Norman Ohler

rock and roll or grunge music and i came to berlin it was uh in a club called eimer bucket in east berlin doesn't exist anymore like in a rundown totally rundown like a squat uh and i i went to the bar and i had a beer and i looked and there was just a few people on the dance floor in this like electronic music which i'd never heard before and the guy in front of me he was like

He looked like an East Berlin skinhead kind of type of guy, but like totally smiling.

I'm sure he was on ecstasy and he was disassembling like an imaginary machine.

And I just looked at this guy.

He was like for one hour, he was just like doing the most complicated like things.

And I was like, this is totally, totally different way of moving.

And I liked that actually.

I liked that.

to dance in clubs and I did this for like two years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time we went out a lot like from Friday to Monday basically but it means and a lot of people still do that in Berlin but it means that

It can't really work.

For me, it was also kind of research, even though I didn't know this.

I mean, life is research, in a way, if you allow it to be.

I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences, because...

I mean, also, like when I wrote about methamphetamine and the Nazis, I asked, at the time, weed was illegal in Germany.

So I asked a friend of mine, she's a cannabis dealer, I guess you would say.

I said, can you also get me crystal meth?

She was like shocked, like, no, no.

Because she was a weed dealer.

But then she found like a Polish guy who actually had crystal meth.

I just wanted to have it.