The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (33 page)

But the Timbuktu I knew in 2006 is not the same ravaged town of 2014. Recently I saw a picture of the monument taken soon after the jihadists gained control of the town: the flame is missing, the white and blue paint of the columns and arches has peeled off to reveal chunks of red bricks, and where the guns are embedded someone had left the black flag of the jihadists.

NICK PAUMGARTEN

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE FIRST PERSON I
met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn't print his name. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I'll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg dueling garb. Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you're fresh in town.

It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters, clubbers, and artists after the Wall came down and is now agleam with fancy restaurants, galleries, and shops. Transplants often describe Berlin's neighborhoods as analogues of New York's, to assess where they fit along the gentrification continuum. Mitte, they say, is SoHo. Like SoHo, it is often full of tourists. But this bar, an early post-Wall pioneer, had a gruff, local air.

The boar hunter stirred an espresso at arm's length and regarded me with martial skepticism. He was a veteran of the city's after-hours party scene, but he seemed weary of it. “Everyone knows about this,” he said. “You should write instead about black rhinos.” He'd recently bought 15,000 acres in Namibia, in a rhinoceros preserve, to help support a conservation program. He said, “I once shot an elephant.”

He had moved to Berlin from Düsseldorf in 1993. He was a philosopher by training (his business card had him as a “Dr.”) but an industrialist by trade: he'd inherited a manufacturing firm from his father, and had done well enough with it to pursue a life of pleasure and ease, though without ostentation, in keeping with the ethos of Berlin. He'd recently returned from a four-week surfing trip to the Basque coast, where he and a girlfriend—two, actually: one for the first half of the trip, and one for the second—had lived out of a VW bus. There were other women in his life, among them a physician's wife, whom he'd met online. (“He gave her fake tits—thank you, mister!”) He described his plans for the following weekend: a day hunting wild boar in a forest on the city's outskirts, then a “sex party” (which should never be said without a German accent) at an acquaintance's apartment, where he'd arrive with one woman but pair up with others (“It's a seedy thing”), and finally, perhaps, just before Sunday dawn, Berghain.

Berghain is a nightclub that opened in 2004 in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. The name is a mashup of the last syllable of its neighborhood, Friedrichshain, and the one across the Spree, Kreuzberg, on what was once the other side of the Wall. It is the most famous techno club in the world—to Berlin what Fenway is to Boston—and yet still kind of underground and, as such, a microcosm of Berlin. The people I'd talked to who had been to Berghain—and there were many—conjured ecstatic evenings, Boschian contortions, and a dusky Arcadia that an American hockey dad like me had never even imagined wanting to experience.

Berghain's renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the DJs who present it; the power and clarity of the sound system; the eyeball-bending decadence of the weekend parties, which often spill into Monday morning; the stringent and mysterious door policy, and the menacing head doorman, with a tattoo on his face; the majesty and complexity of the interior; and the tolerant and indulgent atmosphere, most infamously in its so-called dark rooms, where patrons, gay and straight, can get it on with friends or strangers in an anonymous murk. For some Berliners, Berghain is an elemental part of their weekly existence, a perfectly pitched and carefully conceived apotheosis of Berlin's post-Wall club culture. To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder.

“It's half art project, half social experiment,” a friend in New York had told me. “It's the vampire nightclub to end all vampire nightclubs. People want something like it here, but New York could never metabolize it.”

“It's a social-political-economic achievement,” another friend said. “It's such a fucking unicorn.”

“It's dystopian and utopian,” a third said. “Prepare yourself.”

The boar hunter had been going to Berghain for years, mainly for the music and the sex. He said he preferred it to, say, the KitKatClub. “The sex clubs have bad music,” he explained. He avoided drugs, mostly. He drank alcohol and occasionally smoked damiana, a mild herbal stimulant that is thought to have some aphrodisiac effects. “It's like pot, except it doesn't make you stupid,” he said. Perhaps it was for this reason that he had a more prosaic affection for the place. He didn't seem to see it in transcendental terms. He had a Teutonic bluntness with regard to sex. Typically he'd dance and then go to the dark room. He explained that straight couples, in deference to the predominantly gay clientele in the dark rooms, often preferred the toilet stalls, but, for whatever reason, he didn't like the idea of screwing on a toilet. He'd noticed in recent visits to the dark room that, to judge by wandering hands, the patrons were less interested in him than in the woman he was with. Also, he'd had two cell phones stolen. All this was a symptom of gentrification. “Berghain's not as kinky as it used to be, not as eccentric,” he said. “There are the easyJet people—Spanish people, Italians. The black-leather homosexuals are gone.” Apparently they patronized the club downstairs—Lab.oratory, which has a separate entrance and a more single-minded clientele. In Berlin, offhand references to instances of excess at Lab.oratory—oh, the things that men will do to each other!—are as commonplace as best-burger recommendations in New York.

After a moment, the boar hunter said, “We could go to Berghain now. Would you like to go?”

“Now?” I was jet-lagged. It was Sunday. He looked me up and down, the way Germans do when you walk into a restaurant. He didn't think I'd get in. We made a plan to meet there in a week.

The next morning, the sidewalks in Mitte teemed with citizens on their way to work. Through the windows of an office building across the street from my hotel, you could see young people busy in their cubicles. Somehow, I'd assumed that on Monday mornings everyone in Berlin would be lurking in a club somewhere or else sleeping it off. But it turns out there is a Berlin of museums and gallery openings, of the Bundestag and the Chancellery, of Holocaust remembrance and Naziphilia, of Turkish immigrants and academics on sabbatical, and even of ordinary middle-class families going about their lives and escaping to Wannsee on weekends. It's just that if you are on techno time, you hardly see any of it. You can't fathom that a few U-Bahn stops away, Angela Merkel is busy presiding over the affairs of Europe.

This particular Berlin—cradle of techno culture, hotbed of lost weekends and lost minds—has been an object of international yearning and fascination for more than 20 years. Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the
“Berliner Luft”
—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.”

The First World War was a bracing infusion. Defeat, poverty, inflation, desperation: the celebrated cultural efflorescence and social tolerance of the Weimar years arose out of, or in spite of, a perhaps equally celebrated atmosphere of perversion and abandon. Berlin was the whorehouse of Europe. War widows, or their children, would do anything for a mark, even as a mark came to be worth practically nothing (4 trillion to a dollar at one point in 1923). The kaiser's censors and police were gone. In came the Continent's decadentsia, with their strong currencies and peculiar fetishes. Sally Bowles at the Lady Windermere, transvestites at the Eldorado, “sugar-lickers” (pederasts),
Münzis
(pregnant whores). Mel Gordon, in
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin
, cites the journalist Luigi Barzini: “The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and time-saving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterward.”

Apocryphal, one hopes, but such was the rep. In some respects, the notion of decadence was as integral as decadence itself. So people, in those Weimar years, also came to gawk, or to get close enough at least for the “mystery-magic of foreignness,” as Christopher Isherwood wrote, to rub off. A commodified, self-conscious version of the real thing existed even then. Isherwood cited Berlin's “dens of pseudo-vice”: “Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Berlin was already a brand.

The Nazis closed the clubs, hounded and exterminated the homosexuals, and, in the end, brought ruin on the city. Bombed and desolate, traumatized by street fighting, starvation, and mass rape, and ultimately carved up, Berlin, after the war, barely heaved back to life. West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by East Germany, survived primarily as a political gesture, a flagpole in the sand and a thumb in the Politburo's eye. There was very little industry, turnover, or travel in or out. No corporation could take the political risk or tolerate the barriers to commerce. To encourage people to move there, the West German government gave out stipends and exemptions from military service, so the city tended to attract the West's mavericks and oddballs—hippies, homosexuals, political renegades—who shared the town with the elderly and the soldiers watching over them. In such hothouse isolation, a small but fervid club scene took root.

In 1988, the founders of a small record label, Interfisch, started throwing illegal all-night parties in their office. The space, in a Kreuzberg basement reached via ladder, had 6-foot ceilings. It took on the name UFO. The year before, Dimitri Hegemann, one of the founders, had traveled to Chicago to arrange a licensing deal with another label. While there, he had idly browsed through its so-called white labels—rough demos, not ready for sale—and picked out something strange. It was techno from Detroit. Hegemann, a Westphalian who had moved to Berlin in 1978, was a musicologist, a producer of British electronic music, a fan of American punk (especially the Dead Kennedys), and the founder of an experimental electronic-music festival called Berlin Atonal, but he had never heard music quite like this. He brought a stack of Detroit techno records back to Berlin.

Electronic music spans many genres, from the experimental bleeps and blurts that you might hear at the fringes of Berlin's CTM Festival to the mega-popular sets performed by famous DJs like Skrillex and Avicii—which you won't really find in Berlin. The genres for which Berlin is best known, house and, especially, techno, are mostly, as manifested there, noncommercial, rigorous, esoteric, and both experimental and orthodox. The music isn't pop, although many elements of it derive from and inform pop. It isn't punk, although it owes something to punk, in spirit and scene. It isn't high art, either. It is, fundamentally,
Gebrauchsmusik
—“utility music,” as Paul Nettl, the Bohemian musicologist, described dance music in 1921. The utility, in this case, is mostly that of providing succor and pleasure, a sense of direction and purpose, to addled bodies and minds. The most characteristic subgenre, which peaked in popularity about a decade ago and has been explored to the edges of tolerability ever since, is minimal techno, a spare distillation that people have sometimes likened to the knocking of spoons on pots but which others parse as though it were Brahms.

Techno is repetitive, relying on subtle changes over time to intrigue the ear. It eschews lyrics, melody, and, arguably, harmonics. It doesn't resolve. You don't get crowd-pleasing drops. Its essential element is a basic four-on-the-floor beat—a 4/4 dictatorship in which the bass drum, or its proxy, is struck on every beat, with a snare on each
and
. It sounds like “boots and pants, boots and pants.” Say it. Say it again. The pleasure comes in repetition, in sly referents, and in the nature of the sound—the depth and texture of the low frequencies or, in the case of acid house, the squelchy bass of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. House, which originated in the gay dance clubs of Chicago and (less so) New York in the eighties, often features a snare on the two and the four. “It's to give people with no rhythm a way to hold on to it,” a DJ friend, my techno rabbi, told me. “It's the grandma handle in the shower.”

Purists object when you call this music EDM, though it is indisputably electronic music made for dancing. “Electronic dance music,” lowercase, used to be an acceptable catchall term for the entire range of genres (house, deep house, acid house, trance, techno, industrial, drum and bass, dubstep, brostep, hardcore, happy hardcore, jungle, garage, etc.) created and performed on computers and synthesizers. Shortened to EDM, however, the term has come to signify the party-crowd DJ music that has been the biggest pop phenomenon of the past half decade—Skrillex in Vegas, bros in the house. “EDM took all the gayness and blackness out of it,” my techno rabbi explained. “It's fascistic, with the DJ on a stage.” Some prefer to call it commercial electronic music. It doesn't have much to do with Berlin, except to the extent that Berlin defines itself in opposition to it. The nomenclature is convoluted. To the dabbler, it can seem that there are more genres than there are differences between them.