Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
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Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. 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 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 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.
Hello.
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.
This is a tug. Like...
It's our first day, and so we head to the neighborhood everyone had told me to start with, Friedrichshain. Friedrichshain is the neighborhood that contains Berghain. Walking the streets, I feel this feeling of déjà street view. I've clicked through the same blocks 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 Thulen. Not the Berghain bouncer Sven, there are many Svens in Germany. This Sven, a DJ and a writer.
The music studio where he asks to meet, a walk-up. I walk up with a lot of stairs. I trail behind Shruti.
Check, check. Hi.
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?
This way?
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? In America, it's like the two types of music you're allowed to say you hate are
Okay. That's always a problem when your idea of something is just that bullshit stuff that's mass marketed.
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