The Long Goodbye
Two publications ran their eulogies for Berlin in the same week, and neither of them was wrong. Rolling Stone published a piece on Berghain—the club everyone’s heard of and most people will never get into—that doubled as an obituary for the city’s techno scene, cataloguing the slow erosion of what made it work: gentrification, tourism, the steady closure of smaller venues, the arrival of money where money used to be the enemy. The New York Times went further and suggested Berlin had stopped being Berlin at all, had become instead an annex of Brooklyn—same music, same conversations, same slightly guilty internationalism, just with cheaper beer and easier access to cocaine.
Tobias Rapp, who wrote Lost and Sound, the closest thing to a canonical text on Berlin’s club culture, had a characteristically uncomfortable diagnosis: A big factor in this problem are the Berliners themselves. The local techno scene is completely irrelevant to them, and their arrogance is totally misplaced.
Which sounds harsh until you’ve actually spent time there, and then sounds like a compliment that arrived too late.
The mechanics of the collapse are familiar enough. Rising visitor numbers from London, New York, and San Francisco don’t just mean drunk tourists lying in the parks—they mean the globalization of an aesthetic that was built specifically against globalization. Prices go up. Rents go up. The people who made the scene possible have to work more, party less, or leave. The things that made it cheap and strange and permissive are exactly the things that attracted the money that is now killing them.
Michael Ladner, who ran the Janus party series, explained the appeal in a way that also explained the problem: Young New Yorkers can’t cope with the stress of their city. In Berlin you don’t have that fear. No matter where you go or who you’re with, you always feel like it’s okay. You just have a good time.
The tragedy is that this sense of ease—the feeling that you couldn’t make a wrong move, that the night would absorb whatever you brought to it—was a product of specific conditions that were already ending when people started noticing them. You can’t export that feeling. You can only use it up.
Gawker declared it finished and asked the obvious next question: what comes after? The comments section couldn’t agree. Prague. Edinburgh. Somewhere in Asia. The answer, I suspect, is that there isn’t a next Berlin, because the conditions that produced it were partly accidental and partly historical and won’t be replicated. A city with that much empty space, that permissive a legal culture, that cheap, that close to multiple national capitals, that loaded with a particular post-Wall mythology—there isn’t another one of those waiting to be discovered. There are just cities.
Anyone still spending their weekends between Berghain and the KitKatClub in early 2014 was living somewhere that had probably already passed its peak—not that this made the nights worse, necessarily. Some of the best parties happen after the legend has started to curdle. But you could feel the shift. The magic was becoming product. The scene was becoming content. And the people who’d been there from the beginning were already a little tired of explaining why it used to be different.