![]() Head bouncer Sven Marquardt, who is also a photographer, is a minor celebrity in the techno scene. The club's door policy is notorious for being both strict and opaque, generating accusations of racism and frequent debate and speculation about how to get in. In the toilets of the club there are no mirrors, so that guests are spared the "buzzkilling indignity of seeing their own faces after an epic partying session." Ī 2022 academic study described Berghain as a unique 'pharmacolibidinal constellation', where sexual orientations may become porous, and preexisting behaviors altered, owing to the environment. The policy was maintained in 2020 when the club temporarily converted into an art space for the "Studio Berlin" exhibition during the COVID-19 pandemic. No photos are allowed inside the club, with patrons required to cover their smartphone cameras with a sticker. ![]() In 2019 Frieze magazine observed that while in Berghain's early years, "the main room was mostly a space for gay men, now its queer palette is more mixed the club’s values remain the same: concealment, queerness and excess." The twice-yearly Snax Party is reserved for gay patrons. The club offers dark rooms dedicated to sexual activity, and media have frequently reported of guests openly indulging in sexual acts. It is open continuously most weekends from Saturday night through late Monday morning. Since April 2022, the patrons, regardless of their vaccination status, are allowed in without masks or tests.īerghain has become associated with decadence and hedonism. After 19 months, in October 2021, Berghain resumed indoor dance club events, with patrons required to either be vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19. In September 2020, the indoors club reopened as an art space, hosting an exhibition titled "Studio Berlin" featuring 115 Berlin-based artists including Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson and Wolfgang Tillmans. Over the summer, it hosted several sound art installations inside the building and the adjacent beer garden. Īt the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, in March 2020, Berghain closed along with all other nightclubs in Berlin. The Panorama Bar was upgraded in 2017 with a four-point line-array system with an additional six subwoofers from Studt Akustik. The basement holds a male-only establishment called "Lab.Oratory", which Rolling Stone described in 2014 as being "known as Berlin’s most extreme sex club." īerghain has a Funktion-One sound system on its main dance floor which, when it was installed in 2004, was one of the company's largest club installs. The club's main room is focused on techno, with a smaller upstairs space, Panorama Bar, featuring house. In 2016, a German court officially designated Berghain a cultural institution, which allows the club to pay a reduced tax rate. The design of the club's interior, as well as later interior and exterior expansions of the venue, were carried out by the Berlin design firm Studio Karhard. The building has a cavernous main room with 18-meter ceilings and is dominated by steel and concrete. The space was originally rented from the energy company Vattenfall but has been owned outright by the club since 2011. The club is located in a former heating plant built in 1953 as part of the flagship post-war Stalinallee development and abandoned in the 1980s. The name "Berghain", a portmanteau of the two city quarters that flank the south and north sides of the building, Kreuz berg (formerly in West Berlin) and Friedrichs hain (formerly in East Berlin), has been described as evocative of the club's "post-1989 identity." The literal meaning of the German word Berghain is "mountain grove." īerghain opened in 2004 as a reincarnation of Ostgut. According to Deutsche Welle, Ostgut, "known for unique parties and boundless freedoms, sexual and otherwise, is considered to have paved the way for Berghain." Ostgut closed in January 2003, with the building slated for demolition and later replaced by a large indoor arena, the O 2 World Berlin (since 2015: Mercedes-Benz Arena). Unlike Snax, the club was open to the general public. ![]() In 1999 they founded their first club, Ostgut, in a former railway repair depot in Friedrichshain. Thormann and Teufele became party promoters in the 1990s, hosting a male-only fetish club night called Snax, which launched in 1992 at Bunker.
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