Take a Trip Inside Legendary Nightclub Berghain in Geoffrey Mak’s Memoir Mean Boys
Daniel Tepper; Bloomsbury Publishing
Even if you’ve never been to Berghain, you’ve been to Berghain, such is its place in our shared vision of nightlife at its most unrestrained. Perhaps you saw seen an industrial club that looks suspiciously like it in John Wick: Chapter 4 last year, or maybe you watched blurry live streams of Lady Gaga launching ARTPOP there a decade ago. But perhaps no one has captured the dripping hedonism of the globally famous Berlin institution as beautifully as Geoffrey Mak does in the below excerpt from Mean Boys, the writer and critic’s new memoir-in-essays.
Documenting Mak’s dive into subcultures around the world as he shook off the constraints of an evangelical childhood, the boy in this particular essay is the author’s friend Ben, a locally famous bon vivant who was “like a bottle of sunshine: compulsively dazzling, but if you swallowed it, it would kill you.” After moving to Berlin in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Mak found himself — a self-described “skinny Chinese kid from the suburbs” — thrust into the orbit of the dancers, DJs, models, and professional leisure lovers who frequented Berghain, losing themselves in the thumping 4/4 beat at weekend-spanning parties like Klubnacht.
Over the course of those endless techno-fueled nights, Mak writes that he found “rules to live by”: principles of freedom, communication, and community care that he still abides to this day. But the “most important” one, he concludes, is knowing “when to leave the party.” — Samantha Allen
Mean Boys: A Personal History by Geoffrey Mak
$29.00, Bookshop
When Ben and I started going to Berghain, it felt like a rite of passage into some hermetic gay cult. Everything was discreet and fetishistic. We went every weekend, all summer. Our weekly party routine started on Friday, with a “warm- up” party, and then some bigger gay parties on Saturday at outer venues, such as Griessmuehle or ://about blank. At sunrise, we’d get back to our place and take a nap. Then on Sunday afternoon, we’d put on music and drink cheap wine while trying out different outfits in front of our hallway mirror. Our looks alternated from punk to health goth: combat boots, black vintage tees, and knee-high football socks. I remember Ben had these torn up Docs, which he had to pin together with a row of safety pins, like a tiny aluminum spine, that all came apart throughout the course of the night. Another time, I wore two oversize belts I bought at the market, clipped together with safety pins and cross-looped around my shoulders and back like a DIY harness. I had an elaborate system for where I stashed my drugs and how I recognized my bags when, at some late point in the night, speed or coke or K would all look like clumps of fungible white sugar.
We mostly went to Berghain on Sunday afternoons. Once we got in, we’d go out and tour the garden, find some people we knew, and then go off to the bathroom to split lines parceled out on our iPhones. Coke and ketamine we called “Calvin Klein,” and ketamine with MDMA, “Kate Moss.” We snorted both with rolled up euros, or tiny steel straws, which people either were or weren’t weird about sharing with strangers. From the downstairs bathroom, we’d walk upstairs to Berghain’s main hall, before which stood a massive white statue of Dionysus, a stand-in for bodily hedonism in dialectic with the technological severity of the club’s mechanistic aesthetic in neoclassical drag. Inside the main hall, there were no windows to the outside, yet the high, glass panels that divided the dance floor from the bar lent the space the autocratic aura of a cathedral.
The crowd was filled with a curated cast of recognizable characters: shirtless leather gays, models from the Eastern Bloc set, cybergoths, new wave porn stars, speed freaks from the hardcore scene, and art world intellectuals. Ben and I usually lost one another in the crowd, found other friends, moved between “upstairs” and “downstairs,” or drifted into lines for the bathroom stalls to share drugs, buy drugs, or take a shit because E gave you the runs. It wasn’t uncommon to run into somebody I knew from New York who was in town for the weekend: DJs doing the European festival circuit or artists stopping by in the city before exhibiting at Basel. This is how I got most of my social news — six-month recaps in the garden, sharing a bottle of Club-Mate between us in concrete cubicles beneath the trees.
All throughout the building hummed the 4/4 beat associated with techno, looped in perpetuity: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. This music is often identified by a rhythmic system from 120 to 140 BPM, into which changes and revolutions are gradually introduced by a modification of individual components in exquisite relation to each other. At Berghain, a closing techno set can run up to fifteen hours. To some of the techno DJs I know, a set that lasts one hour is considered “light”; two hours, “enough to work with”; four hours, “standard”; and eight to fourteen hours, merely “a challenge” and curiously not “unreasonable.” It’s perhaps by this logic that techno makes people “lose their minds” at the rave, in the sense that the phrase is also used to mean maniacal. After spending upward of twenty hours in a single club, a combination of sustained sleep deprivation, drugs, and exhaustion from having not eaten contributes to a sophisticated delirium. In a meditative state, the conscious mind becomes vacant to receive the unknown. It is possible to fall into multiple states of consciousness at once, like sleepwalking through a lucid dream. Only after the repeated breakdown and exhaustion of one’s restrictive faculties — what might be considered bodily system failure — can the secret life of one’s mind be permitted to flourish, completely uninhibited, at ten in the morning, when you are beyond dehydrated, skin slicked smooth by the salt of your sweat.
“When gratification is deferred to such an attenuated state, the anticipation becomes palpable. Tension hovers like a forecast of thunder. Static seems to gather in the air, crackling and fizzing with expectation.”
Toward Klubnacht’s final stretch, when Sunday begins to vibrate into Monday, people socialize in the lounge or go out and get food before coming back. Others take more drugs, burn out fast, leave. The gays, losing interest in the dance floor, go to fuck in the darkrooms, where monotonous music is preferred, allowing sexual rhythms to ride their course, uninterrupted by sudden gyrations or beat drops in the music. In fact, the kind of techno played during these hours, from one to four, resembles an intensely slow simmer, refined to an almost perverse level, like the way sex happens in these places over drawn-out periods of time, with shared partners moving in and out of the orgy’s physical configurations.
Like candlelit chapels, the darkrooms are austere and dim. People rarely talk, except for basic negotiations, reducing communication to glance and touch. Men cruise each other, standing along the periphery, masturbating while others fuck against the wall or on stools or on the leather sling. “Rave music has always been structured around the delay of climax: mantra-as-Tantra,” writes Simon Reynolds. “Instead of the tension/climax narrative of traditional pop, rave music creates a feeling of ‘arrested orgasm,’ a plateau of bliss that can be neither exceeded nor released.” Orgasm becomes less “the point” here than the delayed promise that allows the pleasure of sexual tension to cull and relax.
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When gratification is deferred to such an attenuated state, the anticipation becomes palpable. Tension hovers like a forecast of thunder. Static seems to gather in the air, crackling and fizzing with expectation. At some point in the early morning, after four but before six, the promised moment that only the club’s most serious regulars know to expect arrives. The dance floor has thinned out. New entrances to the club have closed. Then, music blasts like a gunshot, blitzing across the cheering and whistling crowd. Heads gather to the dance floor from all corners of the club, as if getting dragged into a whirlpool. The percussion comes suddenly and majestically, like a bolt, not from outside but from within the speakers, sizzling and electrifying along the wires and bursting onto the dance floor. With the lights spasmodically flashing across the building, you’d think it was Beyoncé at the Super Bowl. The building declares its soul in these moments, the way a machine achieves formal ecstasy when used at maximum capacity. Rhythm propels your body. Between the ground and the ceiling, it seems, is the universe contained, and it is moving. Lights bend off lacquered skin in a million tiny laser beams as we move in unison to the same beat. In the music, desire and gratification become one, both terrifying and propulsive. Joy cuts like rain. I often experienced this as a release, but into what, I couldn’t determine. It wasn’t us in control, and it wasn’t exactly the DJ, but it was something that everyone undeniably felt and knew like an instant ravening. Our insatiable hunger for it matched the inexhaustibility of its pleasure, and that’s exactly what it was, pleasure, abundant and overflowing. To know this kind of pleasure is to know the body at its maximum capacity. There isn’t any faith required; it is absolute presence.
Excerpted from Mean Boys: A Personal History. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2024 by Geoffrey Mak.
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