Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 1)

22:14Welcome back to the show. Unz-unz. When we started all this last July, all I really knew about Bergheim was that it was a Berlin techno club and that it was very hard to get into. But I started researching. The club itself maintains a very minimal footprint online. 200 ,000 people follow Bergheim's Instagram account, but the club has only ever posted one photo in 2015. A picture of a sign that says, in all caps, taking photos is not allowed. The sign, presumably, from inside the club itself. Bergheim, like Vegas, claims that what happens there stays there, except in Bergheim, that seems to actually be true.

22:54Some information about the club nevertheless has circulated. The story of Bergheim, as I now understand it, begins 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, two Germans, Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufela, had begun hosting a men's-only gay fetish party, sometimes at an abandoned air raid shelter. After a few years, the party outgrew that bunker. The pair took over an abandoned railroad depot. At the railroad depot, they started a club called Ostgut. Ostgut was legendary, open to people of all genders and sexualities, but still a space run by and largely for gay men. A den of hedonism where consenting adults supposedly engaged in all sorts of unusual behavior.

23:39Online, at least one video survives from inside the club.

23:48But the video is pretty tame. It's from July 2000. Looks like camcorder footage. A grainily shot DJ hovers over a console, twiddling knobs, while nearby, a crowd of German shadows writhes under a strobe light.

24:07Ostgut may have lived forever, except the city wanted to build a big arena. So the railroad depot was knocked down in 2003. Burgheim was its reincarnation. The palace that replaced Ostkut. This time, too big to knock down. A thermal power plant, originally built during the Soviet era. Four floors. On the very bottom floor, a dedicated basement gay club, for men only. At the very top, a bar with big windows opening onto a panoramic view of the city. On the levels in between, where the power turbines once sat, an enormous dark cavern, the main dance area. The entire space governed by its own particular rules.

24:49Rules that are repeated breathlessly by the internet commentariat. Burgheim is not a standard posh club with bottle service. They make you put a sticker over your phone, no pictures, they'll throw you the f*** out. There'd be a window where you could buy ice cream and you could order smoothies. It's open from Friday until Monday, and most people stay there for 12 hours, 24 hours, or more. Right now, it's 9 a.m. Burgheim is best known for one weekly party. Klubnacht. Club night. Club night is a misnomer because while the party starts Saturday evening, it continues all the way until Monday morning without interruption.

25:21A few books document the history of the scene that birthed this party. I found Tobias Rapp's Lost and Sound to be particularly helpful. He writes about how when Berghain opened in 2004, the party was by and for Berliners. But word soon spread internationally. A European budget airline called EasyJet had just opened a new hub in Berlin. and other Europeans started taking easy jet flights to the city to come party. The legend kept growing. Eventually, it grew large enough to draw Chris and Dan, two of the many Americans who made the pilgrimage to Technomecca. It was a marvel. A three-day party, good enough to draw thousands of people, every weekend, people who would fly to Germany without even a promise they would gain admittance.

26:05That was Klubnacht at Bergheim. Most of what people discuss online is not any of this. Instead, they talk about Sven, the intimidating bouncer who Chris and Dan encountered and then cowered in front of. Sven Markhart. Sven Markhart is a tall, imposing man in his early 60s with giant lip rings that look like silver fangs. His hair is slicked back in silver. Tattoos of thorns cover much of his face. He looks like a bad guy in a John Wick movie and he has played a bad guy in a John Wick movie. That was just a cameo one time, though. Sven has run security at Berghain since the club first opened 20 years ago.

26:46Sven's backstory, he grew up in East Berlin, the communist side of the wall, before it fell.

26:55There's this one documentary, Berlin Bouncer, that profiles Sven. In one scene, he gives a talk in front of a crowd. He's wearing all black, tinted glasses. Sven discusses the early chapters of his life, how his teenage years were defined by the feeling of being stuck outside a much more significant kind of door.

27:26Sven's saying, we just wanted to see the other side of the wall. We didn't really want to leave home. We just wanted to find out. What were we being deprived of? What weren't we allowed to see? Sven has said that as a young gay punk rocker, living in East Berlin was risky. He was frequently picked up by the secret police. He was devoted to his photography career, but after the wall fell, he chose to stay on the East Berlin side, and his art career stalled there. Sven's brother was a DJ and a club organizer, and Sven started working the door at his parties. It turned out Sven's eye for people worked not just in photography, but also here.

28:03He had a talent for deciding who should be let in. He developed a reputation. That's why they chose him for Ausgut and later for Burgheim. The fact that this much of Sven's biography exists in public, of course, goes entirely against Burgheim's secretive ethos. But Sven has continued to pursue his photography career. And so every few years, when he has a new exhibition or a photo book, he talks to journalists. Questions about his photography, which he wants to discuss, and questions about how to get into Bergheim, which he has to tolerate. Those are the terms under which the gatekeepers at places like the New York Times or GQ will allow Sven entry.

28:43And, understanding the way of these things, he obliges. Sven, the man with the answer to our question. What was the bouncer at Bergheim scanning you for? I should say, I emailed Sven and requested an interview. I've never been less surprised to be ignored. But in the documentary, there's this prickly moment where the interviewer seems to have directly asked Sven the rules of the door.

29:14Sven responds not with helpful tips about what shade of black to wear. Instead, he says sternly, we don't need to question the rules that are in place. He does allow that, as a selector, his responsibility is to only let people in who, once they join the party, won't impede the freedom and self-expression of the people who are already inside.

29:42It makes sense, but it does not provide clues. And in any situation in which official sources remain this tight-lipped, of course, speculation will reign. And it does, online, as Chris and Dan had seen, mainly on TikTok. There, a cottage industry of people who claim to have gotten through the door now style themselves as helpful experts, explaining what exactly they believe Sven is scanning for when he looks at people like Chris and Dan, trying to get inside the mind of a 62-year-old gay German ex-punk. Be really casual. Don't be flamboyant. Don't speak too much. Don't talk too loud in the queue.

30:19and under no circumstances engage in law tour. Literally, just basically be as casual and blended as possible in order to get in. It's impossible to know if any of these people are actually telling the truth. Again, you can't record inside of Berghain, which means you just have to take the word for it. I promise. People say that you need to wear black to get in, but that's not true. It helps, but it's not a must. I know a guy... Just be yourself, and if you get in, you get in, And if you don't, try again some other time or call it a wrap. When I went back, I was wearing... The advice offered by these supposed gurus, frankly, does not feel all that usable.

30:58Try to get in or maybe don't. Wear black, but you don't have to. And the other thing is, like, look sharp, but also like you don't care that much. My favorite artifact of all the online Berghain speculation is this website called berghaintrainer.com that will actually drop you into a surprisingly high-res simulation of the Burgheim line? The site takes control of your webcam and then scans your face, analyzing your emotions through your expressions. How angry, sad, euphoric your face is, giving a virtual simulation of Sven's gaze. And then the first-person video virtually walks you, step by step, up to the doors of Burgheim.

31:39The music gets louder as you get closer. The website warns you that Sven will ask you three questions. So I did it. When I arrived at the virtual door, a German man, presumably an actor playing Sven, asked, is this your first time here? I said yes. He asked, do you know who's DJing tonight? I said yes. He asked whether I'd taken drugs. I said nein. After a moment of scanning, the virtual bouncer told me, Not good today. And then made the hand gesture toward the street. The same hand gesture Chris and Dan had gotten. To be honest with you, this rejection by a fake bouncer, it hurt my real feelings.

32:28I'll tell you something about myself that won't surprise you. I've never been considered cool. I know cool people. I'm not against coolness. I just don't possess it. I'm uncool enough that I often ask the cool people I know to explain to me why certain things are cool right now. How did we decide big pants are back in style? If you have to ask, you're not cool. And I do have to ask, both professionally and just because of my personality. So I'm not cool, and I'm old enough to be okay with that. But this was a little different. At Berghain, where Sven ruled, it seemed to me that the source of his power lay partly in his refusal to explain himself.

33:08My job, as a journalist, was the opposite, to understand and explain. And I just couldn't resist the challenge of trying to understand something that was designed to obscure itself. That was why, even after all this internet sleuthing and documentary watching, we would continue digging for the better part of a year. We would talk to lots of people, we'd read too many books devoted to the Talmudic study of German techno, its origins and subgenres. And in the end, we'd emerge with an answer. What was Bergheim scanning for, and why? How would a place like this come to be? All that, after the break.

34:14Thank you.

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37:03Welcome back to the show. In America, in the circles I run in, people complain a lot about capitalism. I don't think they're bothered by the exchange of goods and services. I think it's their shorthand way of saying everything here is just too driven by profit. Even things that start out good can be squeezed to death by our ceaseless desire to bring out every possible dollar. In Berlin, a place where until recently capitalism and socialism both operated, in Berlin it feels like something else is going on. The nightlife industry there brings in one and a half billion tourism dollars a year, but they're strange dollars.

37:41The crown jewel, Berghain, operates by turning away thousands of paying customers. And despite demand, it keeps its ticket prices pretty low, all while existing in a building that is 37 ,600 square feet in a very hip neighborhood. And not only does this all seem to work, it's worked for a long time. That doesn't happen in nightlife. Clubs don't stick around. Studio 54 was open for less than three years. Bergheim is on its 20th. And people attribute a lot of that success to Bergheim's strict and strange door policy. You can tell the story of that door as a story about culture, about cool, but cool, we know, never explains itself.

38:23So let's get inside Bergheim from a different direction. I'm going to tell you the story not about DJs and bouncers, but about lawyers and lobbyists, about the municipal regulation and policy that allows this club to exist the way it does. A story that begins in 1949. Hi, can you hear me? Hey. Hey. I hear you well. How's it going over there? Well, well, well. Lutz lights and ring. I'd first heard about him from one of my best friends, Kay Burke, a nightclub founder herself. People in Berlin called Lutz the mayor of the city's nightlife. So did Kay explain, like, who I am and what we're up to over here?

39:03I think she might, but it was also quite some time ago, so maybe you can film me in again. Yeah, so I have this podcast called Search Engine where we just try to answer people's questions no matter how simple or complicated. And we do sort of like all manner of stuff. We do like really serious stuff. Like we just did something about fentanyl and the drug supply in America. But we also do really silly stuff and kind of like everything in between. And what level are we here in this conversation? We're closer to silly, I think. So we have these friends I want to tell you about who just didn't get into Burgheim and are confused about it, but it's sort of an excuse to tell the larger story about nightlife.

39:43I think for people in the United States, it's a place you go and you spend$500 on champagne. And you know what I mean? Or$10 on a can of beer. Yes. Without a glass. Exactly. Germans like Lutz call this style of nightclub bottles and models, shorthand for the economic model that drives them. Clubs like these are what most Americans think of when you say nightclub, spots that tend to make their money by enticing rich people to pay for tables and buy bottles of champagne so that they can feel important. The clubs are like little status factories. In Berlin, though, that same word, nightclub, describes an entirely different operation fueled by a different economic model.

40:23And Litz's job is to protect that status quo. He's nightlife's advocate in the offices of city bureaucrats, the spokesperson for Berlin's club commission. I wanted Lutz to tell me how Berlin's unusual nightlife scene had come to be. And that story is the story of two arguments. The first argument takes place in the late 1940s. Argument one is about a very specific rule, curfew. In Berlin today, there is no curfew. Bars and clubs stay open as long as they want. And can you tell me the story of how Berlin came to be a city with no curfew? What is the origin story of that decision? This decision is like almost 80 years old, and it happened right after World War II.

41:06So in 1949, you had already a divided city between the eastern sector and the western sector. The eastern sector controlled by the Russians, and the western sector controlled by the British, the French, and the Americans. And in the eastern part, there was a curfew at 10 p.m. So all the restaurants, bars, hotel bars, cabaret bars, they had to close at 10 p.m. in the eastern part. In the Western part, it was 9 p.m., so an hour earlier. And there was this, let's say, representative, a spokesperson of the hotels and restaurants of Berlin. His name was Heinz Zellermeyer. Heinz Zellermeyer. There was no club commission back then.

41:45Heinz was instead the deputy director of the Guild of Berlin Hoteliers. In photos, Heinz has an enormous smile and combed back hair. He looks like someone who held forth at a restaurant or two. Heinz did not like the curfew. He particularly did not like that his side of the city had an earlier curfew. The person to complain to was General Howley of the U.S. Army, the American's West Berlin commandant. A meeting was set, and Heinz, supposedly, came prepared. The story is that he brought a bottle of whiskey to that meeting. So they met, and they were talking about it, and General Howley said, yeah, the British and the French, They're not really supporting any idea of losing this curfew.

42:29They say it's a security issue. So you have to give me an argument that I can give to French and the British. And the problem was that at that moment in the Western part, people had to go out of the bar. And then they went to the Eastern sector for another hour, which was also not really liked by the Americans. So he said, if you kick Germans who are partying at a certain hour, you kick them out of the street, you're going to have a security issue. So you have to better find a solution for it. It was a well-reasoned argument. The Allies did not want drunk Westerners crossing East in search of a later last call.

43:01And worse, there'd been an emerging Cold War of curfews, with each side, the East and the West, repeatedly extending an hour past each other to try to capture all the income from drunk Berliners. Eliminating curfew would solve the security issue and win the Night War. Howley was sold. He said, okay, let's try this out for two weeks, and since then, 1949, we have no curfew. Berlin, one of the rare cities that has no curfew at all. In 1949, when the city permanently deleted its curfew, obviously techno music did not exist. Raving was something people did in insane asylums. If anyone was listening to music in a club late at night, it was probably jazz.

43:42But this decision set Berlin on a path. Nightlife is funded more than anything else via the sale of alcohol. A city without a curfew can have a legal party that runs through the night, even that runs multiple nights. Half a century-ish later, techno will hit Berlin. People will begin to throw raves in illegal spots without permits. This will happen in a lot of cities at the same time, Detroit, New York, London. But what makes Berlin different from those places is that here, many of those raves can actually become legitimate businesses, can find permanent homes and clubs. General Howley's 1949 agreement is the first precondition for Klubnacht at Bergheim.

44:24It sets the stage for a party that can last for three days. But years later, as the scene starts to mature, a second argument takes place, an argument which almost kills these nightclubs. Argument two is about taxes. In the early 2000s, Bergheim was a rising young club alongside already established spots like Trisor and the Kit Kat Club. And Berlin's tax authority started to take a closer look at these places. How much money were they bringing in? Shouldn't the city be getting a bigger cut? Government tax agents walk into Burgheim, presumably without needing permission from Sven. They're there documenting everything they see, asking a question.

45:06From a tax perspective, what is happening in these rooms? In Germany, if you pay money for a ticket and enter a venue where music is played, according to the taxmen, you may be having one of three different experiences. You might be experiencing high culture, like opera, in which case the city will barely tax the ticket. You might be at a concert, like the Rolling Stones, in which case the city will moderately tax the ticket. Or you might be experiencing entertainment. This happens in casinos, in porn theaters. In that case, the city will take a big tax bite, almost 20%. Before the tax officials began to take a closer look at the club scene, these venues had been mostly taxed as concert venues.

45:51But now, in 2008, the city started to ask pointed questions. Was a DJ really a musician? Was a techno show really like a concert? The perception that people in government had says, a DJ is not a concert. People are going there to have sex or to drink or to whatever, but not because of the DJ. They even sent people to clubs and documented that people were not facing the artist. They were talking to each other. Oh my God. Stuff like that. Yeah, to kind of prove the point that it is not a concert. Wow. I've been to concerts where people were not facing the artist and talking to each other. Exactly.

46:30But they said clubs is different. People go there to meet people not because of the artists. They don't even know who's playing these kind of argumentations. Bergheim was the club that actually took this case all the way to the high courts. Bergheim won. The Bergheim, in the government's books, was cemented as a concert venue, a place where people went because they loved techno music. Weirdly, this is one part of the answer to Chris and Dan's questions. What was the bouncer, Sven, scanning for at the door? He needed to ensure they were true techno heads, not people there simply for entertainment.

47:03That consideration, a funny side effect of the argument the club had had to make in court years ago. It may have been part of what filtered them out. Chris and Dan, not true techno heads. Bergheim's victory in court meant that any German nightclub that could prove it was meeting Bergheim's cultural standards could be taxed like Bergheim. Lower taxes meant they could keep their overhead low. The lower the overhead, the less pressure to make money. The less pressure to make money, the more they could continue to keep their nightclubs dedicated to preserving Berlin's strange counterculture. Lutz told me about another one of these battles.

47:39I don't know if you're aware of zoning, what that means in cities. So there are different zoning laws, which says in certain zones of the city, there are certain allowances. So for instance, you cannot build an amusement venue like a leisure venue in a residential area. Right. The problem with this categorization is that you're only fully legal in the very center of the city, where also the prices are very high. So if you want to do it properly, you have to be very commercial to survive. And now that we are more flexible in what areas of the cities we can establish music venues, we can also maybe turn a form of a restaurant or bar into a club, possibly, which we could not before because it was in the wrong zone.

48:25It's so interesting, though. It's like you get the government to classify clubs differently. That changes where clubs can appropriately be in the city. Then if the clubs can be in places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, they can have a different profit incentive. They don't have to just make as much money as possible. And you end up with a different culture because of just a change to how the government classified something. That's really interesting. Exactly. We're going to come back to this strange court case and its consequences in the second part of this story. But before I left Lutz, I wanted to ask him specifically about Chris and Dan.

49:01What was it about them, the way they looked, the way they dressed, that had signaled they didn't belong at Bergheim? Lutz does not represent Bergheim, but as spokesperson for the club commission and as a Bergheim regular, I thought he might be able to help. Can I show you a couple of photographs and you tell me if the person seems like... I'm not a selector, so I can only give you my personal opinion. Yeah. Is it okay to ask you your opinion on it? Yeah, sure. Of course. Okay, this is one person.

49:30Well, very friendly, maybe queer person, very soft, happy. He's wearing some kind of top that doesn't really say anything. It's too generic of a top, the vest? I think it looks authentic to him, but this person looked very innocent. Yeah. And you also want to save some people for, you know, to getting into something that they maybe don't expect. Okay, so this is the person he went with. Yeah. I would probably send him to Schwurz. What's Schwurz? It's our oldest, best-known gay club. And that's the perfect wife for those two guys. because they don't seem like techno guys to you. They seem like gay guys who are going out clubbing.

50:20They don't look like hard, you know, like standing in the middle of a sweaty club and going for hours and enjoying this. And, you know, they're standing more like having a chat, you know, and that's okay to have some of those folks in the venue, but it's really about getting out of your inner self and showing your animalistic side of yourself. For very good reason, we do not celebrate the idea that you should judge people based on how they look on the outside. Those judgments often lead us astray. And yet, Lutz, from a photo, could tell that Chris and Dan were after respectful, healthy, wholesome partying.

51:02Not the sort of darkness that occurs in Berghain's techno dungeons. They didn't belong there. They belonged, he suspected, at another place called Schwutz. I wondered what Chris and Dan would make of that judgment. So later, I asked. Chris told me, Schwutz? They loved Schwutz. It was the club they'd ended up at after being rejected from Burgheim. Berlin, this magical city, had somehow sent them to the place where they actually belonged. Lutz was not a selector, but he did seem to have a selector's eye. Your read is so good. Chris, who I know better, he's a lovely, he's one of my favorite people to spend time with.

51:44If I were having a party where it was really important that someone dance in the middle of a dance floor for eight hours, he would perhaps not make the cut for that party. That's really him. I think the first question you have to ask yourself, are you a participant or are you a visitor? And it shouldn't sound sophisticated or arrogant. It's just like a club. The definition of club is being part of a club. If you're not part of the club, why should you be able to enter? I think the idea of just buying myself in is the opposite of a club, what it should actually be. A club should bring people together who have similar interests, similar preferences.

52:27A club should bring together people of similar interests. Absolutely. But what if you're someone who doesn't belong, but still wants to just go check it out? Is there a way to sneak in? Is there some other way into Berghain that is not going through the bouncer? Lutz did have advice about this. My tip that I usually give is make a plan of exploring Berlin, maybe from the outskirts. Go to venues that are not very known. Go to places that are somehow interesting for you because you did your research and you saw some artists that you want to see and they're playing. So go there. And you get in very easy because venues that are not very known don't have this kind of level of selection.

53:11Usually there's not even a queue. And then you get friends with the bartenders. You make friends with the DJs there. And you have an amazing time in an unknown venue with unknown artists, basically. And the next time you're coming, you're going to reach out to them. And because they like you or they connected to you, they will ask you to start in their home with dinner. Maybe you go to a bar, you make no friends. And even maybe they make sure that you get on a guest list of some venue that they're going at that night. But I think it's part of that journey that you also have to make to be part of the scene.

53:50Lutz said the process he's describing, this is the real way into Klubnacht. Make yourself a part of the scene. That line outside Berghain, he said, that's for people who haven't been able to or who haven't known to try. While Lutz was saying this to me, I was nodding yes furiously, my noggin like a broken bobblehead. Of course it all made sense. And as a person obsessed with belonging and exclusion, I was lapping it all up. We finished our conversation. It's really, it's a pleasure to just get to ask you these questions. Thank you for doing this. You're welcome. We hung up, and then, not long after, the spell of Lutz's idea dissipated.

54:32What were we talking about? If you wanted to visit the most exclusive nightclub in the world, go to Germany and start methodically befriending Germans in the city's electronic music scene? Okay. Normally, that would have been the end of things. And perhaps it should have been the end of things? But not long after this, a friend of mine, an American, asked me a question. They were celebrating a big milestone in their life, and they wanted to do it in Germany. In Berlin, actually. They wanted to spend some time there, perhaps even try to see some of the city's famous nightlife. That sound like fun?

55:08Could I make some time away from work? Yes, it did. No, I couldn't. I bought myself a plane ticket. The myth, hard as it was to believe, was that the door to Burgheim, like Excalibur's sword, would be offered only to someone who truly understood techno culture, who understood what the place meant. Could something like that really be true? Next week on Search Engine, the last episode of our season, techno.

56:13Randy Boyd-Wheel Odyssey, and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinnamanani, and it was produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Armin also created the techno remix of our theme. Armin Bazarian, just an extremely talented man. If you have a moment and would like to support our show, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at searchengine.show. You get all sorts of rewards, including bonus episodes, or you just recommend the show to a friend. Either would be a huge help.

56:48Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.