Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #5 "Berlin Nights"

Istvan Banyai's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Berlin Nights"

At its most basic level, Nick Paumgarten’s superb “Berlin Nights” is about getting into a bar. But not just any bar. The one he wants to access is Berghain – “the most famous techno club in the world.” It’s located in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. Paumgarten says of it,

Berghain’s renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the d.j.s 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.

Note that “stringent and mysterious door policy.” The question of whether Paumgarten will be let in hangs over the piece, giving it a magnetic tinge of narrative tension. “Berlin Nights” is one of the most evocative pieces Paumgarten has ever written. Here’s his description of another Berlin bar, Tresor (this is a few days before he goes to Berghain):

At around 2:30 A.M., I left for Tresor. The walk was about a mile along deserted streets, past giant apartment blocks. It was like a zombie movie set in the outskirts of Helsinki. I tacked toward a pair of giant smokestacks, red lights blinking slow. The original Tresor closed in 2005, and eventually the land was sold to a developer. In 2007, Hegemann and his partners opened a new Tresor in a gigantic decommissioned power plant on Köpenicker Strasse, on the Spree. I had no trouble getting in. Inside, an assault of pounding primal techno lured me down a corridor of smoke and strobes, into a smoky basement, figures appearing and disappearing in it like ships in fog. It didn’t seem crowded, but everyone looked to be in a world of his own, some speedy, others half catatonic. The music was muscular, unrelenting. The d.j. stood behind steel bars, as though in a cell, and pressed buttons on two laptops. I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim. One could admire this music—the rigor, the noise, the industrial badassness of it—but after a while it began to seem absurd. 

I got a beer from a stern bartender and went to stand in front of a wall of old blackened safe-deposit boxes from Wertheim– oh god, I wish I’d written that! It’s one of the great Paumgartenian sentences – where “great” means specific, surreal, experiential, vivid.

“Berlin Nights” is divided into ten sections. Section 9 is the climax, where we find out if Paumgarten is allowed into Berghain. Paumgarten writes,

On wide, empty streets, I rehearsed my pidgin-Deutsch greeting—“Ich bin auf der Hausliste”—and walked past superstores that had sprung up in recent years on vacant lots. Before long, I fell in with a few other cloaked figures and came upon a line of taxis, then followed a muddy path along a metal grate toward the old power station, an industrial-deco block of stone and concrete. Berghain. Through the windows you could hear the kick drum and see flashing colored lights. The line wasn’t long: a few dozen bundled and murmuring souls. I circumvented it, as instructed, and waited by the entrance while the bouncer, a big square-jawed crewcut man in an overcoat, dealt with some supplicants. He was in intense but quiet conversation, as though about a medical condition, with two young men with the sides of their heads shaved. Turks, perhaps.

Here’s the decision:

“Ich bin . . .” The bouncer disappeared inside. I’d been told that the list was no guarantee. I also knew that they didn’t want me in their club. (“You’re an American,” I’d been told, “and to them that makes you a Puritan.”) After a moment, he came back out with two other bouncers. They looked me up and down, then motioned me in. Another man patted me down. Nearby, Sven Marquardt, the infamously intimidating tattooed bouncer, was talking and laughing with a group. He didn’t look so scary, at least compared with the others. At a ticket window, a man stamped my wrist and said, “See? Easy.”

Paumgarten puts us squarely there, inside Berghain:

Through a door was a big concrete hall. Coat check: the operation was brisk. For a chit, you got a dog tag to wear around your neck, so you wouldn’t lose it. I tried some doors and found them to be locked, and realized that Berghain proper wasn’t open until the following night. Tonight was just Panorama Bar, an evening billed as “Get Perlonized!,” a celebration of the music of Perlon, a small but beloved Berlin techno and house record label. I walked up some side stairs decorated with giant photo portraits of the resident d.j.s, who were all, it seemed, forbiddingly handsome, and, at a small bar half hidden behind a grate, ordered a Club-Mate—an herbal energy drink—into which, as is the custom, I poured a shot of vodka, and then went Carrawaying around.

The thereness of this piece is exquisite! Section 10, the last section, is a beauty. It’s Saturday night (“or really Sunday morning”); Paumgarten is back at Berghain. He writes,

I had a shot of Jägermeister and an espresso and went out onto the dance floor and stood in front of one of the speakers. There were six of them, each about the size of a Trabant. The sound was revelatory, the deep bass tones like a drug. A d.j. named Mathew Jonson, from Vancouver, had taken over the booth for an improvisational turn with two others, who performed under the name Minilogue. The three men hunched over laptops and mixers as though herding tiny animals with their hands. Jonson had a curly mop of hair and a beard, and looked like some wild ape-man of electronica. The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it.

The piece ends wonderfully, memorably (with maybe a hint of sexual arousal?). Paumgarten is in Berghain’s Panorama Bar, observing a d.j. named Heidi playing a set of Chicago house and Detroit techno:

After a few hours, Heidi stretched her back and leaned into the climax of her set. Downstairs, the techno—and the crowd—had turned hard. Upstairs, the dingy gray light of another Baltic morning leaked past the edges of the louvred shutters at the windows. Soon the shades would flash open in synch with the music, to astonish the congregation with the insult of daylight.

Those last two sentences are amazing! The whole piece is amazing – a techno-drenched tour de force.