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The first time I tried to get into Berghain, I did not put much thought into it. It was a mild Thursday evening in summer. The queue was short. It wasn’t even Klubnacht, the marathon party that begins on Saturday night and runs until Monday morning. At the door, the bouncer asked, “Wie viele?” — how many? After a glance at me and my two friends visiting from France, he delivered the verdict: “Nein, tut mir Leid.”
I had joined the long list of casualties of Berghain’s notoriously selective door policy.
As a Berlin resident and foreign correspondent, being turned away from Berghain felt like exclusion from an essential part of the city’s culture. Housed in a former power plant in East Berlin, the club has become one of the defining symbols of the city’s post-Wall, hedonistic identity. Born out of the gay club scene of the 1990s, it helped turn Berlin into a magnet for techno-loving partygoers and DJs.
Nightlife has been an economic engine for Berlin, a political centre that lacks the corporate heft of Paris or London. In 2019, trade association Clubcommission estimated that clubs generated about €1.5bn a year for the local economy. But since Covid, high rents and declining attendance have put pressure on the industry. Clubs like Watergate have closed down.
Judging by the queues, Berghain has retained its allure. Its latest corporate filings show that net profit fell 15 per cent to €1.4mn in 2024. Yet, the balance sheet remained healthy: the club ended the year with €1.6mn in retained earnings and almost no bank debt. It consistently ranks as the most popular Berlin destination on Bolt and Uber apps. I met visitors who had flown in from Shanghai, Israel and Paris. In 2022, Elon Musk claimed he “refused” to enter after being put off by the word “Peace” on the building.
The club’s media-shy founders Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann were forced to shut their earlier venue, Ostgut, to make space for a 17,000-seat concert space. Much of Berghain’s enduring appeal, I suspect, lies in the mystique of its door policy, personified by Sven Marquardt, the club’s intimidating chief bouncer and main public figure.
So I made plans. I studied Marquardt’s autobiography, Die Nacht ist Leben (The Night is Life), a gritty account of youth as a punk gay photographer in 1980s East Germany, in which he explains how he “developed a taste for assembling a well-functioning party crowd”.
I enlisted my friend Lucy, who said she knew a Berghain regular. On their advice, we aimed for a Sunday morning. We researched DJs. We debated outfits — black jeans for me, black skirt for her, black boots for both.
Then one rainy Sunday at about 8am, we headed towards the club to the soundtrack of Prague-based DJ Pink Concrete. “I feel it’s like trying to get an Algerian visa,” Lucy said.
Disaster struck again. A female bouncer waved us through, before a more senior colleague stopped us. A brief, bewildering discussion followed, before another “Not today, ladies.”
We decided to try our luck again later that same day, hoping a different shift might bring a different outcome. I scrubbed off every trace of make-up, convinced my Dior lipstick had betrayed me. When we joined the queue at around 6pm that day, Marquardt was there, looking formidable with his grey hair swept back and large tinted glasses.
His nod felt, absurdly, like a rite of passage. I resisted the urge to thank him. Now that I was part of the lucky few, I became a snob. How had that goofy-looking tourist managed to get in?
Inside, prepare for nudity, sweat and crammed dance floors. What surprised me most, though, was how well behaved the crowd was. We gravitated towards Panorama Bar, where the music is more mainstream than in the cavernous main hall. That night the line-up featured Budino, a Berlin-based Italian DJ, alongside Berghain resident Ben Klock.
We did not stumble into any dark rooms. Instead I had lemon sorbet at the ice cream bar, served by a siren-like figure with a red braid and “J’adore hard core” tattooed across their stomach. “You’ve made it to the ranks of the cool people,” Lucy’s husband, John, declared afterward. For a moment, it felt true.
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