How the Bunker Became Sacred

Mats Wurnell, a Swedish music journalist based in Stockholm who covers electronic music and club culture, wrote a book called Berghain: The World’s Most Legendary Techno Club. The subtitle flirts with the kind of superlative that usually signals nothing, but in this case it’s arguably defensible. Berghain occupies a category by itself.

The origin story, traced in Wurnell’s longform piece and in the book itself, begins in the late 1990s with two Berlin promoters—Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann—running a gay club called Snax through a series of temporary spaces. In 1998 they landed somewhere permanent: an industrial courtyard in Friedrichshain, in what had been East Berlin, inside a former factory where trains used to be repaired. Grey, cavernous, built for machinery and indifferent to human comfort. They renamed it Ostgut and began drawing crowds that were both gay and straight, which meant something in that city at that moment. Then on January 4, 2003, they threw a farewell party and closed.

What came after—the years of searching, the conversion of a former heating plant on the Spree into what eventually became Berghain, the mythology that grew up around the door policy, the dark room, the Funktion-One system doing things to your sternum that ordinary speakers don’t—Wurnell documents all of it without making the mistake of trying to explain it. Correct move. Berghain works partly because of what it refuses, and any framework that tries to reduce that to a lesson comes out wrong.

I went once. You wait in a line and genuinely don’t know if you’re getting in, and then you’re in, and the light and the bass and the hour of night are doing something to your body that you won’t have language for afterward. The book doesn’t replicate that—nothing does—but it traces the decisions and accidents and stubbornness that made the place possible. Turns out that’s the story I actually wanted.