Charlie had his chocolate factory. Cartman had Casa Bonita. Harold and Kumar had their castle. Moby, his whale.
I had Berlin.
I visited Berlin for the first time ten years ago. It was a criminally-short two-day trip. I was too young and naïve to appreciate it then, but the seed was planted. Time passed. I learned things. I glugged down hundreds of hours of world-war-era movies, podcasts, audiobooks and documentaries. I reached grumpy-grandpa levels of war history mastery. I came to see Berlin as center stage for history's greatest drama.
I wanted to understand a place that swung so violently through the extremes of the human experience and lived to tell it's story.
Then there was the music - techno, more specifically. Techno had been my life's soundtrack since the LimeWire days in high school. Berlin was it's world capital and home to the most legendary techno clubs in the world. I had to pay tribute.
It's saturated with art, architecture, and interesting food - all things this self-respecting semi-cultured pseudo-intellectual wanderer likes.
How was a city near extinction reborn as a global center of art, culture and entrepreneurship? I had to find out.
Berlin perfectly molded to my fantasies and curiosities. I became obsessed. It was my mecca - my geographic White Whale.
In May 2022 I did my pilgrimage. It was an eight-day blitzkrieg (see what I did there?) of non-stop adventure. I walked, ate, painted, flirted, danced and bathed in Berlin's essence. I absorbed every site, sound and sensation my body could handle. I made friends and recruited allies. I quenched my curiosity and fulfilled fantasies.
This series is my diary of that time.
I will describe Berlin and my time in it the way a sommelier might describe wine - with acute sensitivity, factual accuracy, and personal intimacy.
Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Methodology
I am an expert city explorer. I can download a city's essence with Navy Seal efficiency. This starts with a Point of Interest map.
I make these before all my trips. They save me from spending hours of adventure time on research. They're super easy to make. I'll find bars, restaurants, markets, tourist sites and save them on google maps. Future me is always grateful.
These points are options, not obligations. Doing everything isn't sane or realistic. Instead, the POI map buys me flexibility and spontaneity. Days unfold based on logistics and how I feel. Pre-planned things like walking tours or AirBnB experiences fill up any gaps.
I stayed in Prenzlau Berg, a shitty-turned-nice neighborhood north of the city center, and in Kreuzberg, the Turkish neighborhood south of the river. Both give me a broad look of Berlin.
I invite a special companion - William L. Shirer. He's dead. But the books he wrote while war corresponding in 1930's Berlin are alive in my ears. His most famous book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is one of the most thorough dives into Nazi Germany ever written.
On this trip I listen to his Berlin Diary audiobook (where I stole the name of this piece from). It's his daily account of 1930's Berlin when things were starting to get uh....weird.
Listening to William added another dimension to my trip. I could see what he saw, sense what he sensed, and feel what he felt. It was like traveling two places at once - one past, one present.
Now it's time for my Berlin Diary.
What does Berlin Look Like?
Berlin won't win any European-city beauty-pageants. The train from the airport reveals a flat city lined with uninteresting commercial buildings, abandoned warehouses, overgrown grass, and graffiti-marked everything. There is a post-apocalyptic-society-has-broken-down-and-nature-is-taking-over energy in the air.
In the center Berlin looks like any ordinary European city. It's a sprawling network of six-story apartment buildings, street-side cafes, cozy walkable streets lined with bike paths, tram rails, quaint plazas, street side cafes, and small neighborhood parks.
Berlin's center - Mitte - has centuries of imposing dick-swinging architecture - churches, victory arches, concert halls, cathedrals, museums, government headquarters, and that big toothpick looking thing in the middle known as the TV tower.
Bow before the all mighty Church/Kaiser/Führer/People's-Whatever you insignificant peasant! Berlin's designers all seem to say.
It works. I feel small.
In this sense Berlin isn't special. It's more-or-less the the story of all European cities. The city is nice. Sometimes beautiful. But it's no Paris/Stockholm/Vienna. The subways feel old, stuffy and a little dirty (but not New York City dirty). It's covered in graffiti/vandalism/street art. Berlin feels one-part classical-European-city one-part grimy-dive-bar. It's easy to imagine why an ordinary tourist would leave unimpressed.
It's worth pausing for a distinction. The Berlin you have in your mind's eye is most likely former-communist East Berlin. I'm over simplifying it here, but West Berlin is the central business district + wealthy part of town. It's nice, but in my opinion not as interesting as the East.
East Berlin has the major historical centers, tourist sights, grungy-graffiti-techno-club filled neighborhoods and shitty-now-cool parts of town. Odds are you'll be like me and spend your time in former East Berlin.
If Berlin were a person it would be a long-haired suit-and-tie-wearing scruffy-bearded full-body-tattooed former-stimulant-addicted gentleman. He has a dark and complicated past, but seems ok now.
You don't come to Berlin for surface beauty. You come for everything beneath it.
History
Berlin is a dark place. It's the black hole on earth that spawned Hitler and the ideology that incinerated the world. Here armies converged and turned and a once-great world capital into an apocalyptic hellscape.
Berlin's first miracle is that it exists - that it didn't vanish from earth like a modern day Carthage.
If that wasn't enough, it was split between capitalist west and communist east. A giant wall bolstered by barbed wire, attack dogs, snipers, and mine fields split the city along with friends, neighbors, families and lovers in half overnight. East Berlin turned into a bleak communist prison state. Even "free" West Berlin was enclosed inside East Germany. It took thirty years for the wall to fall and the city to re-unite.
Today's Berlin is mostly restored. But the scars are everywhere. Bridges and buildings are riddled with bullet holes, shrapnel, and blackened char. Immaculate buildings neighbor buildings that look like they were wiped down with a wet cloth after the war. Churches stand half destroyed with broken spires. Charred rumps of old statues sit affront famous landmarks.
Berlin is a ghost city, not in the nobody-lives-here kind of way, but in the horrific-atrocities-happened-everywhere kind of way. It's that eerie somebody-was-murdered-in-this-house feeling multiplied across an entire city.
I don't know what it says about me - but this darkness is why I'm here. I had so many questions.
How does a city recover? How do it's people heal? How do they memorialize the past? How does THAT Berlin become today's Berlin?
Berlin's answer seems direct - tell the truth.
Most cities have war memorials. Berlin IS a war memorial.
Countless sites recount it's past. The Topography of Terror details everything about Nazi atrocities. The (many) Berlin Wall memorials show what life was like in a divided city. The DDR museum invites you into communist East Berlin. The museum on top the giant toothpick casts a birds-eye-view of Berlin-then and Berlin-now. Vintage black-and-white pictures line subway stations.
The Holocaust Memorial is the size of a city block. Posters at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous stop between East and West show how World War 3 almost began. Tour guides show where Nazi's burnt books and the ordinary playground that sits above the bunker where Hitler shot himself. Another tour takes me through an old air raid bunker beneath a train station.
It's not just the big stuff - subtle reminders lie everywhere.
Luckily, I found the perfect guide to help me see them - Sean. He's a American historian whose lived in Russia, Japan and Berlin. He's smart as shit. He speaks German, Russian and knows more about dark 20th century history than anyone I've ever met.
Meeting Sean was like finding a glitch in the matrix.
Nazism was a nature movement, he starts the walk with.
Wait wait. I'm hooked. I need to know more.
Sean explains how conflicts between Nazi and Soviet ideologies lead to the greatest war in human history.
Walking with him let me see Berlin through the high-resolution lenses only somebody with decades of immersive study can provide. They say the devil is in the details. With Sean I saw many details and many devils.
He points out the little golden squares along sidewalks commemorating former Jewish residents deported to concentration camps.
We stop at an ordinary neighborhood park - somewhere I never would have thought twice about passing.
This is a mass grave, he says. Here bones from Jews and Nazi soldiers lie below overgrown grass.
This empty space we're standing on was an apartment building turned concentration camp. Inside that government building soldiers fought room-to-room and tossed grenades down stairwells.
On an ordinary bridge he pulls out old photos. Here German snipers battled Soviet tanks and infantry. Another old picture reveals this pleasant green space was a dense residential neighborhood. Now it's another mass grave. I sense Berlin has many mass graves.
Berlin is a warning. Not about what might happen in this particular plot of Earth, but a warning about us. Nazis and their supporters were school teachers, artists, doctors, lawyers, workers and academics. They liked theatre, good food, classical music, and idling in parks. They too were "modern civilized people".
That didn't save them from seduction by ruthless psychopaths. They swallowed propaganda and ignored conflicting evidence. They believed they were heroes saving the world from evil. They fell in line and eliminated anyone who didn't. Berlin's destruction became a memorial to those consequences.
Berlin message is simple. If it can happen here. It can happen anywhere to anyone at any time.
William Shirer concludes his Berlin Diary with a quote from Plutarch.
Thus they let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage.
Few people had a better front-row-seat of Berlin than William. He saw it at the peak of it's evil and the depth of it's destruction. He left bitter hoping never to return.
But William didn't live to see Berlin reborn.
I did.
In my spiritual post-script to William's Berlin Diary I will take you to the Berlin he never saw.
Berlin Today
Berlin's first miracle is that it exists. That second is what it's become.
However eight days in a city doesn't qualify me to tell "the" story of anywhere. Instead I'll tell a story - that of my new friend Dina.
Dina shouldn't be alive. She is a Russian Jew born in Central Russia and raised in Israel. Her ancestors survived Hitler, the front lines of the Soviet army, POW camps, Stalinist purges and gulags.
She became an artist like her parents. In an epic cross-generational "Fuck You", she moved to Berlin - the city that once tried to exterminate her race, and the city which her birth country walled-off into a prison state.
There she entered the tech industry, but soon became disconnected and depressed. One night she gets invited to Berghain, Berlin's most famous techno club. It was her first techno event. Hesitant at first, she wanders into the dance floor. Something happened - a long lost voice called out Welcome Home! Dina said it was like her inner child reawakened. The experience shook her.
I could paint this! She felt. So she did. Dina went on an colorful acrylic-on-canvas rampage and birthed a new style. She calls it Techno Painting.
Fate ejected her from the tech industry and off she went on her own. She worked at the infamous Kit Kat Club (hint: foreshadowing) and did live painting exhibitions all over the city.
This turned into the business she runs today. Dina now hosts Techno Painting workshops at studio apartment. That's how we met. (I'm happy to report my techno painting will soon be hanging in my house).
When she's not clubbing or workshopping she teaches arts and crafts to school kids (with less techno, I imagine). She is much, much happier these days.
Berlin is an alchemist city! Dina says, excited.
She is one of countless artists, creators, innovators and entrepreneurs who flocked to Berlin and turned it into the cultural kaleidoscope it is today.
She takes me to Mauerpark. It's beautiful in a pleasantly ordinary way. People ride bikes, picnic, play with their dogs and even rock-climb.
This park was built on war rubble, she tells me.
......what?. I pause, stunned.
Below us was an ocean of rubble. Inside these brick walls people worked, hosted parties, raised families, and witnessed their city bombed into oblivion. Here we were in paradise. We kept walking, but I couldn't get the image out of my head.
Through Dina I saw a window into today's Berlin. I saw pain, destruction, healing, discovery, creation, but most important - optimism.
Now it's time to open another window into Berlin. This time, through my eyes.
Food
But first, let me taste you through Berlin.
For a city that's been around for 800 years and nearly took over the world you'd think they would have thought of something better than fucking currywurst - hot dog meat and fries drowned in curried ketchup.
But the world is a strange place where things don't make sense.
Don't get me wrong. I like German food. It's underrated and underexplored. However, locals give me confused looks when I ask where to get "good German food". I might as well be asking for North Korean food.
In Berlin, German food takes a backseat to basically everything else. Instead, Berlin's food scene is an international one.
Many Germans died in WW2. They needed man power to do man power things. So Berlin opened it's doors to the world and in came immigrants from everywhere - Turkish immigrants especially.
That's why for the same reasons New York has pizza, Texas has tacos and London has chicken tikka masala - Berlin has Döner Kebab. These are pita bread sandwich things filled with shavings from giant spinning meat towers topped with salad and feta cheese.
They're cheap, filling, and delicious. Döner shops are everywhere.
All because Hitler never got into art school.
File this under the "unintended consequences" folder.
That being said, I found what I needed to find.
In Kreuzberg I stumbled on a Turkish street market and found dozens of stalls serving grandmother's-kitchen type food. I ate pickled herring and meatballs at a charming German restaurant in a bombed out building. I fancy-cocktail-lounge-hopped with a shit-talking whiskey-selling Irish girl.
But nothing beat Markthalle Neun - my new favorite food hall in the world.
Rainbows of fresh produce greeted at the entrance. There is no music - only the buzz from busy locals. Countless food and drink stalls offer low-cost low-commitment options. I pair sauvignon blanc from one stall with oysters from another. I do the same with orange wine and spätzle, a German mac-n-chees looking dish.
Dry cider went with meatballs and lukewarm potato salad (Berlin likes to emphasize their potato salad's lukewarmness). On the way out I pluck a two-bite sized pistachio cannoli and Turkish cardamom espresso prepared in heated sand.
Markthalle Neun is paradise. All self-respecting cities should aspire to have something like it.
I ate well in Berlin, but food was not the city's centerpiece. The scene has a ways to go. There are too many creatives and adventure seekers for this place not to be a world class eating destination. I'm sure it will get there.
Music
Millions of undernourished, corrupt, desperately horny, furiously pleasure seeking men and women thrash and reel in a jazz delirium. Dancing becomes a mania, an idee fixe, a cult, The stock exchange hops, the ministers waggle, the Reichstag cuts capers. War Cripples and cripples war profiteers, film stars and prostitutes, [...] all flint their limbs about in a fearful euphoria. - Klaus Mann. C. 1926
Berlin has a rich and diverse music scene. But I wasn't here for the "music" scene. I was here for one thing only - techno. To me techno isn't just club-party music. It's lift-heavy-shit music. It's morning-drive-to-work music. It's dinner party music. It's write-brilliant-words-about-Berlin music.
Techno is everything.
And as it happens - Berlin is it's world capital. But why? Why here of all places? I don't know exactly, but I have a suspicion. Techno is dark music. Not in the angsty-teenage-I-hate-my-parents kind of way. It's dark like chocolate and complex like fine wine. It's light on words and heavy on raw energy. Like a good wine-steak pairing, techno pairs well with places with dark pasts. For example, Techno was born in Detroit, a city no stranger to darkness and despair.
Berlin's most famous clubs are in former communist East Berlin - a bleak half-city where non-confirming expression was treated as a threat to The Party. Young people weren't into that shit and rebelled. They wore wild clothes and listened to wild music and partied in places they weren't supposed to. They were grunge. Not the suburban-my-life-is-too-perfect grunge, but an-all-powerful-infinitely-opprsessive-totalitarian-regime-rules-my-life kind of grunge.
Until it didn't. The wall fell. Decades of repressed energy exploded out onto the world. Techno became the vehicle for that energy. Like spirits looking for hosts, this tecnho-infused energy found hosts in strange places.
These include a railway repair depot (Ostgut), a department store vault (Tressor), Soviet era power plants (Berghain, Tressor's 2nd location), an old office buildings (Watergate), a dog treat factory (Sisyphos), an old brewery (SchwuZ), and an old air raid bunker (the cleverly named Bunker).
Berlin clubs are the psychadelic mushrooms grown in cowshit.
It's not just where these clubs are. It's everything else surrounding it. In most cities clubbing happens at the fringes. Cities, if they condone it at all, relegate it to "night life districts" and subdue it with strict ordinances.
Not here.
Clubbing is inseparable from the culture. They're scattered all over the city. Rather than tolerating clubs, they're treated as part of the cultural fabric. A high court designated Berlin as a "high art institution" in the same vein as classical music venues. Clubbing isn't just a young people thing either. You'll see people in their 30's 40's and 50's going wild too.
You see it in the way people dress. Berlin attire is somewhere between fetish and pajamas, Dina half-jokes. After a week in the city I understand.
People everywhere look like they're on the way to or from a techno club. At parks, on walks, in cafes, and grocery stores. Black, black, and more black. Clothing here is more Hot Topic than Abercrombie.
In my head I play a game Would They Get In?. I imagine ordinary people in metros, bars, cafes and museums and guess whether they'd pass Berghain's bouncers.
The Portuguese banker sitting next to me at the cocktail bar ranting about his work schedule. Impossible. The tall 40-something wearing black leather boots and a black leather jacket on his way to a mid afternoon lunch? Definitely. The girl lost in her headphones rolling cigarettes on the metro? Probably. The day workers installing windows blasting techno at eight in the morning? Deservedly.
A curious thing about clubs here is how expensive they aren't. Most world-famous-clubs' entry fees are bitter pills to swallow. There you can spend hundreds or even thousands to cut the line and buy VIP treatment. The more you spend the better you get treated. Can't afford it? Bye. Low girl-to-guy ratio? Bye. Clothes not nice enough? Bye.
Not here.
Berghain, likely the most famous techno club in the world, only costs 18 euros to get in. Other top clubs are similar.
Clubs here aren't owned by investors, but by local collectives maximizing energy, not profit.
So what is that "energy"? I can't say exactly. All places have their own. Berghain's is different from Kit Kat's is different than Sisyphos', etc.
The difference here is that you can't buy access to that energy. Here that energy is everything. It's not a side effect. It's the whole point. It's how far clubs here go to protect it that makes them unique.
Entry is cheap, but only in the monetary sense. Berlin clubs don't cost money, but time. On popular nights lines go on for hours. Only then maybe you'll get in. There is a good chance you don't. All top club have strict door policies - Berghains' most notoriously.
That's where the bouncers enter the picture. Passing them is part of the ritual.
I'm going to skip the power-tripping-god-complex angle. I'm sure that's the case with some, but it's not an interesting angle.
I see them as curators protecting the club's energy. They will turn away anyone with the "wrong" energy.
Clubs here aren't exclusive. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, handicapped, hot, ugly, young, old or who you fuck. They aren't inclusive either. They will reject anyone for any reason regardless of wealth or status. Even Elon Musk couldn't get into Berghain.
https://mixmag.net/read/elon-musk-declares-that-he-hates-the-word-peace-thanks-to-berghain-news/
Instead, clubs here are equalizing. Everyone is filtered and treated the same. No exceptions. Inside there is no VIP section or firework-sparkling bottle service. There is no status.
So what do they want?
Here's my guess. They want pilgrims, not tourists. Participants, not spectators. People who will add, not subtract. Look like you just googled Best Clubs in Berlin? Nope. Too drunk? Too loud? Too creepy? Too douchey? Too excited? Astrology sign misaligned? Not dressed right? Nope. Nope. Nope.
I found this out the hard way. Sisyphos turned me away after waiting in line for two hours. I don't know why. Maybe I violated some subtle protocol. Maybe it was random. Maybe the bouncer just didn't like me.
Sorry, tonight is not your night, the bouncer said as he unceremoniously shushed me away to the exit door.
Sure, I was mad for a minute, but I cooled down. It wasn't personal. Even Dina, whose "been to Berghain a hundred times" still gets turned away every now and then.
That night was not my night. But I did get a few extra hours of much-needed sleep. For the next night would be my night.
Kit Kat
Enter Sasha.
Sasha isn't his real name, and his parents aren't Italian or Hungarian. The clandestine nature of his business demands anonymity, which I shall respect. Sasha helps people like me get into hard-to-get-into clubs. He knows door policies, bouncers, rules, and the specific energy each club looks for. He is my sherpa.
We're going to Kit Kat Club, he says.
Kit Kat Club? I remember friends back home telling me about it.
I find their website.
Founded in 1994 at the height of the techno movement in Berlin, the "socio-political experimental field for free spirits" is now in its 14th year. The whole thing is an exquisite mixture of techno club & fetish event, "perversion on a world level" is the goal!
I have more questions than answers.
What am I getting myself into?
Listen, Alexander, Sasha's message begins, You need an open mind for Kit Kat. You're going to see crazy things. Don't go into Kit Kat and then tell me you don't like it. It's like ordering tomate pizza and then telling me you don't like the tomate pizza.
I've had plenty tomate pizza.....just not this kind.
But I am an explorer, and explorers explore. Tonight I would do as the Berliners do.
That is how, at Sasha's instruction, I found myself at a "sexy costume" store looking for black leather....everything.
I love Kit Kat! Dina, former employee and frequent Kit Kat attendee, said after learning I was going. "It's like a Christmas party....but naked!"
Again, I have more questions than answers, but I hold back.
The night arrives. I show up at Sasha's apartment in my.....outfit. Ok, time to get ready, he rushes me. He's got a plan and it needs to happen fast.
There's an Egyptian man dressed like he's going to a rooftop cocktail lounge in some central business district.
He's not ready for tomate pizza and bails. There's a beautiful blonde woman in a beige trench coat and a blue riding cap. Underneath she wears black lace lingerie.
I blush.
Hi! I'm Lina!, she says.
Lina, another one of Sasha's customers, is a recently-unmarried psychotherapist from Lithuania. I'm doing research! she says with a mischievous giggle.
Lina is down for tomate pizza.
Lot's of psychology people do this, she tells me. I file this fact into the back of my mind for safe keeping.
Lina, you are the master. Sasha hands her a riding whip. Alexander, you are her slave. He puts a chain around my neck.
Nice to meet you too Lina, I say hoping she can handle her newly awarded absolute power.
There was no time to spare. Sasha whips out a pencil drawn map.
Ok, this is how we're going to get you in. Pay attention! he commands.
I'm going to drop you off here on this corner and you're going to wait in this hotel. Then I give you the signal and you meet me at this point. There you'll wait in line until you get to the bouncer.
And this is very important. He may or may not ask you questions. You must have answers. Be excited, but not too excited.
How long have you been together? Three years.
What party is this? Carneball Bizzare.
Have you been here before? Yes, before Covid.
Who is playing? Felix, Der Puk and Annie-o.
What is your favorite room? The Dragon room.
I scooby-doo pause. Dragon room?!
Yes, Dragon room. He doesn't pause to elaborate.
What are you here for? To have a threesome!
I glance at Lina. If you say so!
Sensing what I'm sensing, Lina gently deflates the fantasy ballooning in my mind.
Sorry Alexander, I'm just here to observe!
That's ok. This was no place for a scarcity mindset.
We memorize the plan and head off. Sasha drops us off at the hotel lobby. I am wearing things I've never worn in a public space before. I'm relieved Lina is here to share in this absurdity.
Sasha gives us the signal and we head towards the club. On the way we cross an ordinary family with two middle-school aged kids. The boy and I exchange glances. Time freezes. In this frozen space I am him wondering what the fuck I'm seeing right now.
Hey dude, this is as weird for me as it is for you right now. I communicate telepathically.
This is my life right now. I'm exploring.
We wait in line for about 45 before getting to the bouncer. Lina, remembering her role takes the lead and drags me by the chain. She looks at the bouncer, looks at me, and opens her trench coat. I say nothing. The bouncer scans us and wordlessly nods us to the entrance.
We made it! Lina and I cheer.
The door opens and the sensory onslaught begins. It's dark and hot. Everything is red and black (because of course it is). Everyone is following the "less is more" dress code. At the coat room we check in excess clothes, bags, and most importantly, our phones. Kit Kit, like many clubs here, is a strict no-phone-zone. This is not a place for selfies or showing the outside world anything.
Privacy and discretion is paramount. Unlike Vegas, what happens here actually stays here. There is a certain sense of liberation when you know nobody is taking pictures. "Anything goes, but communicate", is Kit Kat's protocol.
And communicate people do. I sense no creepy, or I'm better-than-you energy. People are as friendly as Dina said they would. Naked Christmas party indeed.
Sasha gives us the kinky-MTV Cribs tour. There's the main dance floor featuring psychedelic artwork. A DJ playing proper hard-hitting techno to a mass of people lost in movement. The next room has more techno....and a fire breathing dragon. Dragon room woooo! There's the disco room for the non-techno enthusiasts.
There's a dungeon for....dungeony type things.
Throughout there are dark secluded private-ish spaces for people doing.....dark secluded private-ish type things. Next there's...wait a fucking second...an indoor swimming pool?! Yes. There's back-yard sized swimming pool (with a swing in the middle) flanked by low key cabanas. The music is quiet here. People lounge and mingle (amongst other things).
So THIS is what tomate pizza is. I'm shocked. I'm amazed. I'm baffled. I'm thrilled. But most surprisingly....I'm comfortable. Outside I felt ridiculous. Inside I didn't.
I suppose when everyone is naked, no one is naked.
I could conclude Kit Kat is a stimulant-fueled den of debauchery filled with peak-experience-seeking pleasure-junkies escaping the tedium of office jobs, taxes and furniture shopping. I could say this a nihilistic surrendering to carnal excess. I think I'd be on the dart board, but far from it's center. This is not the only place where people can hyper-stimulate their senses.
What is it about THIS place? Why do people wait in line to potentially get in here, of all places?
Nearby I notice a statue of Dionysus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and techno (I presume).
Berlin clubs are a Dionysian cult, I remember Dina saying.
Now that I was inside it started to click. I could see things in another light.
Here the façade of ordinary life melts away. The monkey mind quiets down and a repressed inner spirit shines through. Bodies turn into translation vehicles for entrancing music. The dance floor becomes a group meditation guided by a shamanic DJ. People run wild with raw expression, exploration and connect in honest ways unthinkable in the outside world.
Maybe this is not an escape from, but an escape to a place...more....dare I say....sacred? Enlightenment through pleasure? Connection through excess? Is this a den of madness, or is it a temple?
Would Dina still be a depressed-tech-worker? Would she have rediscovered her artistic calling had she not found herself on dance floor of one of these clubs?
I don't know.
Our tour ends. Sasha grabs a leather whip and departs. Lina and I grab a drink, sit down and begin processing.
I used have social anxiety, I confess.
Oh really? Interesting....Lina responds.
We share and reflect. It was like a brief and impromptu therapy session. Totally ordinary save for our surroundings.
But it was time for my monkey mind to quiet. I wasn't here to spectate and muse. I was here to participate.
Line and I split and go off on our own adventures.
Here I consider it necessary and proper to apply a thin layer of abstraction to allow your imagination to fill in any blanks. I will say I did nothing contextually unusual. I danced. I made friends. I received kind hospitality and shrunk my "never have I ever" list. I did what I came to do. I explored.
Long past sunrise Lina and I find each other exhausted and exhilarated. We share our stories and depart.
Time, logistics, and physical limitations meant this would be my only venture into Berlin's club scene on this trip.
It was a brief, but strong dose, and everything I could have ever asked for.
Would I go back? Absolutely.
Berlin was so wonderfully alive, so charged with a strange electricity. Till I went to Berlin I'd never seen a bar. There were costume parties in private apartments with flighty costumes that bared a lot of skin, and there were wild goings on. All pretty loose to our way of thinking [...] For us it was the freedom we wanted and needed. Vicki Baum, C. 1928.
Art
I was done clubbing, but I wasn't done with Berlin. In fact, after Kit Kat I wasn't even done for the day. I couldn't stop. Not because of any external stimulants (I stayed sober), but because I had to check out of my Airbnb in a few hours.
I rush home, shower, and get an inadequate amount of sleep. I wake up, leave, but realize I can't check into my next room for another few hours.
What would I do and with what energy?
Museums! Museums were just about the only thing I had energy for. I was going to reach deep into the depths of my body and scrape away whatever energy I could to make Museum day happen. The show goes on!
Berlin is a proper European city. It doesn't just have museums, it has a museum fucking island lodged in the center of the city. I initiated an energy-concious museum rampage.
I toured exhibitions on Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Angela Merkel, and Paul Gauguin. I saw the Pergamon, a miraculous collection of works and mammoth structures uh.....relocated......from ancient cities in the middle east. In the Altes I time travelled to ancient Greece and Rome. The National gallery teleported me to 19th and 20th century Germany. At the Gemäldegalerie I paid tribute to the old masters such as Monet, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Bosch and Caravaggio.
I finish at The Jewish Museum. It's charged with a dark somber energy. I tour Jewish history and their experiences during in Nazi times. It's the heaviest museum I've ever experienced.
By the end of the day I was a satisfied wreck. I check into my hostel plug my human battery into the mattress.
I wake up recharged, but my Berlin marathon is taking it's toll. I'm sore and achy, but I'm on a mission. I would not stop. I brush my teeth, put my shoes on, and head back out.
Yesterday was about the old world. Today was for today's art scene. The glorious thing about Berlin's street art scene is that it's everywhere and free for anyone to see. Some of it is trashy, as street art often is. Some of it is surreal. Turn a corner and you'll find grand multi-story masterpieces on ordinary residential towers.
Most cities have THAT part of town. It's the cheap-shitty-post-industrial-abandoned-building-part-of-town. Artists and creatives flock in. They do artsy creative stuff. Coffee shops and music venues arrive. Art galleries, boutique shops, and of wealthier-than-artists people come and make things prettier.
That's not part of Berlin. That IS Berlin.
There's no better symbol than the East Side Gallery, a giant chunk of the Berlin wall. It's long film-strip of wildly colorful murals.
People still take pictures in front of the Fraternal Kiss, the one where Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker are making out.
Dina invites me to hang out. She's the kind of person you drop your plans for. We enjoy a classic European-street-café brunch and head to Treptower Park.
In the middle there's the Soviet War Memorial commemorating Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin. It's weird seeing a a place memorializing it's own conquest. But Berlin tells the truth.
This is what happened.
It's a serene park with manicured trees and big open spaces. Stone reliefs quoting Joseph Stalin line the edges. It's peaceful, but there is a haunting energy in the air.
We sit and reflect.
Dina, a Russian Jew, and me, the son of Cuban immigrants, are in our own ways born from the ripple affects that took place in this park. It was one of those rare moments in life, like an eclipse, where time and space align to form a brief moment of perfect serenity.
If you think this is cool....she teases.
Dina hauls me to Holzmarkt 25. Immediately I'm blown away. It's complex built on a former wasteland along the Spree River. Murals cover every inch of every wall. There's food stalls, bars, river-front lounge space, a night club, a music school, a coffee shop, boutique shops, guest-houses, and even a fine dining restaurant. Their website calls it a "collectively organized urban district". I have nothing to compare it to.
In any other city this would have been leveled and replaced with luxury retail shops and/or condos and/or class A office space topped with a bar offering 15 euro mojitos. But this is Berlin, and this is not that. We grab sushi and beer and lounge by the river as boats float by.
I've been here 7 years and still love it, Dina says. Berlin is such a special place.
I sense how she feels about Berlin is how I feel about Austin.
All travelers should find their Dina, someone someone kind, generous, and excited enough to show you the deeper essence of a city. I am beyond grateful.
We part ways for the last time on this trip. She has techno painting apostles to recruit.
I was tired. It was late in the afternoon, but I still had gas in the tank. The mission continues. I train an hour west to Teufelsberg. My handy-dandy Point-of-Interest Map tells me it's one of the largest parks built on rubble with good sunset views. I'm a sucker for sunsets and parks built on rubble.
I hike a half hour to the middle of the park and find a man sitting inside a makeshift toll booth.
8 euro please. Uh....what? I didn't know I'd have to pay for this. This was obviously not city-sanctioned. YOU MUST PAY, a graffiti'd sign nearby says.
Uh.....ok...sure.....whatever.
I hand the money over and walk on. Around the corner I see a see multi-story mural on the side an abandoned building. Next to it there's an archway with a mechanical iguana perched on top.
The fuck did I just walk into?
I see more buildings and more murals. World class street art covers everything. Grass grows wild. I decide against climbing a makeshift treehouse. Inside a building there's broken beer bottles, cheap graffiti, ripped couches and steel beams hanging from the ceiling.
This looks safe, I mutter to myself.
This is the post-apocalyptic anarchical party-zone all semi-rebellious teenagers dream about. Free space. No rules. No parents. Unlimited art. The main building has four stories. Each is covered in stunning murals. There's hundreds of them! I wander and wander, amazed. I stairwell to the roof. There are two giant spheres flanking a long cylindrical structure.
It's a giant architectural cock and balls.
What the fuck is this place? I ask the first person I see. Oh, this was the old American listening station.
Oh, you mean SPY station.
Let me paint this for you. Deep in West Berlin's largest park on it's highest peak is an abandoned American spy station situated in a giant dick overlooking and overhearing the entire city. On the base of the shaft there's a American flag mural with lyrics from Team America, World Police.
America! Fuck yeah!
Coming again to save the motherfuckin day, yeah!
Freedom is the only way, yeah!
In my imagination I teleport to the past. I see a cold-war-era clean-shaven spotless-pressed-white-shirt-and-tie wearing bottle-glassed-sporting government-worker elevatoring up to the tip of this shaft, nestling into his desk, sipping of his sugarless black coffee, putting on his headphones and calling out to his colleagues:
LET'S HEAR WHAT THESE COMMIE BASTARDS ARE UP TO TODAY!
I've never been more proud to be an American.
I wander for hours. It's an infinite playground of wildly creative murals and installations.
In Berlin I went to galleries housing works from history's best painters and museums storing multi-thousand year old structures. I stumbled into an hyper-futuristic artificial-intelligence-generated art exhibition inside an old warehouse. I saw the Berlin Wall reborn into a gallery.
Nothing compared to this.
Paris has the Louvre. Madrid, the Prado.
Berlin has Teufelsberg.
End
My time in Berlin was ending. A week of frantic non-stop adventuring drained all the energy I had. I saw and did so much, but scratched only the surface. But I was done. I had a life to return to. I had friends to catch up with and projects to resume.
Berlin was one of those rare moments where reality surpassed fantasy. I fell in love.
I saw a city that tells it's truth and shows it's scars. I saw cafe's next to mass graves and destroyed buildings neighboring new ones. I toured air-raid-bunkers and countless monuments of evil. I strolled mountains of rubble turned into parks and galleries. I tasted the world. I painted in studios and boogied in a sexy techno temple. I befriended entrepreneurs, alchemists, historians, seekers, and weirdos.
In Berlin I saw a monument to darkness and light. I glimpsed it's destruction, imagined it's division, and felt it's healing. I saw a brand new 800 year old city.
I heard a city whisper This is what happened. This is where we are going.
In a city such as Berlin, a stranger would be guilty of a crime against himself and good taste if he did not register all of it's curiosities. Friedrich Engels, c. 1870
If that is true, then I hereby plead innocent.
Resources
The Berlin Point of Interest Map
History
Dan Carlin’s Ghosts of the Ostfront Series
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
A Berlin Diary - William Shirer
End of A Berlin Diary - William Shirer
Music
Techno Painting with Dina Schneider