The Berlin Before the Brand

Everyone who was in Berlin before you was in a better Berlin. You learn this fast. The clubs were rawer, the parties lasted longer, the city hadn’t figured out yet that it was supposed to be a destination. By 1997 standards, the mid-2010s were already tourist-poisoned. By 1997 standards, basically everything since has been a decline.

I hold that nostalgia at arm’s length—I wasn’t there. But I can watch the footage. Arte aired the very first episode of its culture program Tracks on March 14, 1997, and the subject was the East Berlin club scene—which, by that point, had already become the center of gravity for European techno. The Tresor in particular had spent the post-unification years building something genuine out of the ruins of a former department store, the kind of place that works precisely because nothing was designed. The footage captures that. The darkness, the concrete, the fact that the music was the whole point and the lighting was an afterthought.

The Matrix gets a mention too—newly opened in Friedrichshain, already famous for its high-tech infrastructure, including a computer-controlled tap system. The documentary treats this as a marvel. By current standards it sounds like a punchline, but in 1997 the idea that a club was running serious technology felt transgressive, like the machine had come to dance.

What hits me watching it now is how provisional everything looks. Not primitive—provisional. Like nobody had decided yet what Berlin was going to be, so the clubs filled the uncertainty with volume and heat and darkness. The city hadn’t branded itself. The clubs were a secret that kept getting told to more people, but slowly enough that the secret still felt real.

That period ended. It had to. The footage is proof that it existed, which is more than most moments get.