The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  Purists object when you call this music EDM, though it is indisputably electronic music made for dancing. “Electronic dance music,” lowercase, used to be an acceptable catchall term for the entire range of genres (house, deep house, acid house, trance, techno, industrial, drum and bass, dubstep, brostep, hardcore, happy hardcore, jungle, garage, etc.) created and performed on computers and synthesizers. Shortened to EDM, however, the term has come to signify the party-crowd DJ music that has been the biggest pop phenomenon of the past half decade—Skrillex in Vegas, bros in the house. “EDM took all the gayness and blackness out of it,” my techno rabbi explained. “It’s fascistic, with the DJ on a stage.” Some prefer to call it commercial electronic music. It doesn’t have much to do with Berlin, except to the extent that Berlin defines itself in opposition to it. The nomenclature is convoluted. To the dabbler, it can seem that there are more genres than there are differences between them.

  Techno emerged in the early to mideighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class DJs who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio DJ who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.

  Techno was also developing on its own in West Germany, in the underground clubs of Frankfurt, as a logical extension of the early electronic music of Kraftwerk and of the rhythms and sounds to be mined from the records of synthpop acts like Depeche Mode. Juan Atkins, one of the godfathers of Detroit techno, says he lifted the term from the futurist Alvin Toffler, but it may have been in use in Europe before anyone in Detroit took it up, in record stores, as a designation for synthpop or for the sound that would come to be called electro. The debate goes on. The techno that would flourish in Berlin was the Detroit strand that Hegemann brought back.

  As the pent-up underground energy of the West spilled into the empty wastes of the East, Hegemann and his partners, amid the rush to colonize derelict spaces, discovered a hidden depository in a Mitte basement beneath a former Wertheim department store near what had been the Wall. It had been vacant since 1945. They set up in the vault and called it Tresor. The space was symbolic of reconciliation: straddling East and West, packed with reunified Berliners—skinheads and soccer hooligans from the East in frenzied harmony with the gays and the hippies. The soundtrack was techno. In Detroit, techno had hardly left a mark, but in Berlin the music, and the Detroit DJs who made it, found a home. Hegemann has called techno “the most important musical movement of the last century.” In Europe, anyway, this statement does not necessarily seem hyperbolic. In some respects, techno—and its variants and relatives—represents a kind of post–Cold War folk music, endlessly adaptable, performable by anyone. As Hegemann has said, “We knew that the concept of the artist who drew all the attention from the audience was dead. Techno was all about anonymity. The artist became part of the public.” Not long ago, the Berlin DJ Boys Noize tweeted, “If you see a DJ that uses a mic and screams ‘put your hands up’ throw a banana at him.”

  Most Berlin nightclubs aren’t like the American kind. Security is light, rules are lax. Generally there is no bottle service, no VIP section, and, Berghain aside, no velvet rope. In this respect, they bear little resemblance to, say, Studio 54, which, glorious as it may have been, begat a stratified style that metastasized into the models-and-bankers Maybach-and-Cristal rat race that deflected a generation away from the clubbing life in the U.S.

  Low-density neighborhoods make for lenient noise enforcement and therefore endless nights and powerful subwoofers; a liberal civic spirit means no blue laws or last calls. In Berlin, the authorities don’t especially mind your drinking on the street or on the subway. Actually, you can do pretty much anything on the street except jaywalk. It’s not a hierarchy town. There’s little compunction to network or to strive for entry into more elite social circles. “It doesn’t matter who you are here—or it matters less here, anyway, than elsewhere,” Robert Henke, a composer of electronic music who performs occasionally at Berghain, said.

  Wednesday has always been a big night in Berlin, especially for resident DJs trying new things before a sympathetic crowd. Someone had told me to go to Farbfernseher, a small club in an old television store under the S-Bahn tracks on Skalitzer Strasse. To kill time beforehand, I wandered the streets of Kreuzberg, expecting to find bars and crowds, but on this bitter, windy night—I’d heard this weather system called the Siberian Whip—there was no one around. What bars I passed were all but empty. On my last visit to Berlin, in the spring of 1990, just after the Wall fell, a friend and I had driven from southern Poland, expecting a kind of punk paradise. Instead, we found a desolate sprawling half city with no center and no discernible scene. In other words, a punk paradise, but we didn’t have eyes to see it. Here I was in Berlin again, a generation later, still wondering where Berlin was.

  Farbfernseher was a shuttered storefront on the ground floor of a graffitied apartment house with building sites on either side. I got there early, at around midnight, and claimed a spot along the wall by the bar, overlooking a small dance floor. The drink prices were listed in a Pong-era font on the screen of an old black-and-white TV. A few people sat on high benches along the walls, and a handful stood on the dance floor, watching the DJ. To my left, a stocky guy in a salmon-colored hoodie was bobbing and bouncing with great enthusiasm. His name was Ash. He and a friend, a DJ and producer named J.P., were from Cambridge and were in town for four nights of clubbing. “Our main objective is to listen to lots of techno and get blasted,” Ash said. They were 24 and 23. Mates, not dates. “This is what you might call introspective dancing,” Ash said, looking down at the floor. “This room needs some psychedelics.” They pointed out, with approval, the analog Atari mixing deck that the DJ was using: old school. The display brought to mind an abacus. “It’s stuff like this that makes me question people who say electronic music is divorced from instrumentalism,” J.P. said. “That’s a keyboard, basically.”

  At around 2:30 a.m., I left for Tresor. The walk was about a mile along deserted streets, past giant apartment blocks. It was like a zombie movie set in the outskirts of Helsinki. I tacked toward a pair of giant smokestacks, red lights blinking slow. The original Tresor closed in 2005, and eventually the land was sold to a developer. In 2007, Hegemann and his partners opened a new Tresor in a gigantic decommissioned power plant on Köpenicker Strasse, on the Spree. I had no trouble getting in. Inside, an assault of pounding primal techno lured me down a corridor of smoke and strobes, into a smoky basement, figures appearing and disappearing in it like ships in fog. It didn’t seem crowded, but everyone looked to be in a world of his own, some speedy, others half catatonic. The music was muscular, unrelenting. The DJ stood behind steel bars, as though in a cell, and pressed buttons on two laptops. I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim. One could admire this music—the rigor, the noise, the industrial badassness of it—but after a while it began to seem absurd. Ash and J.P. appeared out of the fog, and we stood together awhile, watching. Scattered about were men in tight T-shirts making severe moves. “This is the solitary-rave, demolish-your-own-personality school!” Ash shouted. Later, he remarked, with something approaching admiration, “That was the single most oppressive club atmosphere I’ve ever encountered.” I lasted 84 minutes.

  I returned the next day, in the late afternoon, having all but missed whatever daylight the Siberian Whip would permit. The offices were upstairs, shabby and pleasant, with a backstage vibe. Some gaunt young dudes skulked about. Hegemann, in a faded hoodie, was at his desk, nibbling from a bag of licorice and talking in German with a colleague over photos of the ruins of Detroit.

  “I’m a space pioneer,” he said. “My mission is to transform industri
al ruins into cultural spaces. I have ideas. We save cities, you know? We are like a consulting firm. I could save Detroit.”

  Hegemann went on, “The music came to us from Detroit. We got the milk when the milk was fresh. Now I’m older, the music’s older. It’s not fresh. We have competition. Techno is known. It is nearly pop. But it has not lost the intensity.”

  Downstairs, the techno vault, now without smoke, strobes, or aural assault, seemed no more remarkable than a fraternity taproom. The bank-vault boxes had been salvaged from the original Tresor. Their reincarnation here hinted at the creep of affectation and nostalgia in the techno culture of Berlin. We went up a stairwell and emerged into the main power plant—an old East German distance-heating facility that had served Mitte until 1996. It was now a vast empty cathedral of concrete, with towering pillars and vaults, arcane markings, and a trace of dusky natural light. Hegemann and his partners were calling this space Kraftwerk (natürlich) and didn’t know quite what to do with it. To get it up to code, for safety and fire, they’d need to invest millions of dollars that they didn’t have but hoped to pry from the City of Berlin, under the rationale of government support for an essential cultural industry and tourism draw. In the gloom, you could imagine the rhythmic clamor of the old turbines and pumps—the rudiments of techno.

  The post-Wall abundance of derelict buildings and excess housing was decisive. “Empty spaces allowed there to be a club culture,” Robert Henke said. “With no empty space, you get a closed-at-2-A.M., restrictive-alcohol culture.” At first the reclamation seemed slapdash, improvisational, anarchic, as squatters took over buildings and neighborhoods and set off a period of cultural ferment. But the powers that be had been dreaming up developments for years before the Wall came down, and now—amid a boom in real-estate speculation and investment (everyone spoke of the Swedes)—empty space, and the sense of wildness that comes with it, has become harder to come by. “Flats are getting more expensive,” Hegemann said. “But we still have many free spaces. This is the secret for why Berlin is still alive.”

  Some empty spaces have completed their life cycles. One afternoon, I visited the old Reichsbahnbunker, a five-story fortress of reinforced concrete built by the Nazis in 1942 as an air-raid shelter. The Soviets turned it into a jail for POWs. Then it was used to store bananas and other tropical fruit. It was abandoned. In the nineties, it became an infamous techno nightclub, the Bunker. No ventilation, no fire exits. The government eventually shut it down. In 2003, an advertising executive and his wife bought the building and converted it into a museum to house their collection of contemporary art. They also built a glass-and-steel penthouse on the roof, to house themselves. Now the collection is open to the public, by appointment only. I joined a tour one afternoon. The guide, a young art student with a sweet monotone, took us into a cell-like space featuring giant manipulated photographs of the night sky, by Thomas Ruff, and explained that it had been the original dark room of Berlin. “It was very extreme,” she said. “It was hot, damp, loud, and dark. It was said to be the hardest club in the world. I’m sure you can imagine the things.” She gave a coy smile.

  Except for Lisbon, Berlin is the cheapest capital in Western Europe. This despite being the capital of the Continent’s richest country. Its population is still lower than it was at the outset of the Second World War. It’s a little like a mountain town with ski bums and trustafarians cycling through. The kids come to play, not to stay. Crammed into their WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, or “shared flats”), they luxuriate in cheap rents, idle hours, and a capricious and creative cohort. What had been a very German scene became, a decade ago, pan-European, with the rise of cheap air travel and subsidized unemployment. Then came the Americans. It can be hard to find young people willing to work more than three days a week. And yet it can also be hard for someone who is working three days a week, and who is earning the low wages that are typical of Berlin, to salt away enough money to leave—to afford, say, the first month’s rent in London or New York. So it favors those who have some money to spare or who don’t care. One ex-Berliner said, “It’s spring break for RISD kids.”

  In recent years, there has been more in the way of regular employment. There are tech startups, which attract engineers. Berlin is Europe’s mobile-gaming hub, with the headquarters of Wooga. There are call centers, staffed by legions of young people pulling relatively arduous shifts, and a number of successful startups grounded in the electronic-music scene: SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments. Techno has quietly been professionalized, attracting private and government capital.

  Ewan Pearson, a DJ and producer, made his bones in the U.K. rave scene in the nineties and moved to Berlin in 2003, for a clubbing culture he found to be unpretentious and, if not temperate, then at least benign. “I’m from the West Midlands,” he told me. “Every time you went out, you were primed for danger.”

  He and his wife, Caroline Drucker, a Bryn Mawr graduate who came to Berlin in 2003 to pursue a master’s in architectural theory, have what passes in Berlin for a bourgeois life. Most weekends, he travels around Europe for DJ gigs. She helped to launch Vice Media in Germany, then moved to SoundCloud, and now she is an executive in the Berlin office of Etsy, the online retailer of vintage and handmade stuff.

  Pearson was featured in Feiern (Party), a 2006 documentary about the Berlin club scene. After describing the vortex into which one can disappear on a strong night, Pearson, wry and already going a little gray (he’s 41 now), remarks, “Don’t forget to go home.” The line gave the film its English title and became a catchphrase among the clubbers of his generation, a click of the slippers in this particular Oz. In a way, it’s an accidental mantra for the scene’s survivors, those who have fashioned a daytime life out of all those nights, and who have found a way to mellow a bit with age, without quitting entirely.

  I’d been warned by a few adherents about what they called “the Berlin jade,” the cynicism of the locals, native or adopted, toward the naive enthusiasms of outsiders. Nearly everyone I talked to considered Berlin’s peak—its finest, purest, most interesting, authentic, blissful period—to have occurred a year or two before he or she arrived. Newcomers perpetually catch the tail end and stake their claim to the remnants. Any time an article comes out about what you might call the Berlingeist—how hip the city is, or no longer is—Berliners stick their fingers down their throats.

  The writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus observed, in the Berlin chapter of A Sense of Direction, his 2012 pilgrimage memoir, “What the word ‘over’ really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might have become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you.”

  Each generation finds a Berlin to test that persistence. One night, I had a drink with two sisters from the suburbs of Chicago, Arielle and Adina Bier, formerly performance artists of a kind, who had recently settled in Berlin, which their grandparents were forced out of in the late thirties. Adina was interested in queer Berlin and liked to go to Homopatik—an all-weekend gay party at a club called Aboutblank—and the Sunday-night Pork party at Ficken 3000. (Its website: “Drink—Dance—Strip—Fuck. Music for prostitutes, indie anti-hits, pink noise, raw static, synth cherry pop, spunk rock, cock ’n’ hole, artcore + lo-fi 4 low lifes.”)

  Arielle mentioned, with some disdain, an advertisement for Coca-Cola that had been making the rounds, in which a karaoke vendor on a bicycle sets up his karaoke machine in Mauerpark, in Prenzlauer Berg, which is known for its flea market, and before long has an amphitheater full of hipsters joyfully taking part. Later that night, I watched the ad a few times and wondered how the jaded Berliners had been persuaded to carry on like that for the Coca-Cola Company. The next day, I had coffee with Tilman Brembs, a very early visitor to Tresor. He worked for a casting agency, DeeBeePhunky, one of the biggest in Berlin; it had a portfolio of a thousand young Berliners as models and actors for hire, and had done ads for Microsoft, IKEA, and McDonald’s. It turned out that he had cast that Coca-Cola campaign. He
told me that the kids who appeared on camera were well paid. Goodbye, jade.

  Brembs had come to Berlin in 1982—military-service avoidance. “The techno movement was like a second puberty for me,” he said. When he arrived at Tresor, he helped tend bar and clean up after the parties. “In the early years, there was no running water. We had buckets of water to wash with. It was a crazy time. It was magic. Everything was possible. There were not so many tourists. We had a lot of English from the Allied forces. They got out of their bases at night and they were full of drugs. Then they came no more. Probably they were arrested. They brought a different style, the ravers, the Ecstasy, the big printed T-shirts.” At the clubs, he went on, “we had the hooligans, all these rough guys, together with the gays. There was no violence. Maybe it was the Ecstasy. There was a Wild East atmosphere. People robbed shops. The police, they drove Trabants and were not fast enough for all the Golf GTEs. We preferred to take speed. It was the speed users versus the coke users. The coke people were arrogant. But the drugs were not the motor of the movement.”

  He’s been finding ways to capitalize on techno ever since. In the nineties, he was a sanctioned photographer at Tresor (“The Bunker was too hard for me”). He put 10,000 photos online in 2007, under the heading “Zeitmaschine” (Time Machine). He’d started a company with D. J. Tanith, an early techno pioneer in Berlin, selling camouflage fabrics and party gear. For a while, Brembs worked for the Love Parade, the street jubilee that was canceled in 2010, after 21 people were killed in a stampede—the Altamont of techno. He is married to a woman from New Hampshire and living in Prenzlauer Berg (Park Slope), and for the most part no longer spends much time in the clubs.