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

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 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7gKdMHv8jN0a7p2KszLuWV?si=ct9eAnM1T--RgS-YrzQRFA&pi=u-6fNvYuF_Txus. Sven von Thüle: https://soundcloud.com/svt // Der Klang der Familie Gesine Kühne: https://soundcloud.com/wannadosomething Become a premium member! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello. This is part two of our story about why two nice young American men were not permitted to enter Berghain, a famously exclusive German techno nightclub. If you haven't heard part one, please go back and listen.

• 0:40PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  You didn't get a call tonight. Bitte nehmen Sie sich daher einen Moment Zeit und verstauen Sie Ihre Handgepäckstücke einschließlich Laptops. Ihre Telefone und Tablets können Sie gerne weiterhin.

• 1:10PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vought. You're listening to the second part of our story, Why Didn't Chris and Dan Get Into Berghain? In March, I found myself on a tarmac in Berlin, holding yet 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, Berghain, 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

• 1:53PJ Vogt?

  what the music meant to 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 felt 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

• 2:38PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  How do you say "hello"?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 2:58PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  This is a tag?

• 3:09PJ Vogt?

  It's our first day, and so we head to the neighborhood everyone had told me to start with, Friedrichsheim. Friedrichsheim is the neighborhood that contains Berghain. 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 Ostgut, Berghain's previous incarnation. I can see the river Spree, which winds along the city 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 One, The Portal. Late in the morning, I find myself en route to see a man named Sven von Tullin.

• 3:53PJ Vogt?

  Not the Berghain bouncer Sven-- there are many Sven's 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 stares. I trail behind Shruti.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Check, check.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 4:20PJ Vogt?

  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 DJ, but how does a techno guy dress, anyway?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  This way?

• 4:36PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 4:55Speaker 04

  In America, it's like the two types of music you're allowed to say you hate are country music and techno music.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  Okay, that's always a problem when your idea of something is just that bullshit stuff that's mass marketed.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:10PJ Vogt?

  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 that was sledging out of Europe in the 1990s.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  That was like punk hit. I lived in a squat, and for me, it felt like techno is just apolitical, it's just hedonism, it's very German, it's all that I, as an angry 16, 17-year-old, I was like, I don't like any of that.

• 5:50PJ Vogt?

  To give you a sense of what angry young Sven was into, this is his old hardcore punk band, Abyss.

• 6:03PJ Vogt?

  Sven had no use for Unz Unz. 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.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  I grew up in a small town close to Hamburg called Bremen. They didn't have spaces, so they had to go in all the discotheques, and they looked like discotheques, so I could never relate to that.

• 6:24PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  In Berlin, obviously, you had all these spaces that were basically-- like, some of them were actually squatted, where you had illegal clubs, illegal parties. And even if it wasn't maybe not illegal anymore, it was still rough, rough-and-ready, kind of, 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.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  So it was seeing the places where the music was being played and understanding that they were underground and sort of illegal, to you, part of what you were looking for as a young punk kid, it didn't feel so clean and commercial and whatever?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, the DIY aspect of it. Because I was organizing concerts, and we did all kinds of labels and fanzines and 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 for us and our friends.

• 7:42PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  Realizing, okay, here are all the misfits. All the misfits of society are here and feels, today we'd say, safe here, welcome and all that. That, I had to see and experience that to fully-- I understand that, and now I understand the music better as well.

• 8:35PJ Vogt?

  Sven was transformed in Berlin, from a hardcore kid to a raver. He became a DJ, he's actually DJed at Berghain, and he's written a history of Berlin techno called "Der Klang der Familie," The Sound of the Family. He's now a full participant in the techno scene, a subculture he once thought he hated.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Okay, can you just tell me the origin story of techno music? Where is it born?

• 8:59Speaker 05

  Oh, God. So techno music. So in 1988, there was a seminal compilation that was released by a British label, 10 Records, and that was the first compilation to basically showcase to the world the new dance sound of Detroit, which was techno.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Why were people in Detroit-- what was happening in Detroit that people were like, we should make music with synthesizers and dance to it? Why did that happen?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Well, there's this famous quote by Derek May, who said techno is like Kraftwerk and Parliament stuck in an elevator.

• 9:40PJ Vogt?

  Techno is like Kraftwerk 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 a part of my mission, this plan to break into Berghain. 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.

• 10:23PJ Vogt?

  At the end of the 1970s, the city of Detroit is in some trouble. The US auto industry is beginning to sink, taking Motor City with it.

• 10:32PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Awesome 84.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  A trip to our 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 of our time.

• 11:27PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Welcome to Awesome 84. A trip to the future of music. Awesome 84. Awesome 84. Awesome 84.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  And he mixed it all up. He would play whatever, the B-52s, Prince. He would play electronic music that came over from Europe.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  So you had Kraftwerk, obviously you had like the Belgium stuff, like T-Lex, Italo Disco. And he would kind of create these narratives and he was kind of a mystical figure as well.

• 12:43PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 13:15PJ Vogt?

  In 1985, Juan Atkins puts out a track called "No UFOs." He's made it on an eight-track recorder and his Roland TR909 drum machine.

• 13:31PJ Vogt?

  The track is synthy, like Kraftwerk. The beat is funky, like Parliament. There's also this doomed science fiction feeling to it, this dance track about UFOs over Detroit.

• 13:53PJ Vogt?

  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, they're construction sounds, the sounds of what the city is losing, bleeding into this music.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  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 the industrialness, that it all kind of played its role into how you approach making music.

• 14:32PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 15:00PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  Berlin in the late 80s was still divided. It was still the GDR and West Berlin had a really small scene. Like, it was really just like, I don't know, 100 people or something.

• 15:52PJ Vogt?

  Oh, like a small, small.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, small, like really, everybody knew each other by name, small. And there were music enthusiasts and dancers and like all of that. And the music would obviously, you know, 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.

• 16:17PJ Vogt?

  Act Two, The Wall.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  So where are we right now?

• 16:22Speaker 06

  We're on Waschaustraße. There's, behind us is Oberbaumbrücke, which is a beautiful bridge.

• 16:32PJ Vogt?

  It's 3:00 PM now, and Shriti 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 Berghain scenester 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.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  We're staying in Friedrichshain because I wanted to show you Berghain, which is, by the way, the name stems from Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. So the Berg from Kreuzberg and the Heinz from Friedrichshain comes together in Berghain.

• 17:21PJ Vogt?

  Oh, so it's just, it's two neighborhoods, portmanteau, smashed up together?

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Exactly. And so, blah.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  This is the explanation of the name. How boring, hey?

• 17:33PJ Vogt?

  I do think it would be more something.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Nah, it's not.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  It's very, very boring.

• 17:39PJ Vogt?

  Gazina tells me Berghain 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. Berghain sits near a cluster of clubs, small, big, discreet, not, tucked along the banks of the River Spree.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  On the right side, there's the RAV-Gelände. We call it RAV, where's a nice flea market on Sunday and also certain little clubs,

• 18:09Speaker 06

  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 apparently not so good.

• 18:24PJ Vogt?

  Gazina's lived in Berlin most of her life. She was born just outside the city in East Germany while the wall was still up.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  We're gonna go this way around because I want to show you the Todestreifen.

• 18:35PJ Vogt?

  The death strip.

• 18:36Speaker 06

  The death strip, yes.

• 18:37PJ Vogt?

  Todestreifen?

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Todestreifen.

• 18:39PJ Vogt?

  Todestreifen?

• 18:40Speaker 06

  Almost.

• 18:43PJ Vogt?

  Tod? Streifen?

• 18:46Speaker 06

  Yes, and it's a strip of death, that's why.

• 18:49PJ Vogt?

  Let's just say the death strip.

• 18:52PJ Vogt?

  During the Cold War, East Germany built what we call 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, there's just the wall. Her family lived in the Soviet-controlled East, the GDR. Gazina's father ended up on the wrong side of the secret police there, the Stasi, for what sounded to me like the dumbest possible reason.

• 19:36Speaker 06

  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 lemonades were out," which happened. And so he knew he'd always had this file and he couldn't move as he wanted to because...

• 20:00PJ Vogt?

  He hasn't complained about there being any lemonade?

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:10PJ Vogt?

  This stray complaint about lemonade, one time, it meant Gazina's family would always be surveilled, targeted. Reading about life under the Stasi gives me a deep chill. The Stasi 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.

• 20:55PJ Vogt?

  But Gazina's family, they actually found an escape from the 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 Gazina'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 Gazina, six years old at the time, to pretend to be sick, to buy the family a little more time while the Stasi monitored them.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  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 gonna be sick again. You have to act sick. So I've been like holding my stomach and acting all sick. And so, 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

• 22:14Speaker 06

  a German citizen. So that was kind of good. But now being 46, so 40 years, 40 years later, actually, wow. I have to, 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.

• 22:45PJ Vogt?

  Gazina'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 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?

• 23:22Speaker 06

  So this is part of the wall, which is like now a monument, East Side Gallery, with lots of different paintings along the wall.

• 23:30PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 23:56Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:06PJ Vogt?

  The size of this strip is pretty crazy. It's just so expansive.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, we can walk towards the water. So yeah, here is where Baar 25 used to be, and now it's like Karntablaue and the whole area. But Baar 25 was also quite famous.

• 24:25PJ Vogt?

  Gazina starts pointing down river to the 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.

• 25:09PJ Vogt?

  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 Tresor.

• 26:19PJ Vogt?

  Act Three, The Vault. In the 1910s, before the Nazis took over, the biggest department store in Europe was a store called Vertheim. Founded by George Vertheim, 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." Vertheim is forced to hand his store over to non-Jewish Germans. He dies of pneumonia in 1939.

• 27:04PJ Vogt?

  The store itself is destroyed a few years later by Allied bombs. What's left is razed 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 Tullin, the DJ techno historian, picks up the story of Vertheim here.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  During the war, like the building was destroyed, but the wall was still there. And then on top of the wall was like just a kind of small bungalow shack, whatever you 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. It was empty. So when they found the place by chance, Tony Stiller from the East and Achim Kolberger and Dimitri Hegeman from West Berlin, they were driving around like, we want to open a club in East Berlin.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  And basically, by chance, saw this shack. It's like, what's that? So they parked their car, went in, and the door was open. 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,

• 29:06Speaker 05

  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, like 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 the place.

• 29:49PJ Vogt?

  This place would become the site of a club called Trezor, German for vault, the jewel of the city's new techno scene, years before that title was seized by Berghain. Trezor, a nightclub, but also a portal between Berlin and Detroit. One of the men in the car that day, Dimitri Hegeman, 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, Trezor 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

• 30:33PJ Vogt?

  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 a sweaty dungeon of Trezor, Gazina Cuna. Although before Gazina loved electronic music, she actually hated it. Her association with dance music was this cloying, repetitive, syrupy stuff that 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.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  My best friend, Martin, who is such a soul in all kinds of ways, he started taking me to these places. And one was Trezor.

• 31:27PJ Vogt?

  Trezor was a turning point for Sven Van Tullend too, the site of his conversion.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Do you remember just the first time you went to Trezor?

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember the first time I went to Trezor. I went right down the basement.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  Downstairs was just super interesting with the old compartments and the very famous stahlgitter here. What do you have in a prison? What's it called? The steel bars, which looked like, you know, a cell kind of thing.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  It was full of, you know, fog, and the strobe was going off.

• 32:03Speaker 06

  And you walked in there, and there was the techno floor, the Trezor, that was the Trezor floor where techno was played. And I was standing on the floor there and looking around me because I felt a bit uncomfortable because that was loud and strobe lighting always a bit weird for my eyes. And then it became all dark.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  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, ooh. And then I went to the wall, kind of like, ugh, where's the wall? Where am I? And it took me a little bit to adjust.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  And I felt something wet dripping on my nose. And I'm just like, looked up, couldn't really see. But then the strobe was started. And I'm like, oh, that's like sweat from the ceiling. That's very interesting. And then the kick drum kicked in.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  So like pure bass in my stomach, 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 my head, I'm like, I understand now. Okay. And I didn't drink or anything. Back then, I was pure, pure energy of the music.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  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 turntables 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.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Okay, I just say, it's also, it's so, it's, when you, when, like, I've heard, this week, we've spoken to people, and like, I've thought, like, I was aware of the 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 strangeness 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 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,

• 34:47Speaker 04

  it turns out the thing that they're gonna do is have computers make music for them and shake their asses in like dungeon-y, like bombed-out buildings. It's so strange.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  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, ah, 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.

• 35:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  There were still, you know, 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 floor.

• 36:25PJ Vogt?

  For Sven, Trezor is where the new city began, where he learns to 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 techno, but who had just heard

• 37:10PJ Vogt?

  there was a room that was very hard to enter, a room they now wanted to try to get into. Berghain.

• 37:20PJ Vogt?

  Act Four, Portraits.

• 37:25PJ Vogt?

  It's still Wednesday afternoon. Our stroll with Gazina, the DJ and radio reporter, continues. She's about to show us Berghain'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.

• 37:41Speaker 06

  We're gonna get there from the side, which isn't maybe as...

• 37:46PJ Vogt?

  Cinematic?

• 37:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, bombastic. But I think you still get the gist of it.

• 37:50PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 37:51Speaker 06

  You can already see...

• 37:52PJ Vogt?

  Is that it?

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, you can already see part of Berghain there.

• 37:54PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it's enormous.

• 37:56Speaker 06

  It's huge. Like, seriously, it's so, it's so, so big.

• 38:00PJ Vogt?

  Berghain 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, Berghain is the church she now visits most regularly. What was the, can you tell me the first time you went to Berghain?

• 38:31Speaker 06

  Um, yes and no, because when I start telling those stories to my bit younger friends, when they ask, you know, what was your first time to Berghain? How long?

• 38:40PJ Vogt?

  That's what they ask that question.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  No, no, it's like, how long have you been coming here? This is the question I get. I'm like, you know what? I've been going to OSU. 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.

• 38:57Speaker 06

  It's OK, grandma. Let's get you to bed.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  So my first Berghain experience was not Berghain, it was Ostgut.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Who's the predecessor to Berghain?

• 39:06Speaker 06

  Richtig, exactly.

• 39:09PJ Vogt?

  Gazina says she went there to see one of her friends, DJ. The line was short back then, but Sven Markhardt was already manning the door. Two decades younger, his reputation already firmly established. When Ostgut morphed into Berghain, it kept the same values: secrecy and privacy for its guests. Walking toward the club, Gazina explains that even today, when you enter, your phone is taken so its camera lens can be covered.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  No photos, so you get your stickers on. Can't take any pictures in there. It doesn't matter what kind of performance or whatever you're going, it's always stickered. Here, look.

• 39:46PJ Vogt?

  Oh, what's that? There's a little green sticker on the ground.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, this is...

• 39:48PJ Vogt?

  Is that a Berghain sticker?

• 39:49Speaker 06

  Yes, it's this. Yes.

• 39:51PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it goes right over the lid.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  Those are like, I mean, they're like mostly neon colored. And you see, there's a yellow one.

• 39:57PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, there's a bunch.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  There's an orange one.

• 39:59PJ Vogt?

  There's Berghain, Shrapnel, just a couple of blocks away.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:03PJ Vogt?

  We pass through a small park, a former train lot, concrete and graffiti-covered benches. We pop around a corner, and now Shruti, Gazina, and I are standing by what seems to be the side of Berghain. I notice this unassuming metal door that looks like a service entrance, maybe.

• 40:17Speaker 07

  So the main line just goes this way, and then to the left?

• 40:20Speaker 06

  No, no, this is the door.

• 40:22PJ Vogt?

  This is the main door of Berghain. We're here already. 4:30 PM on a Wednesday, the club is closed, no one's outside. A gray door, sealed tight and graffitied. This will be where the line ends on Klub Nacht. In front of the door, a series of waist-high metal gates to corral that line. And overlooking it all, I notice 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.

• 40:53Speaker 07

  I have a question, actually.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 40:55Speaker 07

  So is there a way to sneak in, i.e., has anyone snuck into Berghain?

• 41:02Speaker 06

  Not that I know of, because, I mean, look at it. You have barbed wire, you have cameras there at the door.

• 41:10PJ Vogt?

  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 doormen, these gatekeepers. Everyone obsesses over and sometimes reviles.

• 41:27Speaker 06

  Let's talk about any bouncer in the city, not specifically...

• 41:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, not the place that we're standing 10 feet away from.

• 41:34Speaker 06

  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...

• 41:53PJ Vogt?

  I've always thought that, yes.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Really bad, yeah. So I don't want to say that term because it's nasty, and given our history, even worse.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  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? Like, 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's going to turn out. The thing is, in my club life, I kind of grew up with bouncers.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  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 fear 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.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  No, not at all. The best bouncers are super smart people.

• 43:33Speaker 07

  So standing here doesn't look so bad? Like, does the line go much, much farther back?

• 43:39Speaker 06

  It's just going to lead the way to where the line sometimes goes to.

• 43:44PJ Vogt?

  Gazina walks us away from the door, away from Berghain. We're now walking down a concrete path. We pass by a closed Imbiss, a German snack shop, whose entire business seems to be selling food to Berghain'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 Berghain. 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's thinking. So if you were here, how many, would it be like a couple of hours?

• 44:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, probably. I mean, the longest, my husband waited with his friends, it was seven hours.

• 44:31PJ Vogt?

  Seven hours?

• 44:32Speaker 06

  That was the day where two guys got rejected, and he, with his, like, good friend, got in.

• 44:38PJ Vogt?

  And so, wait, they waited seven hours in line?

• 44:40Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 44:40PJ Vogt?

  Half of their party was rejected, and he was like, I'm so sorry, I'll see you tomorrow?

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, you go in then, like, you know? Our favorite DJ was playing, so it was so funny because I was just,

• 44:55Speaker 06

  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.

• 45:02PJ Vogt?

  Because you were on the list?

• 45:04Speaker 06

  No, I was not on the list.

• 45:05PJ Vogt?

  Oh, really?

• 45:07Speaker 06

  That's the thing about knowing bouncers quite well, you know?

• 45:11Speaker 06

  And belonging, I guess.

• 45:15PJ Vogt?

  Gazina talking about waltzing into Berghain 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 Gazina, 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, Berghain 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 Gazina. I'm thinking myself about trying the door on Sunday.

• 45:59PJ Vogt?

  She looks at me and Shruti appraisingly.

• 46:02Speaker 06

  The thing is, I would say at the moment, Shruti would get in and you would be rejected.

• 46:08PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 06

  You look so American.

• 46:11PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  They can send you from miles away.

• 46:15PJ Vogt?

  And Americans are not, like, adored at Berghain.

• 46:17Speaker 06

  Not really.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Sorry.

• 46:20PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, you just look very American.

• 46:37PJ Vogt?

  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 club is supposed to...

• 46:46PJ Vogt?

  It's early evening when we say goodbye to Gazina and leave Friedrichstein. 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 forge on 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 Kit Kat 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.

• 47:30PJ Vogt?

  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 Berghain doorman Sven Markhardt, I have no nightmares.

• 48:28PJ Vogt?

  Act Five: Intoxication.

• 48:32PJ Vogt?

  Thursday morning, I wake up still pretty jet lagged. I go to get a table at a coffee shop in Friedrichshain, and standing, waiting, I behold a sight I'm pretty sure is a hallucination. I snap a photo, just to be sure, and then go find Shruthi to learn if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Can I show you a picture that I just took?

• 48:54Speaker 07

  No.

• 48:55PJ Vogt?

  Look who is sitting at the cafe.

• 49:03PJ Vogt?

  Sven. Sven Markhart, Haunter of My Dreams.

• 49:09Speaker 07

  You want to go talk to him?

• 49:10PJ Vogt?

  Not at all.

• 49:13PJ Vogt?

  It's a high-risk maneuver.

• 49:14Speaker 07

  Oh, come on.

• 49:16PJ Vogt?

  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 Shruthi 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 Burgheim. My efforts to melt into the scene will have to proceed differently. I delete the photo from my phone, we leave the coffee shop, and we head to a very different part of the city to meet somebody connected to the techno scene.

• 50:05PJ Vogt?

  We're in Mitten now, the center of Berlin, one of the neighborhoods the wall used to divide. These days, Mitten is a place filled with expensive, old buildings, the neighborhood where the lawyers work. And we were there, appropriately, to meet a lawyer.

• 50:18Speaker 08

  Hello.

• 50:19PJ Vogt?

  Hi.

• 50:21Speaker 08

  Yes, Peter. Hi, Peter. Nice to meet you.

• 50:23PJ Vogt?

  Shruthi.

• 50:24Speaker 08

  Hi, Shruthi. Nice to meet you as well.

• 50:27PJ Vogt?

  We settle into a meeting room. It's a nice one. Wayne's scotting for days.

• 50:31Speaker 08

  When did you write?

• 50:32PJ Vogt?

  Yesterday? Yesterday, yes. First things first, can you just say your name and what you do?

• 50:39Speaker 08

  My name is Philipp Schröder-Ringe, and I'm a lawyer.

• 50:42PJ Vogt?

  And what type of law do you write?

• 50:44Speaker 08

  Event lawyers have many clients from the event industry, like clubs or organizers, festivals, et cetera.

• 50:55PJ Vogt?

  In a normal city, talking to a lawyer would not be a good way to break into or understand the techno scene. But we're in Berlin, where a lot of the grownups are former or not-so-former club kids. Philipp says he grew up haunting West Germany's club scene. He even threw parties of his own. But that was then. He's been a lawyer for 15 or so years now. Philipp, 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.

• 51:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, typical problems where we could help with is, for example, noise issues with the neighbors, for example. Clubs are too loud, or festivals, concerts need 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 techno culture became UNESCO World Cultural Heritage?

• 51:57PJ Vogt?

  Yesterday, right?

• 51:58Speaker 08

  It was yesterday.

• 51:59PJ Vogt?

  I'm not going to play all the times this moment happened 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, Philipp says, as a lawyer, this UNESCO designation will be useful ammunition in his ongoing battles.

• 52:38Speaker 08

  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.

• 52:48PJ Vogt?

  And it's a way of saying, like, basically, all of these things amount to the same thing, which is like, the 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 opening here, but we are deciding to preserve our culture.

• 53:12Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 53:14PJ Vogt?

  The UNESCO designation may be a sign that Berlin's nightlife has won its multi-decade war for legitimacy, a war which Philipp played a role in. Philipp 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 Lutz Lichtenring in the last episode, but I wanted to hear it from Philipp, 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 had been taxed mostly as concert venues, which paid 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

• 53:59PJ Vogt?

  disco tax, which would mean almost 20% of all the club's earnings went to the city. And Burgheim 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 if they had to pay this bill?

• 54:20Speaker 08

  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.

• 54:39PJ Vogt?

  So in 2011, Philipp's 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, hashing it out.

• 54:55Speaker 08

  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't say who was there, but they also tried to dress up a bit and to behave seriously in that situation.

• 55:24PJ Vogt?

  These club kids in suits had to defend the thing they did at night as meaningful. Discussion ensued.

• 55:30Speaker 08

  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 had discussions about the DJs being artists. Do they use instruments? What are they doing there? And the tax authorities was of the opinion that, no, this is not art. I mean, you put on a CD or LP and you just let it play, it's no art.

• 55:59PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 56:22Speaker 08

  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 that 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 in a corner, there's no light, and people move around, and they don't really care who's playing there. And we went into all this discussion. We 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

• 57:07Speaker 08

  come because they want to see these DJs. They celebrate a DJ. If he's doing a good job, then they're applauding, they are cheering.

• 57:15PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 57:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, it is like a very old-school, 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.

• 58:10PJ Vogt?

  The club that would fight the fiscal authorities in court was, of course, Burgheim. Or, as the Germans call it, the Burgheim.

• 58:18Speaker 08

  I was very happy that it was the Burgheim, because it is like, it still is one of the most famous clubs of Germany. And if it wouldn't work here, it wouldn't work for other clubs.

• 58:32PJ Vogt?

  Similar arguments will be made in open court to the ones Philipp and his team had made behind closed doors. But here, those arguments seem to fall in more sympathetic gears. 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 officials argue, don't people just go to Burgheim and places like it to get intoxicated?

• 59:00PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 59:15PJ Vogt?

  The lawyer's example: What was the feeling you were meant to have when listening to a piece by Gustav Mahler, if not intoxication?

• 59:35PJ Vogt?

  And if that was true, couldn't you just as easily feel intoxicated after hearing a track from planetary assault systems?

• 59:55PJ Vogt?

  September 2016, the verdict is announced. Berghain wins. The court had sided with the club kids.

• 1:00:04PJ Vogt?

  Did people celebrate? Like, did people go out?

• 1:00:07Speaker 08

  If they did, I was not invited. I don't know.

• 1:00:17PJ Vogt?

  So does that mean there's a pressure on these clubs in the wake of these rulings to behave artistically, whatever that would mean, or behave culturally, whatever that would mean? Does it push people towards a kind of conventions or rules with an eye towards the tax authority?

• 1:00:36Speaker 08

  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 DJ or whatever.

• 1:01:10PJ Vogt?

  This was a story that I heard all the way in New York, that if you go to the door at a place like Berghain, 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. Is that, because I feel like, is that true, that you can draw a line from that tax decision to that question?

• 1:01:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, it starts from the discussion with the tax authorities, I'm sure.

• 1:01:41PJ Vogt?

  Act Six.

• 1:01:44PJ Vogt?

  Techno Loops. The story is about a dude who 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 "Sus Vorgestern," 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.

• 1:02:27PJ Vogt?

  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 watch 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 Tulen, 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.

• 1:03:12PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 1:03:45PJ Vogt?

  Saturday night comes, the beginning of Klub Nacht at Berghain. 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, asks 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.

• 1:04:30PJ Vogt?

  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 Instagrammable, 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 you 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.

• 1:05:01PJ Vogt?

  Sunday afternoon, a few hours later, a text arrives. "Do I want to see Berghain?" A person I'd met this week. Their friend is DJing today, so they're 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 Berliner offering me a halo.

• 1:05:21PJ Vogt?

  3:00 PM, the sun is shining at morning church-level strength. The line of petitioners outside Berghain 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 asks me, "Is everything OK?"

• 1:06:05PJ Vogt?

  But I tell him, "I'm just watching." And he nods. "That's fine." Like everything in life, the line is not what I expect it to be.

• 1:06:14PJ Vogt?

  A woman in her 50s, dressed for the airport, she's waved in. A Middle Eastern guy in his 30s, alone, wearing a functional hiker's backpack, he's also in. Two young Eurotrash gentlemen, dressed for a visa, they get the not 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, it 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 wave in, the list for regulars. It's much faster than the main one.

• 1:06:55PJ Vogt?

  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 underdoormen. I stand in front of the bouncer, and the bouncer looks at me, his face blank, blank like a new abyss. 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.

• 1:08:34PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pennamineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armen Bazarian. Fact-checking this week by Claire Hyman. Additional production on this episode by Noah John. Thank you to everyone in the Kudelmodul, and Laura Saum, and Califa Sané. Thanks also to the labels, Oscuton and Tressor, for letting us dip into their catalogs. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkati, and Hillary Schaff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on Search Engine, please email us,

• 1:09:18PJ Vogt?

  [email protected]. Subject line: Advertising. You can also send us questions there, if you have a question you'd like the show to answer, or feedback on anything you've heard. If you would like to remove ads from your version of Search Engine, there's a way to do it. You can sign up for incognito mode. That is our paid feed. It is $50 a year. You also get extra episodes, bonus interviews. You can sign up at the link in our show notes. Your contributions there are the way we are able to fund this show for everybody. Thank you, as always, for listening.