m. on Wednesday, the club is closed. No one's outside. A gray door sealed tight and graffitied. This will be where the line ends on Klubnacht. In front of the door, a series of waist-high metal gates to corral that line, and overlooking it all, I noticed two prominent white security cameras. The scene does not feel like what you'd see outside of a nightclub.

It feels like what you'd see in front of a tiny patch of the Berlin wall. High security. I have a question, actually. Yes, so is there a way to sneak in, i.e., has anyone snuck into Perg? Not that I know of, because, I mean, look at it. You have barbedoia, you have cameras there at the door. Gazina says highly unlikely. Just given how tight the security is here, the sheer number of people who work the door. But she also uses the opportunity to point out, people sort of misunderstand these bouncers, these doorman, these gatekeepers, everyone at,

obsesses over and sometimes reviles. Let's talk about any bouncer in the city, not the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the place that we're standing dead feet away from. I know it's a very delicate topic, very delicate, because you select. And selecting people has a very bad ring to it, very bad, very, very bad. Also, the selector, calling it a selector has a very Nazi ring to it as well. That's really...

I've always thought that, yes. Really bad, yeah. So I don't want to say that term because it's nasty. And given our history, even worse. The thing is, which makes it so delicate, is that they decide about you within milliseconds, not even seconds, but like less than that. Like in a very, very short amount of time, they look at you, they check you out and then decide, do you fit tonight, not just in general, do you fit tonight or not?

Then they might ask questions, hey, where are you coming from? How old are you? Or who's playing? They ask a lot, like, who's playing tonight? Just to see if they're really into the music. But they really decide how the party is going to turn out. The thing is, in my club life, I kind of grew up with bouncers. It's a weird thing to say, but I always felt like every part of the club is very important. not only the DJ, and I was always very fond of the bouncers.

I always became friends with them, different clubs in the city, and stood there with them and realized how much trouble they have to go through, like how much hate they get. And that's why they also have to be a bit more strict and kind of the feel of being intimidating. But usually they're not, and usually very, very important. A good bouncer is a very smart person, by the way. It's not a dumb, whatever broad person

that was just casted out of the gym with big muscles. No, not at all. The best bounces are super smart people. So standing here doesn't look so low. Does the line go much, much farther back? It's just going to lead the way to where the line sometimes goes to. Gisina walks us away from the door, away from Bergheim. We're now walking down a concrete path.

We pass by a closed imbis, a German snack shop, whose entire business seems to be selling food to Bergheim's line supplicants. We walk, and we walk, this currently empty path that in a few nights will be filled with pilgrims. We walk to the end of the road, and then we turn around and behold the grandest view of Castle Bergheim. I imagine for a moment the ghosts of Chris and Dan, making minor dance movements here,

wondering if the club can perceive them, and if so, what it says. thinking. So if you were here, how many, would it be like a couple of hours? Yeah, probably. I mean, the longest, my husband waited with his friends was seven hours. Seven hours? That was the day where two guys got rejected and he, with his, like, a good friend got in. And so wait, they waited seven hours in line. Half of their party was rejected and he was like, I'm so sorry, I'll see you tomorrow? Well, yeah, you go in then. Like, you know, our favorite DJ was playing. So it was so funny because I was just, I was walking a friend to the train station and I came back and walked

in just 20 minutes after him, after he had waited for seven hours. Because you were on the list. No, I wasn't on the list. Oh, really? That's a thing about knowing bounce is quite well, you know? And belonging, I guess. Gazzina talking about waltzing into Berghine without waiting in line, without even being on a list, is a little funny to me. Elon Musk, reportedly, was not only rejected by a doorman here, but rejected despite being on a guest list. But Gazzina, who is just a very normal adult Berliner, a person who owns zero electric car companies, actually stitches together a lot of jobs to make ends meet. For her, Bergheim is just the place she belongs. It reminds me of that conversation with Lutz from the last episode,

where he explained how a nightclub is in fact a club, that here at least you can't buy your way in. At this point, I make a confession to Kizena. I'm thinking myself about trying the door on Sunday. She looks at me and Shruti appraisingly. The thing is, I would say at the moment, Shruti would get in and you would be rejected. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You look so American. They can sense you from miles away. And Americans are not, like, adored at very kind. Not really. Sorry. I get it. For the record, I want to say, I am dressed badly, as is my custom. I've never really figured out pants.

So it's not that I'm dressed frumpily, it's that I'm dressed Americanly? Yeah. Yeah. You just look very American. That's a tough one. Okay, but here's what's hard. So you say that. I totally agree.

And I'm like, But like, if the... It's early evening when we say goodbye to Gazina and leave Friedrich's sign. I'm still jet-lagged and a little confused. I eat a donor kebab at dinner with some American friends. They want to hit the bars. I try, but I find myself falling asleep into a gin and tonic. I tell myself, it's the first night, there will be others.

I say goodbye and my friends for John in search of an adventure. Which for them does not quite work out. What happens is they go from bar to bar, but then somewhat randomly end up outside the KitKat Club, a very famous fetish club where the dress code runs towards leather gear or else basically nothing. My friends show up at the door dressed in comfortable American tech worker fleeces. The bouncer is horrified.

He looks at them and says, No, no, this is impossible. We are a fetish club. Please, go home. Read our website. The Americans seem to find this experience completely entertaining. a good story to take home. Through all of this, I am asleep.

Despite visions of Bergheim Doorman Sven Marcard, I have no nightmares. Act 5. Intoxication. Thursday morning, I wake up still pretty jet-lagged. I go to get a table at a coffee shop in Friedrichsign, and standing, waiting, I behold a sight I'm pretty sure as a hallucination.

I snap a photo just to be sure, and then go find Truthie to learn if I'm, seeing what I think I'm seeing. Can I show you a picture that I just took? Yeah. Look who is sitting at the cafe. Sven. Sven Markhart, Haunter of my dreams.

You want to talk to him? Not at all. It's a high-risk maneuver. Oh, come on. The recording stops here because I realize I'm about to debase myself and don't want to record it. I will just say, we have an argument. which I win, and the end result is Shruthy has to go say hello.

She compliments Sven on his photographs, which, if you haven't seen them, honestly, are quite beautiful. Sven is gracious. No one spontaneously combusts, but he also does not hand Shruthi two secret golden tickets into Bergheim. My efforts to melt into this scene will have to proceed differently. I delete the photo from my phone. We leave the coffee shop, and we had to a very different part of the city, to meet somebody connected to the techno scene. We're in Mita now, the center of Berlin, one of the neighborhoods the wall used to divide.

These days, Mita is a place filled with expensive old buildings, the neighborhood where the lawyers work, and we are there, appropriately, to meet a lawyer. Hello. Hi. Hello. Yes, DJ. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well.

We settle into a meeting room. It's a nice one, Wayne Scotting for days. When did you arrive? Yesterday? Yesterday, yes. First thing is first. Can you just say your name and what you do? My name is Philip Schroeder Ringem, and I'm a lawyer.

And what type of law do you practice? Event laws have many clients from the event industry, like clubs or organizers, festivals, etc. In a normal city, talking to a lawyer would not be a good way to break into or understand the technology. scene, but we're in Berlin, where a lot of the grown-ups are former or not-so-former club kids. Philip says he grew up haunting West Germany's club scene, even through parties of his own. But that was then, he's been a lawyer for 15 or so years now.

Philip, a handsome man, 45, but looks about a decade younger. Apparently dancing is good for you. He told me about the kind of work that a grown-up club lawyer finds himself engaged in. Yeah, the typical problems where we could help with is, for example, our noise issues. With the neighbors, for examples, clubs are too loud or festivals, concerts, need a noise permission. And we try to get these kinds of permission. We help the organizers to fight back neighbors that have an issue with this permits and then we go to court. By the way, did you realize that Berlin Technoculture became a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage?

Yesterday, right? It was yesterday. I'm not going to play all the times this moment happens in a recorded conversation this week. We're both better than that, but it's a lot. Over and over again, someone will ask me, have I heard about the UNESCO news? And it's true. March 13th, the day we arrive in Berlin, Berlin Techno is declared a UNESCO cultural heritage site. UNESCO world heritage sites include the Great Wall of China and the Acropolis.

Berlin Techno is technically considered an intangible, cultural heritage site. But still, Philip says, as a lawyer, this UNESCO designation will be useful ammunition in his ongoing battles. Because when you have to outweigh the interests between neighbors and club owners, it will be a bit easier to get the permits with this decision now. And it's a way of saying, like, basically all of these things amount to the same thing, which is, like, this city is constantly having to make choices about whether to favor the needs of a resident, or a business, and what something like this does is it lets culture make its argument as well, to say, like, this might inconvenience a neighbor in this way, or this might prevent this other

business from being here, but we are deciding to preserve our culture. Exactly. The UNESCO designation may be a sign that Berlin's nightlife has won its multi-decade war for legitimacy, a war which Philip played a role in. Philip had been there in the 2000s, when this new generation of Berlin clubs had to fight against being wiped out by a proposed new tax designation. This was the story I'd heard in broad strokes before from Lutzlijs-and-ring in the last episode,

but I wanted to hear it from Philip, who'd actually helped put the club's legal argument together. A refresher, just in case you need it, in the early 2000s, underground techno clubs in Berlin have been taxed mostly as concert venues, which pay pretty low taxes to the city. The tax authorities wanted to start charging the clubs at entertainment rates,

to treat them all like garden variety disco tax, which would mean almost 20% of all the club's earnings went to the city. And Bergheim and other clubs like it wouldn't just owe 20% going forward, they'd have to pay those taxes retroactively as well. For the club owners, was it like existential? Like, were there clubs that were worried that they would go out of business that they had to pay this bill?

Absolutely. Yeah, we're talking about like 100,000 of euros. It would have been like an earthquake, and it would have been dramatic. And I think there would have been some clubs that had to close the doors if they had to pay back all that money. So it was existential, absolutely. So in 2011, Phillips Law Firm

starts meeting with the Club Commission and certain club owners, he can't say which ones, but let's say some key players. They meet with the tax authorities to make their case, bureaucrats and club owners in a room together, hatching it out. I remember it was at the top of the building, very impressive old building. And we were sitting there with older gray-haired people that didn't look like they would go clubbing.

And we sat there together with the different club owners. I can say who was there, but they also tried to dress up a bit and to behave seriously in that situation. These club kids in suits had to defend the thing they did at night as meaningful. Discussion ensued. And that was a very funny conversation because you have to agree on two things for the reduced taxes. First, it has to be a concert, so you need an artist. So we have discussion about the DJs being artists. Do they use instruments?

What are they doing there? And the tax authorities was of the opinion that, Now, this is not art. I mean, you put on a CD or LP and you just let it play is no art. So that's the first point of contention. Is a DJ an artist? The second point was, even if they are, is a DJ set really like a concert? One way you could define a concert would be fans pay for tickets,

and the price of the ticket is based on how famous the artist is and how close to the artist the fan gets to sit. The fiscal authorities, looking at a techno club, did not see that happening. And fiscal authorities, they said, no, we checked it, and you have bars, and you drink very much, and you have low entrance price,

you make much more with drinks. So this holds against a concert. And what also holds against is the people don't know who's playing. Who's the DJ? And the DJ is not like on a concert, on a big stage, he's maybe on the corner, there's no light,

and people move around, and they don't really care who's playing there. And we went to. went into all this discussion. He said, okay, come on, look. We have lower entrance fees because we want to provide the opportunity for many people

to enjoy club life. But at the same times, the clubs pay a lot for the DJs. I mean, they have resident, they have international DJs. They are well-known. Of course, people come because I want to see these DJs.

They celebrate the DJ. If he's doing a good job, then they're applauding, they are cheering. Slow down for a second. Like, these tax authorities who you're having these conversations with, are they people who are more used to like rock shows?

Because if you just think about it, like, is there any reason why when a rock band plays we all stand and watch them strum a guitar? We could celebrate it by standing away from the band and dancing. Like it makes you think about the arbitrariness of how we celebrate music together in modern life. It's very strange. Yeah, it is like a very old-school,

and maybe Prussian way of looking at, concerts like everybody has to sit in a row and be quiet and do nothing else but listen. And I had a good feeling after this conversation that we have the better arguments, obviously. Yeah, but the fiscal authorities and these people didn't agree. And instead, they went to court. The club that would fight the fiscal authorities in court was, of course, Berghein. Or, as the Germans call it, the Bergheim. I was very happy that it was the Berghein, because it is like, that still is one of the most famous clubs of Germany,

and if it wouldn't work here, it wouldn't work for other clubs. Similar arguments will be made in open court to the ones Philip and his team had made behind closed doors. But here, those arguments seem to fall in more sympathetic ears. The court agrees. DJs don't just press play on CDs. They have synths and mixers and faders. They change the pitch and the frequency of their tracks.

But then, the tax is. officials argue, don't people just go to Bergheim and places like it to get intoxicated? And here, the club lawyer, concedes the point. Yes, they do. But he had a question. Wasn't intoxication so often the point of listening to music? The lawyer's example, what was the feeling you were meant to have when listening to a piece by Gustav Mahler, if not intoxication. And if that was true, couldn't you just as easily feel intoxicated

after hearing a track from planetary assault systems? September 2016, the verdict is announced. Bergheim wins. The court had sided with the club kids. People celebrate, like, did people go out? If they did, I was not invited. I don't know. So does that mean there's a pressure on these clubs in the wake of these rulings to, like,

behave artistically, whatever that would mean, or behave culturally, whatever that would mean? Like, does it push people towards a kind of conventions or rules with an eye towards the tax authority? I don't think that they changed the program or the culture, but what they are doing now is, of course, to do their paperwork. So they make sure that the running order is published before, like online or on social media, that they have scans of their flyers. And maybe you realize if you go out here, they might ask you if you know who's playing tonight. So this is also something they do since the discussion started to make sure that the people come to the club because of the resident and DJ or whatever.

This is a story that I heard all the way in New York, that if you go to the door at a place like Berghein, you may be asked who the DJ is. And then later I'd heard rumors that this was partly as a result of German tax law. I love a good story. That seems crazy. Because I feel like, is that true?

That, like, you can draw a line from that tax decision to that question? Yeah, it starts from the discussion with the tax authorities, I'm sure. Act 6. Techno loops. The story is about it due to two. sometimes.

When I'd first heard this story from Lutz, I liked it, I thought it was funny, and I guess I understood it as a tale of the club kids being clever, outmaneuvering the tax people a bit. Here in Berlin, it settled on me differently. The conversation with Philip happened late in the afternoon. That night I had really my first sublime Berlin dance floor experience. This tiny spot, no bouncer, it's called Sussfargestern, Sweet was yesterday. I don't record here. I don't record in any club. I'm trying to follow the rules of this place that's so dead set against the casual surveillance we're all used to at home.

But it's dingy and beautiful here. The dance floor, like a living room from Alice in Wonderland maybe, someone stapled a Persian rug to the ceiling. The floor is crowded, people really have all ages. For some reason, the room has an absurd amount of couches, but the dancers just clear all the furniture. I'm told that's how it happens every week. As I watched the DJ and the people around the DJ, I find myself thinking about Philip and the court case and about what's happening in this room.

I think about Sven von Toulin, that hardcore kid turned techno DJ. Sven had told me at one point, part of why he loved techno was the same reason he'd loved punk, that it was a genre that just did not care for rock stars. In the early days, in particular, he'd said the people dancing at the party were the main attraction. The DJ conducted them,

but the DJ also kind of disappeared. It wasn't like a concert where hundreds or thousands of people stare at one person in a kind of secular worship. This was something older, weirder, people losing themselves, becoming a mass. It's happening in this room tonight.

And I think maybe this is what the club kids were trying to say to those tax authorities, that this was worth defending, valuable, or at least cultural. Saturday night comes, the beginning of Klubnacht at Bergheim. Instead of going there and braving the bouncers, staring down Sven,

I go with my friends to a different Berlin club, this one sitting on the banks of the river Spree. The bouncer there, a stylish woman, asked our group if we speak German. The German speakers in our party try to cover saying we all do, her eyes fix directly on my cow-like, uncomprehending American gaze, and she asks in English, Do you speak German? No, I confess.

She starts laughing. Why would you lie to me? She lets us all in. Sunday morning, one final dance party. We show up at an old public German swimming area, this small lake outside of the city, in a shack on the water. All the windows have been covered in colored gels.

So when the morning light comes in, it feels like you're inside a cathedral instead of a lean-to. It's so crushingly beautiful, so criminally Instagram. one of my American friends can't resist. He takes out his phone, immediately a German partygoer is on top of him, reacting the way someone would react if he took out an actual weapon in an American nightclub.

Stay in the moment, she yells, or something to that effect. It's a little aggressive, but the phone is ultimately holstered. Sunday afternoon, a few hours later, a text arrives. Do I want to see Bergheim? A person I'd met this week. Their friend is DJing today, so they're going to. going to support them, they can take me along if my clothes aren't too bad. I'll still have to pass a bouncer, but I'll have a real brittler offering me a halo. 3 p.m., the sun is shining at morning

church level strength. The line of petitioners outside Bergheim is as long as ever. The line where Chris and Dan had found themselves, snakes from the entrance of the club, maybe 100 yards back, at the front, an open door guarded by two men. Inside, through the black rectangle of the door, Sven, watching a series of security camera monitors, presumably directing decisions from inside. I meet my Berliner friend, and we stand near the famous line. For a very, very long time, we just watched the line. It feels tense and electric to be here observing it, like I'm breaking a rule. And maybe I am.

A bouncer from the door asked me, is everything okay? But I tell him, I'm just watching. And he nods. That's fine. Like everything in life, the line is not what I expected to be. A woman in her 50s dressed for the airport, she's waved in. A Middle Eastern guy in his 30s alone wearing a functional hikers backpack, he's also in. Two young Euro trash gentlemen dressed for Abisa, they get the knot tonight.

Most people today, though, are getting waved in. The ones who don't, they walk away looking like they somehow knew before they heard the words. The whole thing feels like watching something that's already happened, happen. Like the divorce papers or the marriage license that shows up in the mail a year later. Eventually, my friend takes me to the shorter line that they usually wait in, the list for regulars. It's much faster than the main one. I wait as people shuffle to the front for the bouncer's inspection. It's my turn now.

I stand in front of a bouncer, not Sven, one of his underdorman. I stand in front of the bouncer, and the bouncer looks at me. His face blank, blank like anubis. My brain fills with a question that I realize always hums in the background. But now it's brighter and more intense than I've ever heard it. It's almost deafening. Do I belong? I wait to find out.

Surgeon is a presentation of Odyssey. It's created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthie Penhminani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Backchecking this week by Claire Hyman, additional production on this episode by Noah John.

Thank you to everyone in the Koodle-Moodle and Laura Somme and Kelifasana. Thanks also to the labels, Oskutton and Trissor, for letting us dip into their catalogs. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira, Courine, Josephina, Francesina, and Hilary Chef. If you have a business and would like to advertise on search engine, please email us.

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