Complaining About Tourists After Having Been There Twice

There was a Tumblr called Just Berghain Things that tried to capture the specific texture of the experience in short fragments—the wanting, the queuing, the being inside, the consequences of being inside. Posts like "Trying to walk on Keta." "Finally being able to pee." "Complaining about tourists after having been there twice." That last one is the most accurate thing written about club culture in years.

Berghain, for anyone who has somehow avoided the decade of mythology, is a Berlin techno club in a converted power plant that runs from Saturday through Monday morning without stopping, sometimes longer, with a door policy so opaque and deliberately arbitrary that being turned away has become a rite of passage rather than a rejection. People queue for hours in the cold. They practice their outfits. They study body language, eye contact, the precise calibration of not-caring. Entire guides have been written about how to get past a single man named Sven, who has achieved a level of cultural authority that most gallery curators can only dream of.

And once you’re in—if you’re in—the problems just change register. You’re on the wrong substance at the wrong time. Your phone has no signal and everyone looks the same in the dark. The sound system is doing something to your internal organs that you won’t finish processing until midweek. The bathrooms are a philosophy problem you lack the equipment to solve.

What the Tumblr understood, underneath the jokes, is that none of this is ironic. People genuinely love it. They go back. They queue again the following weekend, get turned away again, go home and feel somehow like participants in something real. The club has managed to externalize its entire mythology onto the people orbiting it, which means the mythology has grown larger than the club itself. Whatever is actually happening inside on any given Sunday morning is almost beside the point.

I’ve never been. This feels relevant to mention.