I'm not sure I know why I decided to conquer Berghain. I am not, by nature, a conquerer, and I was happy enough sipping bargain pints and grooving almost perceptibly to Steely Dan at my favoured local. Perhaps it was because Berghain concentrated everything I loved most under one absurdly brutalist roof: pompous exclusivity, throbbing Eurotrash techno, public sex acts. Perhaps I foresaw a perverse thrill in being turned away at the door for some arbitrary reason after queuing for three hours in the cold Berlin air. Perhaps, more plausibly, I wanted something to write about.
Being based in the hain of its name, I was able to reach it relatively quickly on foot. And by 'it' I mean the industrial lot a kilometre from the building proper where the end of the queue was located. Taking up my place behind a hundred optimistic, time-rich Berliners, I could just about make out the grey slab of hedonism twinkling in the distance. Though I did not seriously expect to make it in, I began to wonder what I would do if I actually did. Somehow it did not strike me as the type of venue one could safely document from the margins, at least not without engaging in a public sex act or two. Would it be ungracious of me to simply poke my head in, mutter "Huh", then, satisfied it wasn't my jam, quietely retreat to a nearby dive? But it was silly to speculate. I would be turned away the moment the bouncer laid eyes on the shabby configuration of items I called an outfit. But I was wrong. I was not turned away.
Instead, I left the queue voluntarily with a trio of Irishmen, having lasted a grand total of ten minutes. We headed in the direction of a less mythic nightclub with a smaller queue, on the recommendation of a passing New Zealander. The journey took us by a remnant of the Berlin Wall, and my superficial knowledge of Russia's involvement in the whole affair was enough to qualify me as the historian of the group. This was to be the night, long mythologised, in which one historian from Melbourne and three pharmaceutical workers from Cork took on the collective might of Berlin's nightclubs and lived to tell the tale. Actually, I can only speak for myself; I lost track of the Irishmen and never acquired their contact details. They might well have met gruesome ends on the streets of Berlin that night.
The three friends—I guess they bonded over being Irish and having the same dumb job—had flown in a couple of days prior with debaucherous designs on the long-weekend. How fortuitous for them to have stumbled upon a seasoned enabler in the form of a small, greying Australian, even if his predilection for consuming low-grade cheese by the block was a little too hardcore for their tastes. They told me they had spent the better part of their holiday, of which only this night remained, mercilessly taking the piss out of one another, prompting the gentlest of the trio to wonder why they could not just be kind and mutually respectful. This anecdote circulated the limited tracks of conversation more than once that evening, and I got the impression they were confronting a bleak existential truth they had not the faculties to process.
The other club, Watergate, did indeed feature a shorter line, but it still snaked a disheartening distance from the entrance. Less inclined to queue, I spied an opening and managed to cut in, my heftier—that is, man-sized—companions slipping in behind me. This reduced the wait to a manageable twenty minutes, just enough time for the Irishmen to source some lactose-free narcotics before we were face-to-chest with our final obstacle: Watergate's bouncer. A sagging, clip-fastened length of rope, manned by said bouncer, was now all that separated us from sub-Berghain ecstasy.
I'm not entirely clear on why we were ejected. The bouncer claimed it was because he had attempted to talk to us multiple times and we had refused to engage with him, as if he were some petulant child, but none of us had any recollection of this. Not that there was much point speculating: the fascists at Watergate lacked any sort of appeals process. All we could do was gather what remained of our pride and slink off to find somewhere less exclusive. Inspired—if that's an appropriate word to apply to the act of selecting shitty nightclubs—one of the Irishmen led the charge into a Kreuzberg venue he remembered from a previous night, only to scurry straight out as if it were primed to explode.
"Gay night," he said, grimly.
I presume his research into the first nightclub he had been queuing for had not been exhaustive.
Our last stop for the night, recommended to us by a cab driver, was a club whose door policy was based less on demographic factors and the whims of bouncers, and more on a person's ability to part with 7 Euros. It was here, among young Turks, that I lost the Irishmen. If, after some loutish display, they were slain by a gang of roving aesthetes, I feel I must apologise to their families for my carelessness.
Despite having consumed my body weight in alcohol, despite having paid to be there, my disinclination to dance remained very much in tact. For anyone similarly afflicted, I would not recommend positioning yourself anywhere on the dancefloor of a nightclub. Certainly you should avoid standing morosely in the centre like your dog's been shot. Strangers don't like that.
