DPA
Berlin’s best-known nightclub is celebrating its 18th anniversary and, unlike the many clubs in Europe displaced by gentrification, Berghain is now coming of age, so to speak.
Anyone born when the notorious techno club opened in 2004 has now reached the minimum age to be admitted there.
The massive club, known to have Berlin’s strictest door policy, is celebrating its birthday with a club night starting on December 10. Announcing “Club Night – Eighteen Years of Berghain”, the exclusive club says it’s now “finally of age, but still not grown up.”
The celebrations come amid rumours that the club is set to close down, in what would be a massive loss to the city’s nightlife and international profile for partygoing tourists.
Besides its world-class sound system, large main dance hall and seedy lower areas, Berghain is perhaps best known for being a business that turns away the vast majority of its potential customers.
Being one of the rare few allowed into the club is seen as an accollade by many locals and tourists in Berlin, with post-Berghain selfies being posted on social media by many of those who can show their stamp of admission.
Over the years, the city landmark has regularly been ranked among the best clubs in the world, even though it fell out of the top ten in the Top 100 Clubs poll from DJ Mag in 2022, dropping to 12th place.
In the meantime, it has been confirmed that Berghain, whose operators are extremely secretive, also wants to continue into the new year.
In addition to the birthday party, a New Year’s Eve club night has been announced, although “night” is an understatement: The club night starts on December 31 and will “probably not end until the early noon hours of January 2.”
At the turn of the year, not only two, but four dance floors will be used. Berghain, known for its basement debauchery and druggy toilets, has also announced a “XXX floor” among other things.
The line-up for the three-and-a-half-day party lists around 60 DJ acts. Outside Berghain, which gets its name from its location in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, long queues are likely again.
It was the “first regular New Year’s Eve club night since 2019,” they added.
Like other clubs, Berghain (known in German as “das Berghain”) had to close for many months during the pandemic. At times, the labyrinthine club building – a former energy plant from early GDR times not far from the former Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) – housed an art exhibition that people could view for an entrance fee without having to fall to the mercy of bouncers.
On display were not only works permanently installed in the Berghain, for example by artists such as Norbert Bisky, Wolfgang Tillmans and Marc Brandenburg. Other renowned artists were also represented, including Olafur Eliasson, Katharina Grosse, Alicja Kwade and Rosemarie Trockel, to name but a few.
A remnant of this exhibition can be found today in the toilet wing next to the main dance floor, of all places: A “Cockaigne” scene inspired by the Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder is engraved on a stainless steel wall. The work by Cyprien Gaillard is an allusion to ecstatic clubbing.
It wasn’t only the pandemic that has weighed on Berghain. After reports of suspected needle-spiking attacks in several countries, in which party-goers were allegedly injected with knockout drops by needle, Berghain organisers – who apart from announcing the programme otherwise never make any public statements – saw themselves compelled to give safety advice on their website.
After the coronavirus, another infectious disease, monkeypox, also caused concern among some partygoers this year. The Lab.oratory, a men-only area on the ground floor of Berghain building, gave prevention tips on its website against the spread of the monkeypox virus, which can be transmitted through close physical contact.
Measured by the standards of Berlin’s club scene, the 18 years of Berghain are quite a stately age.
While many clubs, especially in Berlin, see themselves threatened by gentrification and property developers, Berghain not only looks like a fortress with its building architecture in the style of socialist classicism, but it also somewhat upholds the myth of wild Berlin in the time after the fall of the Wall.
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