After Hours

I arrived in Berlin in the summer of 2007 and had no idea what I was doing. The city felt like it was on fire in a way that made sense at night and nowhere else. Bar 25, Scala, Knaack—clubs you’d hear about from other people, never from any official source. You’d show up because someone told you to, and the night would become something you couldn’t have predicted.

The clubs weren’t trying to be anything but loud and dark and alive. They felt like they’d stolen their energy from New York and London and Amsterdam all at once and run it through Berlin’s particular kind of collapse. The kids who’d been dressing in black downtown were becoming something sharper, something meaner, something hungrier. I was nineteen and I thought the nights would just keep going like that forever.

Years later there’s a YouTube series called After Hours that films this exact moment. Not as art, not as analysis—just as archive. Berghain, Watergate, Club der Visionäre caught on camera doing what they did. People dancing, people drinking, people becoming someone else in the dark. Watching it now is strange because I don’t recognize myself in it, but I feel myself in it.

The series doesn’t capture what it was like, not really. But it holds the shape of it—nights that felt infinite, hunger that made sense, the belief that the dark could sustain you. You can’t go back. You wouldn’t want to. But sometimes you want to sit in the room where the feeling lived and just remember.