I smiled. “Of course.”
I was sitting in the wide hallway of her apartment in a salon chair, looking at myself in an old vanity she’d converted into her office. Bottles of Bumble and Bumble crowded the narrow shelves. A girl came out of the bathroom in a towel and waved to me enthusiastically before ducking into another room. Jens Lekman’s Shirin came to mind.
“It’s actually one of the reasons I moved here,” she said.
“Berghain?”
“Yeah.” She considered this for a second while her hands worked quickly to fold strands of my hair into sheets of foil. “Actually, I think that, at the time, it was the only reason I moved here. There is nothing like it in Sweden.” She was a DJ and recently started producing her own tracks. Techno was playing from her laptop in the kitchen. It was clearly the rhythm of her life-pulse and it made sense that she’d pitch camp next to the main artery.
“I like how deadly serious everyone is about having fun,” I said. But it was more than fun. Fun was the amateur stuff. This was more essential than that -- professional hedonism, trance states, ecstasy.
“Absolutely! You have to clear your schedule. You can’t try to squeeze it in because it might take six hours to really start to feel it. And you have to be open to that.”
She led me to the bathroom where I knelt on cold white tile and leaned over her bathtub – letting my hair down in a curtain. She set out the shampoo and conditioner and then left me and the handheld showerhead to work it out. When I emerged, she handed me a lemon ice pop.
* * *
It’s no wonder that the fringe kids of our generation flock to Berghain (and the upstairs Panorama Bar) to lose themselves somewhere in the dark between the neon spots, the hollows between body-rattling bass beats and those shadows that slip between the whites of cigarette smoke and fog. It’s natural to crave a release for the body and the mind. We’ve found it in so many ways throughout history -- religion being a major player. Think pagan rituals, Baptist revivals, glossolalia, tribal dancing, all-consuming prayer as a choir fills a domed cathedral with an achingly sweet melody, yogic meditation. And, of course, today’s fanatic zeal for techno resembles nothing so much as the cult of Dionysus, which was based on indulgence, intoxication, and frenzied dancing until you become possessed by the god of the party himself.
Hipsters don’t have a lot of religion. Sure they wear a lot of long, dangly crosses from their necks and ears and have them -- scars of an oppressive Catholic youth incarnate – tattooed on their forearms. But it’s not where they are looking for enlightenment. They live in an era that is increasingly driven by logic and rational thinking, especially here in Germany, and the ones on the real outskirts of things are not usually embraced by church groups anyway. These kids also have more than their share of societal stress and identity issues to puzzle through and sometimes they just need a break. Berghain is a place that gives those nagging cyclical and obsessively calculating mental processes a rest – literally they are blown away by the sound system -- and allows the mind to bliss out. The body part works in much the same way – you’ve been up for thirty hours, you’re on God-knows-what and you’re dancing so hard that you can’t think about those extra pounds you may or may not have gained this week because your boss said that thing and why did they have to open that vegan cupcake shop on the corner. There are no mirrors allowed. Once you’re in, you’re in and you can do whatever, wherever you want.
Berghain is a reincarnation of a gay fetish club that was popular in the 90s. There are still nooks and cubbies and corners and oversized shelves tucked into all the dark corners. It’s just that sometimes when you peer into them now, you see a man and a women having sex. But only sometimes. Bacchus was often depicted as a young man with girlish features. I think it was pretty well understood that he swung both and every which way.
Caravaggio's Bacchus, 1595
The old power plant building rises out of the industrial cityscape like the House of Usher, foreboding and electric. (In this case, the lightening is on the inside and one watches it streak across the windows.) The line of miscreants trails from its door like entrails. Often slick with rain on black leather. The guys at the door have the impossible job of sorting out who’s come to play from the spectators – with only tattoo patterns and the geometry of ripped jeans to read like tarot cards. The line snakes slowly forward from Friday to the wee hours of Monday’s morning but never seems to shorten. Once inside, some stay for days. The blinds are ceremoniously lowered each sunrise to a cheer that lifts the heads of the revelers – for a moment reminding them of a world outside the concrete walls. But the knowledge is quickly cast off as they catch the next sonic wave into the fray.
Because it is important for people to have things that they take seriously and Berghain-goers often blow off the things that most people take seriously, club-prep is a sacred affair. They catch up on sleep and feed themselves and slick back their hair. They do it knowing that they will be spit out of the place looking like drowned rats. It’s much like an animal might be cleaned and decorated for presentation before being slain at some holy alter. They preen so that they might be properly destroyed. I learned yesterday that the club’s nickname is The Church. My studio-mate wanted to go to a bar with his friend but was turned down. “Nah man,” his friend said. “I can’t go out tonight. I’ve got Church tomorrow.”
(There are no photographs to accompany this post because the bouncers confiscate all photo-making equipment at the door. However, when my friend was caught with drugs in his pocket, he was gently chided (tisk, tisk!), handed them back and ushered inside.)
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