Article

EPD: Society and Space

2022, Vol. 40(3) 451–468
Berghain: Space, affect, and ! The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/02637758221096463
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Johan Andersson
King’s College London, UK

Abstract
In this article, I think of Berlin’s techno club Berghain as a form of relational aesthetics where
encounters mediated by tactile sounds, labyrinthine architecture, and libido-enhancing drugs
create an unusually porous sexual subjectivity. By sketching out some changes in the composition
of the club’s crowd and drug culture – a shift towards aphrodisiac substances such as G and
mephedrone – I argue that Berghain has become a specific pharmacolibidinal constellation.
Especially the recreational drug G can be thought of as an unruly liquid that concretises queer
theory’s preoccupation with sexual fluidity. Instead of nausea-inducing drugs in combination with
same-sex erotica – a popular technique in so-called ‘aversion therapy’ – this is a ‘gay conversion
therapy’ in reverse whereby erotic horizons expand and multiply through the combination of
chemicals and a multi-sensory overload of pleasurable stimuli. Rather than thinking of sexual
orientation as located inside the body, I suggest, we might think of it as located inside the building.

Keywords
Queer, Berlin, sexuality, clubs, art, drugs

Introduction
Renowned for its austere techno, industrial architecture, and clean sound system, Berlin’s
techno club Berghain has often been treated with the same reverence as fine art. After a
successful court case with Berlin-Brandenburg in 2016, it was recategorised as an arts venue
and taxed at the same rate as an opera house or museum, while during the Covid-19 pan-
demic, the club turned into a gallery for the Boros Foundation’s Studio Berlin exhibition. In
normal times, events take place regularly in different parts of the sprawling building every
week: concerts in Halle and Kantine, fetish-themed nights in Lab, the male-only adjacent
wing of the ground floor, experimental music in S€aule, house and disco in Panoramabar, but
the big weekly event is Klubnacht when the three main floors are open. Klubnacht, which

Corresponding author:
Johan Andersson, King’s College London, London, UK.
Email: [email protected]
452 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

starts at midnight on Saturday and builds up towards its crescendo – the final ‘closing’ set
that normally ends around noon on Monday – can be approached as an immersive site-
specific artwork. More specifically, it can be thought of as an example of relational aes-
thetics (Bourriaud, 2002), the type of open-ended interactive art that prioritises encounters
over detached spectatorship, which evolved in the same period as Berlin’s post-wall club
scene in the 1990s and early 2000s. Some of the artists most closely associated with this
paradigm – Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, whose banner ‘MORGEN IST DIE FRAGE’
adorned Berghain’s front façade during the pandemic – featured in the Studio Berlin exhi-
bition underlining its affinity with the club.
While relational aesthetics was quickly dismissed by some as ‘arty party’ (Foster, 2003:
22), the notion that parties – at least of a certain kind – can be considered an art form has
gained traction. Art critic J€org Heiser (2018: 177) thinks of ‘the club as a place in which
certain marginalised forms of artistic and social expression – queer culture, for example –
can be lived out, displayed, and experienced’ but also as ‘a kind of art form in itself – be it a
pointed minimalism or a baroque Gesamtkunstwerk.’ In a text specifically on the biannual
male-only fetish party Snax that takes place in Berghain, Luis-Manuel Garcia (2019: 75, 89)
also makes the comparison with the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Perhaps it was Roland
Barthes (2010: 145) who first, after a visit to the Parisian disco Le Palace in 1978, saw ‘the
appearance of a new art . . . that is achieved among the public and not in front of it, and a
total art (the old Greek and Wagnerian dream), where scintillation, music, and desire unite’.
Le Palace, Barthes argued (2010: 128), should not be viewed simply as a ‘business, but
a work and . . . those who conceived it can rightfully consider themselves artists.’ While
the owners of Berghain (Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele) have never agreed to
be interviewed, the only quote attributed to them – from a review of the opening of
Panoramabar in 2004 by DJ Daniel Wang – ‘stated that they wanted to create a club as
a work of art’. If we take them at their words and think of Berghain not only as an exhi-
bition or performance space, but as a relational artwork, then the encounters it fosters must
be evaluated as part of the overall aesthetic experience.
At the height of the debates about relational aesthetics and in the same year as Berghain
opened, Claire Bishop (2004: 52, 66) argued for relational art that foregrounds friction and
unease through encounters between fractured and incomplete subjects: ‘the presence of what
is not me’, she wrote, ‘renders my identity precarious and vulnerable, and the threat that the
other represents transforms my own sense of self into something questionable’. It is this
unstable subjectivity, changeable through the affective presence of others, that is most
interesting in relation to the unpredictable encounters that take place in Berghain.
Initially, a predominantly gay club with roots in the male fetish party Snax, the crowd
has become more mixed over the years and in the words of music journalist Alexis Waltz
(2010: 131) constitutes a ‘special social constellation in which all party-goers come together
under the hegemony of Berlin’s gay community’. According to Waltz (2013), the overt
sexuality in Berghain’s predecessor Ostgut (1999–2003) was ‘more or less to the irritation’
of straight visitors, but by the time Berghain opened, distinctions between straight and gay
sexual behavior had already become less obvious: a review from early 2005 noted the
unusual social mix of the ‘fetish club style darkrooms where hetero couples are to be
found (or groped) alongside their homo counterparts’ (Burns, 2005). In this sense,
Berghain was a realisation of Michel Foucault’s (1994: 165–66) ideal of an avant-gardist
gay culture ‘that invents ways of relating . . . that are, at certain points, transferable to
heterosexuals’. But beyond transferring relational models from one group to another,
mixed sex-positive clubs are also ideal spaces for encounters not predetermined by previous
erotic trajectories and identifications. The proximity to other bodies in confined spaces
Andersson 453

overflowing with surplus libido, tactile sounds, and empathy-enhancing drugs can create an
environment in which sexual categorisation is temporarily transcended.
In her recurring critiques of the limitations of identity politics, Elizabeth Grosz (1995:
227) has argued for a move away from what the body is – an analytical and political
emphasis she believes encourages repetition over experimentation – in favour of what the
body can do, defining sexuality as ‘fundamentally provisional, tenuous, mobile, igniting in
unpredictable contexts with often unsettling effects’. Or as she puts it elsewhere: ‘One’s
sexuality is contained in the next sexual encounter, rather than in the synthesis of all
one’s past sexual activities’ (Grosz, 2005: 213). In clubs, specifically, Gilbert Caluya
(2008: 288–290) has argued, desire (‘the impersonal, material, affective flow that connects
bodies’) can overcome sexuality (‘the representation of these desires, the overcoding of these
flows’) when we ‘allow ourselves to be swept up by desire to see where it leads us’. While
Caluya’s argument is about the overcoding of racial sexual hierarchies, a short think piece
by Alexander Lambevski (2004: 304–307) uses ethnographic vignettes to make similar points
about how sexual orientation can become fluid in club settings. He refers to such encounters
as ‘unpredictable microsocial sexual rearrangements’ that pose ‘serious epistemological
challenges’ to how we think of ‘sexuality as a subject position’, suggesting instead a
‘coming together of many elements (music, lights, probable chemicals, the intersubjective
play of affects among people)’. In the following discussion of this unpredictable sexuality in
Berghain, I want to add spatial dimensions such as architecture and landscape to the affec-
tive mix, while also drawing attention to the role played by specific substances such as G and
mephedrone.
Unlike Caluya and Lambevski’s explicit deployment of autoethnography, my account is
centred on an eclectic range of already circulating materials about Berghain including jour-
nalism, literature, scholarship, photographs, art exhibited inside the club, drawings of the
crowd, memes, social media, and paraphernalia. These representations have contributed to
the myth of the club, which, in turn, likely influences behaviour since the recurring tropes
about hedonistic excess create a set of expectations that visitors try to fulfil. Implicitly, my
account is also informed by personal observations: I have been to Berghain many times over
a 17-year period between 2005 and 2022 although rarely thought of these visits as research.
Therefore, no archive of field notes as such exists, but hopefully a cumulative and longitu-
dinal sense of how the club and its subculture has evolved. Indeed, a key argument I want to
make is that the increasingly mixed crowd in Klubnacht in combination with changes in the
drug culture – pharmacological advancements such as Viagra and PrEP, but also a shift
towards aphrodisiac substances such as G and mephedrone – have created a specific phar-
macolibidinal constellation that returned gay male culture to the abandon of the pre-AIDS
era, while also inviting people who normally identify with different orientations to partic-
ipate. Apart from highlighting a pattern or grouping of interconnected things (people,
chemicals, sounds, etc.), the term constellation, as it is deployed here, suggests an interdis-
ciplinary way of reading that draws on disparate sources and concepts to study cultural
formations (Chisholm, 2005).
By focusing primarily on the sexual aspect, I might give the impression that Berghain is a
sex club, which would be misleading: it is a dance club with a sex-positive ethos where some
people have sex and others don’t while the long opening hours mean people’s priorities
fluctuate throughout the day and night. Moreover, the emphasis on sexual fluidity will
perhaps imply that the identity affiliations of the outside world simply evaporate inside
Berghain, which would be an overstatement: anecdotally, among friends and acquaintances
I have talked to, some have said that they never end up in sexual situations with anyone
outside their normal gender preference whereas others say that they do. While these
454 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

differing experiences perhaps suggest a spectrum (like the Kinsey scale, for example), I am
less interested in measuring past sexual experience than in what Jason Lim (2007: 64) has
called ‘an autonomous sexuality that embraces the potentials offered by events to come’.
For those who allow themselves to be ‘swept up’, Klubnacht can be a ‘conversion therapy’ in
reverse: instead of nausea-inducing drugs in combination with same-sex erotica – a popular
technique in so-called ‘gay aversion therapy’ – erotic horizons expand and multiply through
the combination of chemicals and a multi-sensory overload of pleasurable stimuli. Since this
sexuality is specific to the event, we might think of sexual orientation as located inside the
building instead of inside individual bodies.
The experience, however, already begins in the romantic ‘terrain vague’ that surrounds
the club. In the words of novelist Peter Schneider (2014: 132), ‘Berghain sits there like a dark
castle on an island. To reach it, you have to swim across a black ocean.’

The exterior and the landscape

Seen from a distance, Berghain’s heavy rectangular three-floored façade has, for many,
become a Berlin landmark as easily recognisable as the Reichstag or Brandenburg Gate.
Reproduced on unofficial paraphernalia (memes, tote bags, postcards, posters, a mock Lego
set, the ‘Bergnein’ card game, or ‘Birdhain’ birdhouse, for example), the neoclassical sim-
plicity of its alternating pilasters and windows has an obvious appeal to graphic designers
and illustrators. Moreover, because the building is freestanding in an ostensibly ‘empty’
location, its rectangular shape can be fitted nicely into the frame of selfies and group photos
to communicate subcultural belonging on social media, but also to depict the building itself
as an object of desire. Indeed, in some respects, the devotion to the building resembles
Jennifer Terry’s (2010: 53) notion of ‘monument sexuality’: an orientation where the nor-
mative ‘libidinal reverence’ of ‘standing in awe’ in front of architectural monuments – like
on school trips and holidays – goes further and becomes a romantic investment. During the
pandemic, informal parties organised on Telegram took place immediately outside
Berghain’s entrance suggesting a strong attachment to the building even when the club
was shut.
Built in accordance with East Germany’s Sixteen Principles of Urbanism approved by the
Soviet Union, the ‘Fernheizwerk für die Stalinallee’ compound was constructed between
1953 and 1954 to supply heat and electricity for Stalinallee, the first stage of East Berlin’s
neoclassical flagship development (van der Gaag, 2014). Photos from the late 1950s show a
coal-powered power station with chimneys and a cooling tower, which have since been
removed. Abandoned in the 1980s, the ruined thermal station was converted into
Berghain in the early 2000s after its predecessor Ostgut, across the railway tracks, had
been forced to shut. Both Ostgut and Berghain were in wasteland locations – or the so-
called Stadtbrachen (Gandy and Jaspers, 2020) – characterised by spontaneous ruderal
vegetation. When the architects first visited the site in February 2003, a 1.5 metre birch
tree was growing inside the building and the surfaces were covered in moss and fern
(Cadenbach, 2019). Among the few circulated images of the club’s interiors is a short art
film of animals in the club called After Hours (K€ ohn and Kaminiak, 2012), reinforcing the
notion of Berghain as urban nature (Figure 1).
In his nature memoir about bisexuality, Out of the Woods, Luke Turner (2019: 208)
suggests the club has a unique ability to accommodate his ‘fluid sexuality’ (‘Just like forests,
Berghain knows no morality or rules’). This evocation of nature or wilderness as outside of
sexual binaries also informs Jack Halberstam’s (2020: 3) book Wild Things: The Disorder of
Desire where he writes of ‘a romantic wild, a space of potential’ that signals ‘simultaneously
Andersson 455

Figure 1. Still from After Hours (K€

ohn and Kaminiak, 2012).

a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorisation, unrestrained forms of embodiment,

the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable.’ In an idealised
sense, this ‘wild’ speaks both to how the club is perceived by many of its followers – ‘a wild
work of immersive art’ according to Liam Cagney (2020) – but also to the ‘unmonitored’
qualities of Berlin’s overgrown wasteland sites as ‘free space for all alternative lifestyles and
idiosyncrasies’ (Hausdorf, 2015: 17, 5). In memes and illustrations, Berghain has been
inserted into Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818),
highlighting the romantic connotations of the surrounding pseudo-wilderness (Figure 2).
If landscape is understood as ‘a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’
(Mitchell, 1994: 1–2), then Berlin’s informal Stadtbrachen have become spaces of self-
discovery and experimentation: a kind of ‘postindustrial neoromanticism’ in the context
of its techno scene (Garcia, 2016). Until it was dismantled and sold in smaller pieces in
2017, Piotr Nathan’s monumental mural of volcanic coastal countryside Rituals of
Disappearance in Berghain’s entrance hall underlined the club’s relationship with landscape
painting and provided a transition between the overgrown exterior vegetation and the
cavernous interior space.
In 2020, the introduction of manicured lawns, park benches, and foot paths altered the
landscape to the west of Berghain, but for the first 15 years of the club’s existence, it retained
some of these ‘wild’ romantic qualities with ruderal vegetation, disused railway tracks, and
graffiti-covered concrete structures. Yet even before the recent interventions, the landscape
was less spontaneous than it seemed: in 2006, the two-hectare site from the club to
Warschauer Straße had been given the name Wriezener Freiraum Labor (Wriezener Open
Space Laboratory) and received federal government funding as an experiment in participa-
tory planning (Tempel, 2013: 30). The naming of the park as a ‘laboratory’ suggests an
affinity with the fetish club on the ground floor of Berghain called ‘Lab.Oratory’ as well as
early discussions of relational aesthetics informed by ‘metaphors like “laboratory,”
“construction site”, and “art factory”’ (Bishop, 2004: 52). Instead of detached spectatorship
in institutional settings, these metaphors suggested an unfinished aesthetic encouraging
informal encounters.
The ‘construction site’/‘art factory’ paradigm’s embrace of postindustrial ruins also con-
forms to what architect and writer Martti Kalliala (2016) has referred to as club culture’s
456 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

Figure 2. Telekom Electronic Beats (https://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/7-reasons-everyone-go-tech

no-club-alone-least/).

‘general aesthetic disposition bordering on a fetish toward ready-made, found space: a kind
of nomadic architettura povera’. Berghain was strictly speaking not architettura povera: the
large-scale conversion required significant capital investment and by conforming to health
and safety regulations from the beginning represented a professionalisation of Berlin’s
techno culture. Yet the conversion aimed to preserve the raw industrial character of the
building at a time when Berlin’s clubs were moving in a sleek direction of shiny surfaces and
outward-looking panoramic windows: Watergate, which opened in 2002, had floor-
to-ceiling windows facing the river Spree, while Weekend in Haus des Reisens, the former
German Democratic Republic (GDR) travel bureau, which opened in 2005, had panoramic
dancefloors on the 12th and 15th floors as well as a rooftop bar overlooking Alexanderplatz.
There was something of the ‘sky bar’ about these venues: a bling Manhattanised aesthetic
removed from the ruinous grit for which Berlin had become renown in the 1990s. Berghain
and its predecessor Ostgut, breaking with the dominant global homonormative interior
design themes at the time (Andersson, 2019: 3003–3004), instead returned to a dark intro-
spective ideal of club space, which achieved an added mysterious lure because it was difficult
to access and forbidden to photograph.
In the era of mass digital reproduction, Berghain has protected its ‘aura’ by a strictly
enforced photo ban inside the building. Apart from some brightly lit photographs of the
empty interiors on the architects’ webpage and the art film of animals inside the club, very
little photographic documentation is publicly available. While scale models such as Philip
Topolovac’s I’ve Never Been to Berghain (2016) have been exhibited in art galleries and
attempts have been made to emulate its interior in TV dramas such as Amazon’s crime series
Beat (2018), visual depictions during club events exist mainly as drawings. Above all, rep-
resentations of Berghain’s interior often exist only in written form. According to an over-
view of early 21st century German literature, ‘Berghain even initiated a distinctive literary
genre’ with several novels set in and around the club while journalistic coverage, popular
and academic scholarship, as well as various blog entries devoted to its mystique prolifer-
ated (Krass and Wold, 2017: 201). This mystique or ‘aura’ was aided and preserved by the
club’s notoriously selective door policy and long queue.
Andersson 457

On the weekends, the queue becomes a human extension of Berghain’s concrete

architecture. In line with the idea of the club as an interactive artwork, its celebrity doorman
Sven Marquardt has rejected the bouncer title in favour of ‘curator’ arguing that his job is to
create the right selection of personalities (Kulish, 2011). While selectivity on the door is
nothing new – early New York discos were membership clubs for licencing purposes, but
also to control the door, while raves in hidden locations were ‘word by mouth’, and clubs
before the internet often used targeted flyering – Berghain’s rejection ratio is unusually high,
and the choreography of the queue is especially brutal. Rejection – typically communicated
through a dismissive hand gesture without verbal interaction – is followed by a ‘walk of
shame’ in full view of the main line and the shorter guest list/re-entry queue. Apologists for
Berlin’s door policies, however, have referred to them as ‘almost egalitarian’ (Hausdorf,
2015: 30) and ‘radically democratic’ (Rapp, 2010: 144) because subcultural capital trumps
both monetary and social capital (anecdotes about celebrities turned away from Berghain
abound). In an egalitarian sense, the conformist dominance of black clothes in the queue
involves a ‘putting on of impersonality’ (Harvey, 1995: 257) although certain types of eccen-
tricity and flamboyance are also rewarded: subcultural capital largely overlaps with ‘queer
capital’ since it is assumed that looking like a sexual minority improves one’s chances to get
in. The advice to not look too straight, however, has typically not led men to ‘camp it up’,
but more often to adopt a hyper-masculine look epitomised by the harness and gym-
sculptured pecs, while women frequently wear latex, rubber, and see-through fishnets to
communicate ‘kink’. The door policy, in this regard, tests familiarity with sexual subcultures
and gauges openness to sexual exploration.
Most who are refused entry to Berghain accept rejection, but there can be outbursts of
socially awkward shouting and crying while the absence of any clear explanation for rejec-
tion tends to trigger debates about inclusion and exclusion (Moore, 2018: 125). In this
respect, the queue almost resembles an ‘antagonistic’ relational artwork aimed at causing
uncomfortable friction (Bishop, 2004: 34): the spectacle of rejection becomes a collective
‘acting out’ of rave culture’s broader ‘tension between esoteric snobbery on the one hand,
and attempts to transcend social hierarchy on the other’ (Saldanha, 2007: 65). The two
principal purposes of the club’s door policy, however, are to preserve its identity as a
subcultural space in an era of mass tourism and to create a sense of exclusivity. Both
aims are fraught with charges of discrimination since any system of separating ‘insiders’
from ‘outsiders’ based entirely on visual criteria is prone to prejudice. Yet, for those who get
in, the post-adrenaline relief can translate into an ‘anything goes’ form of collective abandon
while the subcultural belonging created by the selective door promotes an affiliation with
gay male culture regardless of sexual identity.

The crowd and the space

Descriptions of the crowd in Berghain fall into three sometimes overlapping categories:
(1) accounts of the club as a predominantly masculine space in which other groups are
welcome but remain numerically and culturally in a minority; (2) classifications of the
crowd into distinct cultural and sexual ‘types’; and (3) a more idealistic tendency in which
the various subtypes morph into a queer whole where the sexual difference and identity
markers of the outside world are temporarily erased.
In the first category, even celebratory accounts of Berghain can be ambivalent about the
expressions of masculinity seen to dominate. Waltz’s (2010: 131) description of a ‘special
social constellation in which all party-goers come together under the hegemony of Berlin’s
gay community’ hints at a hegemonic masculinity others have been critical of explicitly. The
458 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

short film Hyper Masculinity on The Dancefloor (Davasse and Busse, 2015) specifically
associates certain sections of the crowd with a politically uninformed masc-for-masc aes-
thetic while Liam Cagney (2019) covering its 15th birthday for Frieze magazine regretted
‘the macho dominance that occasionally appears in Berghain on a Sunday night’. Moreover,
Cagney highlighted the predominantly white male bookings of DJs while it has also been
suggested that the sound system on the main floor and acoustics of the concrete building
detach techno from its black roots by privileging music below 140 BPM (Gomez, 2020). In
the entrance hall, Norbert Bisky’s Vertigo (2017), a constellation of around 30 colourful
paintings of naked or sparsely dressed male teenagers in urban, lakeside, or camping settings
reinforces the notion of Berghain as a predominantly white masculine space. Socialist real-
ism has been mentioned as an influence, yet it is difficult to know if Bisky’s urban pastoral
scenes, which have also been accused of a ‘Leni-Riefenstahl-aesthetic’, should be understood
as idealisations of adolescent white masculinity or, more critically, as meta-comments on
such idealisations (Koerner von Gustorf, 2007). Overall, the exhibited art in the club has
tended to be by white male artists creating a jarring disjuncture with the demographic
composition of the crowd.
The second tendency is to subdivide the crowd into distinct sociological or sexual types.
Wang’s review of the opening of Panoramabar in 2004 includes a rough head count of
racialised minorities, a gender ratio, and descriptions of the fashion worn as well as refer-
ences to different gay tribes. A combination of society reporting, ‘thick’ ethnographic
description, and the sexologist’s fascination with the coexistence of different subgroups,
these descriptions have multiplied over the years with the writer-observer often taking on
the role of a scientist who proceeds to classify and subdivide the crowd. British writer Amy
Liptrot (2015), for example, compares Berghain’s dancefloor to Ernst Haeckel’s illustrative
studies of different aquatic species while Finnish artist Sampo H€anninen lends his drawings
of Berghain and Panoramabar a sociological aura by calling them ‘empiric studies’
(Figure 3). H€ anninen’s humorous illustrations of self-segregation with different groups
occupying different sections of the dancefloor still resonate but the boundaries have
become more porous since the drawings were made in 2011.
Finally, the third trope, often overlapping with the other two, idealistically suggests a
more open-ended sexuality. Frequently referenced in journalistic accounts of the club,
Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs in Panoramabar, replaced every five years, have served
a didactic purpose in this respect by encouraging a sexually open mindset. In the early years,
when Berghain was predominantly gay, Tillmans chose a large photograph of the lower
abdomen of a naked woman next to two of his abstract Freischwimmer pieces, while five
years later, when the crowd had become more mixed, the vagina was replaced with a close-
up of a male anus (five years later this was replaced with a gender-neutral throat and again
on the club’s 15th birthday in December 2019 with a gender-ambiguous photo of a hand
inside red underwear). In the book Berghain: Kunst im Klub, Tillmans is explicit about his
intentions (‘I wanted to broaden the perspective on sexuality’), but ultimately dismissive of
the ‘decorative’ function of visual art in clubs. Instead, the ‘atmosphere in a club is like art is
supposed to be’, while the architecture and lighting ‘creates a specific landscape’. Echoing
arguments about relational aesthetics, Tillmans suggests that encounters and interactions in
clubs put us in ‘a position to think about other possible ways of organizing the way we live’
(Schneider, 2015: 30–36).
In some accounts it is even suggested that Berghain turns the crowd queer. In Lost and
Sound: Berlin, Techno and the Easyjet Set, Tobias Rapp (2010: 155) notes how: ‘Somehow,
when you look around on a Sunday afternoon in Panoramabar, everyone’s a little queer’. At
the time of Rapp’s observation, Berghain’s closing happened in Panoramabar on Sundays
Andersson 459

Figure 3. Sampo H€anninen ‘Empiric studies’ (2011).

(whereas for many years now, both main dancefloors have stayed open until Monday)
implying perhaps that queer acclimatisation occurs gradually over time culminating shortly
before closing. However, since Rapp also argues that ‘it’s no longer clear what’s gay and
what isn’t, except for the actual sexual preference’ (as if ‘the actual sexual preference’ wasn’t
central to a definition of gay), his idea of the queer dancefloor does not seem to alter the
sexual orientation of the participants. Similarly, scholarly work on the erotic dynamics of
the dancefloor such as Tim Lawrence’s (2011: 231–234) analysis of the ‘queer potential’ of
the early New York disco the Loft’s ability to exceed ‘normative conceptions of straight and
gay sexuality’, ultimately sidelines sex by asserting that ‘intercourse . . . at the end of the
night was only exceptionally more than a secondary concern’. Yet in a sex-positive space
like Berghain, ‘intercourse’ is not a consideration for ‘the end of the night’, but takes place
460 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

continuously throughout the night and day, sometimes in unexpected constellations. Queer,
in this context, therefore, is not merely an umbrella term for sexual diversity and coexistence
but reclaims its parallel meaning as something ‘polymorphous, nonreproductive, pleasure-
seeking, compulsive, and unruly’ (de Lauretis, 2011: 248–249).
Seen from the top of the stairs to Panoramabar, the tightly packed crowd of nearly 500
barely dressed bodies on the main floor, can resemble an erupting lava field when the red
lights turn on intermittently. Journalistic accounts have sometimes described this sublime
unbounded mass as an erasure of clear distinctions between self and other or as a blurring of
gender lines. For Cagney (2019), Berghain is a ‘morphogenetic experience of overflowing
your bounds, becoming-animal, becoming-other’ while Matthew Collins (2018: 50), in his
travelogue Rave On, underlines how silhouettes in the darkness become gender-ambiguous:
‘male or female or maybe something else, and anyway who really cares in here?’ These
notions of Berghain as unbounded are clearly at odds with the parallel descriptions of
hegemonic masculinity, but they are not mutually exclusive: fluidity coexists with what
Arun Saldanha (2007: 5) refers to as ‘viscosity’, a stickier tendency of some bodies to
group together. Yet, what appears solid one moment, can easily through small shifts in
group constellations, music, and intoxicated affects, become permeable.
The reductive preoccupation with having a sexual ‘type’, which in crowded environments
easily becomes a screening process whereby desirability is disaggregated into a set of easily
identifiable attributes, is both reinforced and disrupted in Berghain. On the one hand, basic
gendered visual signs like female curves or sculpted male gym bodies are perhaps privileged in
an environment characterised by dimmed lights and loud volume (Amico, 2001: 364), yet at the
same time, in a club with a significant trans and non-binary following, these signs are not fixed.
Moreover, the semiotic disassociation of sexual signs and dress codes from their dominant
meanings – as, for example, when supposedly straight men wear leather harnesses – can be
bewildering. This straight appropriation of gay fetish wear, which in the first place was under-
stood as gay appropriations of straight macho signifiers, disrupts basic presumptions about
who is potentially sexually available for whom. At its worst, this can lead to a cliquey less
friendly dancefloor with self-segregation of the type depicted in H€anninen’s ‘empiric studies’
drawings or where boundary maintenance in the form of small demonstrative gestures or
microaggressions becomes an obstacle to the desired togetherness (Figure 3). However, there
are also moments when a range of factors fall into place – sound, heat, light, intoxication,
physical proximity – and these boundaries dissolve in ways that are genuinely porous.
The dancefloor is often hot contributing to what is already a long tradition at gay circuit
parties to dance topless, sometimes taken further in Berghain and other Berlin clubs where
nudity is accepted. While sweaty naked bodies in nightclubs can reinforce hegemonic mas-
culinity (Misgav and Johnston, 2014), the packed dancefloor can also be a place where
porosity is not merely a metaphor for disintegrating boundaries, but literally porous as
pores in the skin through which sweat pass between bodies and break down easy distinctions
between interiority and exteriority, oneself and others. Often, sexual activity spills over or
overflows from designated areas such as the darkrooms into the dancefloor suggesting that
both architectural and corporeal boundaries are leaky. Moreover, following Terry’s (2010:
41) ‘monument sexuality’, the libidinal attachment to Berghain’s architecture is not limited to
affectionate reproductions of its façade but involves tactile interactions with its surfaces.
The sensation of naked skin against the metal doors of the toilet cubicles, for example, often
coincides with the immediate erotic rush after taking drugs triggering sexual encounters
where the building itself could be said to possess erotic agency. Pressed against a concrete
wall dripping with condensation, the exchange of bodily fluids also includes fluids emanat-
ing from the architectural materials.
Andersson 461

In urban studies, the term porosity is associated with Walter Benjamin’s writings on leaky
physical and temporal boundaries in cities, but extends to subjectivity itself: for Benjamin,
‘“[p]orosity” means that the limits of the subject become flexible and contextually condi-
tioned’ (Melberg, 2005: 106). This context-specific subjectivity is perhaps what Martin
Zebracki (2016: 116) describes as ‘redefined in-betweenness’ with regards to his own sexu-
ality in auto-ethnographic notes from Berghain. If skin contact is the most obvious site of
porosity on the dancefloor, sounds are designed to encourage this tactility. In work on the
tactilisation of sound, Garcia (2015: 73) has argued that the sonic granularity of minimal
house and techno ‘speaks to the fluid and blurred social relations that arise on its dance-
floors – or, at least, to how that fluidity feels to those who participate in it’. Partly based on
ethnographic observations in Berghain, Garcia (2013) has also described this feeling of
‘vague togetherness’ as ‘liquid solidarity’. These two metaphors of fluidity and liquidity
have slightly different lineages – the former is associated with queer theory and the latter
with Zygmunt Bauman’s work on the ever-changing identities, mobilities and relationships
under ‘liquid modernity’ – but both suggest an anti-essentialist idea of sexuality, which is
neither fixed nor stable. For Bauman (1998: 22) eroticism after ‘the collapse of the
“panoptic” model of securing and perpetuating social order’ is flexible.
The panopticon’s antithesis is the labyrinth, which is also the most common spatial
typology deployed in relation to Berghain’s interior architecture in close competition with
‘cathedralesque’ (the 18-metre-high ceiling of the former turbine hall and the illuminated
coloured windows in the adjacent bar combine to create this cathedral-like effect) (Ku, 2018:
24). Outside the dancefloors, paths, stairways, a mezzanine, an ice-cream bar, darkrooms,
bars, seating areas, toilets, and a garden built of containers, create, at least on a first visit, a
labyrinthine impression. The interior has been described as an ‘Erm€ oglichungsarchitektur’,
an architecture that ‘enables’ various activities associated with physical pleasure and where
‘form and function’ are in ‘synthesis’ (Rüb and Ngo, 2011: 146). According to one of its
architects, Thomas Karsten, Berghain is designed ‘like a labyrinth’ where intoxicated people
react only ‘instinctively’ and ‘can discover a lot or get lost’ (Cadenbach, 2019). The photo
ban encourages temporary experimentation and the absence of mirrors even in the bath-
rooms aid in forgetting one’s everyday identity. While Berghain may be an orchestrated
version of the labyrinth from which one can eventually find one’s way out, for periods it is
also possible to stray off the path, and disappear into corners and cul-de-sacs.
In media reports that are often voyeuristic and titillating such as the well-researched
Rolling Stone article ‘Berghain: The secretive, sex-fueled world of techno’s coolest club’,
the labyrinthine characteristics of the building (‘so large and maze-like, you can discover
new stairways and rooms even after spending a few days in the club’) are directly linked with
its ability to facilitate sexual encounters (‘purpose-built not to have any dead ends, even in
the bathrooms, so people can cruise each other without running into a wall’) (Roger, 2014).
This ability is not unique to Berghain but has also been observed in other mixed sex-positive
clubs. In an interview, one of the founders of Gegen, a party in the equally large
KitKatClub, suggests an almost literal correlation between space and desire: the ‘enormous’
size of the club in which people ‘get lost’ and experience ‘identity crisis’ produces its own
‘microclimate’ where ‘queer is about being dialogical, not dialectical’ and the participants
‘take their identity off, like their clothes’ (Electronic Beats, 2015). In this account, the
KitKatClub across several floors with its numerous corridors, small rooms, and hidden
corners, not merely facilitates in a functional sense a range of different sexual encounters,
but disrupts and perhaps ultimately transforms, or at least temporarily transcends, the
identity of the participants.
462 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

The labyrinth also operates metaphorically: it is simultaneously a place where you can
‘get lost’ (‘Get lost in the concrete temple for contemporary electronic dance music’ was for
many years the English tag line for Klubnacht in the weekly listings of the LGBTQ mag-
azine Siegess€ aule), but also a place where you might ‘lose yourself’. While the essentialist
notion of ‘finding yourself’ conforms to a sexual liberation paradigm where one’s true
essence can be liberated or ‘found’, ‘losing yourself’ hints at something less stable. Early
work on clubs and raves described this ‘loss of self’ as a ‘gender-displacing jouissance’
enabling ‘new relationships to the body of both self and other/s’ (Gilbert and Pearson,
1999: 107). Since the gendered ‘direction’ of desire is referred to as a sexual ‘orientation’,
the idea of Berghain as a labyrinth also suggests a form of sexual disorientation where the
interioristic perspectives that locate desire inside the body are exteriorised onto the sur-
rounding space. ‘Depending on which way one turns,’ as Sara Ahmed (2006: 15) writes in
her influential discussion of the sexual ‘orientation’ metaphor, ‘different worlds might even
come into view’. In mixed sex-positive spaces like Gegen and Berghain, the way you turn at
each corner determines the next encounter: erotic horizons restricted through repetition over
time can be expanded to transcend not only the narrowly normative or identitarian, but also
the fixation with ‘type’.
To bridge ‘getting lost’ and ‘losing yourself’, Benjamin’s notion of a threshold space is
useful since it does not distinguish between the physical and the psychological. According to
Susan Sontag (1997: 10–11), the figure of the labyrinth for Benjamin is ‘about the forbidden,
and how to gain access to it: through an act of the mind which is the same as a physical act’.
Similarly, in a discussion of Berghain’s door policy, Madison Moore (2018: 123) suggests
that ‘doors are thresholds, abstract regulation points that carry us from one state of being to
another as soon as we cross them’, while George Kafka (2020), writing about the club’s
architecture, highlights ‘the interplay between the rigidity of its interior/exterior threshold
(the queue, the infamous door policy) and the contrasting fluidity of the spaces inside (the
club has no dead ends)’. The alternate ‘state of being’ on the inside is multifaceted, but apart
from architecture, its most central components are electronic music and drugs. If the music
is a ‘threshold experience’ that ‘serves to dramatize similar threshold experiences between
individual dancers and a crowd’ (Garcia, 2015: 73), this experience is typically pharmaco-
logically mediated: empathy- and libido-enhancing drugs operate as equalisers against the
distinctions of the outside world although largely of course by creating its own distinctions
against that very outside (Thornton, 1995).

The pharmacolibidinal constellation of Klubnacht

Drugs have also been understood as threshold experiences with regards to sexual orienta-
tion. During the era of ‘free love’ in the late 1960s, LSD and marijuana were promoted as
returning the user to an innocent stage uncorrupted by the conformity and hypocrisies of
post-war society. Partly overlapping with these ideas, one tradition of work on sexuality –
what Didier Eribon (2001: 55) refers to as ‘the Freudo-Marxist ideology of sexual liberation’
– believed in an innate universal bisexuality that had been repressed by capitalist social
relations but could ultimately be unlocked or ‘liberated’. Other strands of scholarship on
drugs have highlighted temporary changes in sexual behaviour under the influence. In Der
Cocainismus (1924), a study of Weimar Berlin’s drug culture, Ernst Jo€el and Fritz Fr€ankel,
suggested that cocaine influenced seemingly heterosexual people to participate in homosex-
ual acts (Beachy, 2014: 215). Today such changes in sexual behaviour are mainly associated
with other drugs, but apart from the libidinal qualities of specific substances, intoxication
Andersson 463

cannot be separated from the social context since desire is often opportunistic and depen-
dent on who is around.
Waltz’s (2010: 131) description of Berghain as a ‘special social constellation in which all
party-goers come together under the hegemony of Berlin’s gay community’ was written at
the end of the 2000s, but since then the crowd has become even more mixed and interna-
tional. When the club opened in 2004, Berlin was still a shrinking city, but especially after
the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–2008, the population started to rise partly because
of international migration: between 2008 and 2018, rents of newly let apartments
increased with 78% and purchasing prices almost trebled (Holm, 2019). In Queer
Constellations, Dianne Chisholm (2005: 11, 65) deploys Benjamin’s notion of constellations
to ‘foreground contradictions’ such as the intimate connection between ‘sex radicalism’ and
‘the homo-eroticization of capital’ in the context of New York’s 1970s bathhouses. A similar
relationship exists in Berlin today where the city’s reputation for hedonistic nightlife has
gone hand in hand with rapid gentrification, exacerbated by party tourism and lifestyle
migration. While the suggestion that Berghain has ‘become a brutalist Ibiza for the jet-
setting class’ is exaggerated (Thomas, 2021), the partial gentrification and straightification
of the crowd has created a new heterogeneity.
Perhaps to accommodate the diversification of the crowd, some spatial adjustments that
could be viewed as de-gaying or desexualising have taken place in Berghain: the replacement
of the downstairs darkroom with the more exposed S€aule mezzanine, for example, or the
installation of new seating outside the toilets where gay men used to have sex on a couch. At
the same time, the more diverse crowd in combination with new highly libidinal recreational
drugs such as G and mephedrone have created a pharmacolibidinal constellation that is
more open-ended. In the late 2000s, the quality and global availability of ecstasy
(3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, MDMA) dropped after the Cambodian govern-
ment with the assistance of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),
burnt large quantities of oil rich in safrole, which was used as the chemical precursor in the
production of ecstasy. Until then, ecstasy – complemented with amphetamine, cocaine, and
ketamine – had dominated in Berghain like it did in the techno clubs of the 1990s, where it
was typically understood as promoting empathy and platonic tactility among previously
segregated groups: ‘Gay or not-gay was totally immaterial. As was Wessi or Ossi. Everyone
got cuddly on ecstasy’ as one informant in Der Klang Der Familie, the oral history of
Berlin’s techno scene, puts it (Denk and von Thülen, 2014: 120).
This somewhat desexualised understandings of MDMA as cuddly also informed early
work on raves and clubs, which described ecstasy as ‘non-genital, especially for men’
(Morton, 1995: 38) or as ‘much more likely to promote a desire for cuddling and friendship
than for sex’ (McDermott et al., 1992: 12). Produced during the ‘safer sex’ era of the first
phase of the AIDS crisis, such accounts arguably conflated mechanics with desire, confusing
the temporary erectile dysfunction caused by MDMA with an absence of libido. Since then,
the invention of Viagra and antiretroviral HIV medications (including pre-exposure ones
like PrEP) has helped to facilitate a carefree exchange of bodily fluids not seen since before
the AIDS crisis. Because of the temporary drop in the quality of ecstasy (safrole was even-
tually replaced with a newly invented synthetic precursor called PMK-Glycidate), other
substances such as G, which was initially marketed as ‘liquid ecstasy’, and mephedrone,
first popularised in the UK as a cheap ‘legal high’ during the recession (later becoming more
expensive after it was classified as a narcotic), established themselves in the meantime.
Both G and mephedrone are strongly libido-enhancing drugs associated with so-called
‘chills’ or ‘chemsex parties’ organised through gay hook-up apps. Apart from getting high
and having sex, chemsex typically involves ‘deep emotional talk’ requiring the participants
464 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

to articulate their same-sex desire in addition to downloading and using gay-identified apps
(Hakim, 2019: 258). In contrast, in clubs like Berghain, the introduction of the same sub-
stances takes place in a highly libidinal context that requires no verbal or written sexual
identity affiliation. Electronic dance music events such as Berlin’s Love Parade have been
understood as ‘a sensual and affective experience that itself purposely refuses to enter into a
relation with official language’ (Borneman and Senders, 2000: 297–300), while similarly,
nightclubs offer an alternative model of togetherness where dancing, flirting, sex, tactility,
gestures, and smiles are often only accompanied by a bare minimum of verbal communi-
cation (Buckland, 2002).
This deprivileging of spoken language enables interactions that fall between or outside
the discursive labels with which people might identify in their everyday lives. It is not that
desire becomes entirely a set of overwhelming affective flows outside the discursive – in fact,
the heavily mythologised discourses of Berghain as sexually free-spirited probably influences
behaviour – but sexual encounters are not solely determined by physical criteria, but also by
proximity and a range of other sonic, sensual, and pharmacological factors. Moreover,
unlike chemsex, which is dependent on both drugs and the image-sharing technologies of
hook-up apps – two key aspects of our pharmacopornographic times (Preciado, 2013) –
Berghain is pharmacological without being pornographic: desire and collectivity are fun-
nelled through drugs while photography is banned.
G has perhaps changed the erotic dynamics of clubs more than any other drug since the
popularisation of ecstasy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Easily bought as an industrial
paint stripper online, GBL which the body converts into GHB, is taken in very small
quantities with a pipette or syringe making the cost of a dose as low as a few cents.
Because of the precise measurements and the importance of timing doses correctly, the
risk of overdosing is high and poses problems for clubs when people either ‘collapse’ or
start to behave in erratic ways. If there is a ‘G dance’ – an unchoreographed equivalent to
Anita Berber’s embodied Weimar performances of ‘Cocaine’ and ‘Morphine’ – its dark
variant has something of the death throes about it: far from the hip spasmodic movements
of some dance styles, its frightening loss of control resembles epileptic seizures. To minimise
such episodes, the body search by security on the door in Berghain is rigorous and those
found in possession of G automatically get a three-months Hausverbot the first time and are
banned for life the second time (in contrast other drugs are typically confiscated without
further penalty). The physically intrusive search on the door, has led guests to hide 20 or
30 millilitre bottles of the drug in condoms in their vagina or rectum, later retrieved in the
toilets after entering, in a smuggling process that turns sexual organs into embodied storages
for a liquid that literally kills: ‘the rectum as a grave’, or perhaps when dosed right, a self-
shattering jouissance of ‘losing sight of the self’ inside Berghain’s labyrinthine space
(Bersani, 1987: 222).
While it is tempting to link G with antirelational queer theory’s preoccupation with the
death drive, it is also a liquid that concretises queer theory’s preoccupation with sexual
fluidity. In the autumn of 2021, a poster campaign across Berlin by ‘Clubculture against
GHB’ included the slogan ‘Don’t kill the vibe’ while the city’s Clubcommission (2021) issued
a statement (‘There is no G in Club Culture’) presenting the drug as a threat to Berlin’s
reputation for ‘hedonism and the dissolution of boundaries.’ Yet, put differently, G is ‘the
vibe’ in many of Berlin’s clubs precisely because it facilitates the ‘dissolution of boundaries.’
Public health messaging, advocating prohibition over harm reduction, is likely to fail unless
it acknowledges these pharmacolibidinal characteristics. Poured as a graffiti remover on
H€anninen’s ‘empiric studies’ of the self-segregating tendency on Berghain’s dancefloors,
G would dissolve the boundaries between the different subgroups and create one big
Andersson 465

blurry mass/mess (Figure 3). Digested in the body, the drug appears to do something similar
by blurring distinctions and creating an unbounded eroticism that, at times, overwhelms the
participants. This lowering of sexual inhibitions can be described as a ‘lowering of stand-
ards’; phrased horizontally, however, it is also as a ‘widening of scope’ and ‘broadening of
horizons.’

Conclusion
Approaching 20, Berghain has outlived the lifespan of most canonical clubs and continues
to attract new generations of devout followers. Yet in many ways, the club remains rooted in
the first post-Cold War decade of the 1990s, when its predecessors Snax and Ostgut started
experimenting with techno, art, and sex in abandoned buildings. The name Berghain – a
combination of the now merged former West and East Berlin boroughs, Kreuzberg and
Friedrichshain – suggests a meeting of West and East, while the desegregation of sexual
groups the club has fostered, speaks to the broader valorisation of encounters that also
informed the relational art of the period. In his manifesto Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas
Bourriaud (2002: 50–51) suggested that Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres had ‘foreshad-
owed a space based in inter-subjectivity’ where ‘homosexuality did not seal a community
assertion: quite to the contrary, it became a life model that could be shared by all, and
identified with by everyone’. Klubnacht, which has been described as ‘half art project, half
social experiment’ (Paumgarten, 2014), became a realisation of such an inter-subjective
space that not only attracted a wide range of people into a predominantly gay club, but
encouraged everyone to adopt ways of relating associated with the subculture.
These roots in 1990s gay white male culture, can, at times, make Berghain seem out of
sync with Berlin’s younger generation of queer parties. While many of the newer parties
have adopted features originally associated with Berghain – sex positivity, bans on photog-
raphy, selectivity on the door, long opening hours, and publicised connections with the art
world – they also differ in important organisational and political ways, highlighting changes
in the meaning of ‘queer’ over time. Where Berghain’s management is hierarchical and never
makes public statements, the new generation of parties often describe themselves as
‘collectives’ and communicate with their customers on social media. Moreover, unlike
Berghain, they publicly embrace political causes, frequently adopting a language of com-
munity, solidarity, coalition-building, and intersectionality, which draws explicitly on fem-
inist, trans, and queer of colour critiques.
The new prevalence of ‘awareness teams’ in Berlin’s clubs, for example, tasked with
creating ‘safe(r) spaces’ by preventing boundary crossings and micro aggressions is rooted
in feminist practices of self-governance (Raiselis, 2021). While it is difficult to imagine
yellow-vested awareness teams in Berghain, there have been signs that the club is subtly
abandoning its apolitical policy of not making public statements. In 2020, support for Black
Lives Matter was published on its website and in 2022 all profits from Klubnacht’s reopen-
ing weekend, after the second Covid-19 lockdown, were donated to sexual and racial minor-
ity organisations working with refugees from Ukraine. The peace sign placed on the façade
at the same time, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggested that not only Berghain,
but Europe had entered a different era from the optimistic one in which the club first
emerged.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
466 EPD: Society and Space 40(3)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Johan Andersson is Senior Lecturer in Urban Cultural Geography at King’s College

London.