After a moment, the boar hunter said, “We could go to Berghain now. Would you like to go?”
“Now?” I was jet-lagged. It was Sunday. He looked me up and down, the way Germans do when you walk into a restaurant. He didn’t think I’d get in. We made a plan to meet there in a week.
The next morning, the sidewalks in Mitte teemed with citizens on their way to work. Through the windows of an office building across the street from my hotel, you could see young people busy in their cubicles. Somehow, I’d assumed that on Monday mornings everyone in Berlin would be lurking in a club somewhere or else sleeping it off. But it turns out there is a Berlin of museums and gallery openings, of the Bundestag and the Chancellery, of Holocaust remembrance and Naziphilia, of Turkish immigrants and academics on sabbatical, and even of ordinary middle-class families going about their lives and escaping to Wannsee on weekends. It’s just that, if you are on techno time, you hardly see any of it. You can’t fathom that, a few U-Bahn stops away, Angela Merkel is busy presiding over the affairs of Europe.
This particular Berlin—cradle of techno culture, hotbed of lost weekends and lost minds—has been an object of international yearning and fascination for more than twenty years. Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.”
The First World War was a bracing infusion. Defeat, poverty, inflation, desperation: the celebrated cultural efflorescence and social tolerance of the Weimar years arose out of, or in spite of, a perhaps equally celebrated atmosphere of perversion and abandon. Berlin was the whorehouse of Europe. War widows, or their children, would do anything for a mark, even as a mark came to be worth practically nothing (four trillion to a dollar at one point in 1923). The Kaiser’s censors and police were gone. In came the Continent’s decadentsia, with their strong currencies and peculiar fetishes. Sally Bowles at the Lady Windermere, transvestites at the Eldorado, “sugar-lickers” (pederasts), Münzis (pregnant whores). Mel Gordon, in “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” cites the journalist Luigi Barzini: “The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and time-saving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterward.”
Apocryphal, one hopes, but such was the rep. In some respects, the notion of decadence was as integral as decadence itself. So people, in those Weimar years, also came to gawk, or to get close enough at least for the “mystery-magic of foreignness,” as Christopher Isherwood wrote, to rub off. A commodified, self-conscious version of the real thing existed even then. Isherwood cited Berlin’s “dens of pseudo-vice”: “Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Berlin was already a brand.
The Nazis closed the clubs, hounded and exterminated the homosexuals, and, in the end, brought ruin on the city. Bombed and desolate, traumatized by street fighting, starvation, and mass rape, and ultimately carved up, Berlin, after the war, barely heaved back to life. West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by East Germany, survived primarily as a political gesture, a flagpole in the sand and a thumb in the Politburo’s eye. There was very little industry, turnover, or travel in or out. No corporation could take the political risk or tolerate the barriers to commerce. To encourage people to move there, the West German government gave out stipends and exemptions from military service, so the city tended to attract the West’s mavericks and oddballs—hippies, homosexuals, political renegades—who shared the town with the elderly and the soldiers watching over them. In such hothouse isolation, a small but fervid club scene took root.
