Sunday at the Berghain
It was a Sunday evening in Berlin and I was sitting at a swanky hotel bar sipping a basil daiquiri and reading a philosophical biography of Nietzsche. I’ll let the absurdity of the image stand for itself. An hour beforehand I’d been sprawled on my mattress at home, watching the light fade, just waiting for tomorrow. But when my gaze slid off the wall and onto the bookshelf, I found myself absent-mindedly pulling down the Nietzsche biography and thumbing to a passage about Dionysian revelry and the eternal encased in every moment. The words shot through me. What was I doing in bed? The night was young. I was young. Sunday was the new Saturday. I dressed and went to the hotel bar down the street to order the most yea-saying drink on the menu.
***
“Do you know a good place to go out on a Sunday?” The booming voice behind me was addressing the bartender, who shrugged in response. I swiveled my stool 180 degrees and found myself face to face with the enormous smiley head of a man.
“The Berghain’s open,” I said.
“What’s the Berghain?”
“The high temple of electronic dance music.”
At least so I’d been told. I’d never been, but my roommates went without fail each Sunday after a lengthy champagne brunch. They called this ritual “going to church.” I’d elected not to join them because – though I’d never admitted it - I found there to be something vaguely obscene about clubbing on Sunday morning. More importantly, I was vehemently opposed to all forms of electronic dance music, better known to its devotees as E.D.M.
Much like marmite or Christianity, E.D.M. polarizes. The experience is too intense to offer a middle ground. “Love it or hate it.” That was the slogan for British Marmite. I loved Marmite. I hated E.D.M.
My rejection was more a matter of principle than taste. I was “for” dance. Therefore, I believed, I had to be “against” electronic dance music, which, despite nominal claims to the contrary, inhibited dancing. Of course there was plenty of fist pumping to be had. Not to mention the endless nodding and shaking of heads, as if everyone were vigorously agreeing or disagreeing with some overwhelming question. But that wasn’t dancing. Dancing was self-expression. Not necessarily graceful, not necessarily skillful, but someway, somehow, expression. Electronic dance music suppressed expression, demanding submission to the mindless throb of the beat. I saw it as an affront to individuality.
Which is not to say I felt I had “superior” tastes in music. I grew up dancing to Backstreet Boys and Britney, Jock Jams and LL Cool J. All those gloriously innocent anthems of 90’s pop and hip-hop. I was the guy at the middle school dance busting the worm and other powers moves I’d learned from my breakdance VHS. Though I was just as happy to shake my hips to Latin beats or jump n’ jive to big brass. Give me a downbeat and I was down.
That was the problem with electronic dance music: the downbeat. Where was it? Everywhere and nowhere. The relentless onslaught of the BOOM BOOM BOOM made for a very unforgiving dance partner. When I first moved to Berlin – widely regarded as the world Mecca of E.D.M. - I’d spent several long and alienated nights trying to find a way to appreciate the music. I brought all my moves to the floor, even tried some new ones, but nothing seemed to work. As far as I could see, it wasn’t about moves. It was about…what? Head bobbing? Fist pumping? Mass stupidity? The music rejected me. So I rejected it.
***
I was sitting at a large table with the smiley-headed man, his conspicuously younger Canadian girlfriend, and a pair of Irish sisters. “So,” he leaned back on the pillow, pausing for effect, “Are we going to the Berghain?” I peered at the basil leaf floating in my daiquiri – my third daiquiri, I should say – and considered launching into one of my anti-E.D.M. tirades. But I lacked the conviction. One of the Irish lasses leaned forward with a smirk and said to no one in particular. “It’d be rude not to.”
* * *
An hour later we were approaching an enormous concrete monstrosity through a chain-link fence corridor. I could already feel the immense downbeat – BOOM BOOM BOOM– shaking the earth beneath my shoes. Under the starless sky, the building looked vaguely sinister. Someone said it was an abandoned thermal power plant. I thought it looked more like the apocalyptic temple of a godless world. But that might have been the Nietzsche talking.
At 3 AM we rolled in with let's-throw-the-rules-out swagger and a willingness to give ourselves up to the pounding darkness. In a matter of minutes my new friends had slipped into the rose-colored fog of the dance floor, leaving me alone. I was finally in the Berghain. Or was the Berghain in me? The sound system had turned my skeleton into a tuning fork. I didn’t just hear the beat; I felt it in my bones.
I stood on the edge of the crowd, bob bob bobbing my head like of one of those dashboard Jesus figurines, and felt the old doubts return. How could you dance to this stuff? Why would you want to dance to this stuff? Is this even dancing? What had just moments before looked like a room full of fun loving individuals transformed before my eyes into an army of soulless automatons. I began to wonder if I might be the victim of an enormous conspiracy in which everyone pretended to enjoy themselves to hide the emptiness inside.
But I stayed and I bobbed. And slowly – was it the basil daiquiris or the spirit of Dionysius come down from on high? – I began to feel my body soften under the onslaught of the beat. And the more my resistance receded, the more I could feel an unfamiliar pull - a something beyond the downbeat tugging at my attention. Beneath the beat I started to notice new sounds. Gradual shifts in pitch and slowly building walls of sound.
When the epiphany came, it came all at once; as if a wave had grabbed me in the shallows and swept me out to sea, as if a form of understanding had bypassed my head and went coursing through my body. All this beating and bobbing wasn’t about dancing. It was about an experience: an experience of time. Or better yet – an experience out of time. By focusing on the incessant downbeat, I’d committed the aural equivalent of standing six inches back from a pointillist painting and complaining all I could see were dots. Sure, if you push your nose right up to a Georges Seurat, all you’ll see is a mishmash of color. But step back a few feet, and a beautifully shaded landscape snaps into view. So it was with E.D.M., except that, instead of pulling my eyes back from the canvas, I (so to speak) pulled my ears away from the moment. When I allowed myself to listen past the downbeat, I suddenly saw that the music was forming a much larger picture. The DJ was creating an aural landscape whose dimensions encompassed the span of the night. Or maybe a figure painting in which we were the figures, striking out together towards unknown horizons. “Expression” was simply the wrong concept – a square peg for a round hole. “Journey” was much closer.
* * *
The Berghain opens on Saturday evening and closes on Monday morning. These outrageous hours might seem, at first glance, to be a commitment to maximal hedonism. But that night I came to see it had more to do with an attempt to establish a different relationship to time. In most party scenarios one is conscious of the end in the beginning. One goes out late with an eye on the clock, knowing things are only going to get later. The writer and theorist Herbert Marcuse thought this wasn’t just something inherent to parties, but to pleasure itself: “Man learns that every pleasure is short, that for all finite things the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.” But in the Berghain, entranced in the beat, the end of the experience was so far in the future it passed out of sight and consciousness. At any moment, you might stay forever, and so, in a way, every moment lasted forever.
****
Six hours later, the DJ pushed a button and the metallic slats covering the windows all opened at once. Outside it was morning, and it seemed as if the sun’s rays weren’t just bringing light, but time itself back to the room. People whooped and hollered and cheered. I looked around at a roomful of bodies, all facing the windows, heads tipped back in bliss, arms stretched to the sky, and it occurred to me that when my roommates’ said they were “going to church,” they might not have been joking.
***
When I came to the next afternoon, I lingered in bed with a light headache and the Nietzsche biography. I read he once famously said the only serious philosophical question worth asking was: “Is life worth living?” Having answered this in the affirmative for myself, I began to wonder what the second serious philosophical question might be. The answer that morning seemed obvious:
What are you doing next Sunday?