Underground Berlin: Past and Present by Stephen Emms
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“If you’re faced by the Wall every morning, it’s dark all day,” says Steve Morell, DJ, musician, and one of Berlin’s legendary night-owls. “Even though we were just in the West, it felt apocalyptic; I thought it’d never end.”
It’s a blue-skied morning outside The Rauchhaus, one of the oldest squats in Berlin, right up by the former death strip. I’ve come to see how the city’s changed in the 20 years since the Wall fell, with the help of Steve and my old friend Nackt, from the cult Berlin band Warren Suicide. The idea is a personal road trip across the spaces that have transformed their cultural landscape.
Before 1989, Kreuzberg was the centre of alternative youth culture in West Berlin, and the Rauchhaus, a neo-Romanesque hospital, was on the eastern tip of this once desolate neighbourhood, enclosed by both the Landwehr canal and the Wall. Named after leftwing radical George Van Rauch, it now welcomes visitors, but check their Web site first. If you don’t mind sharing with strangers, a bed in the ‘international guest room’ is fairly inexpensive, but if that sounds a little scary, its Smoke House parties offer lashings of authentic Berlin spirit on the second weekend of each month.
“This area was incredible,” says Steve (nee Stephan Kraus), who arrived from Frankfurt in 1984, aged 17, to squat with 40 other left-wing activists. We are standing in bright sun by discarded painted doors, tyres, filing cabinets and dilapidated 1940s trucks lining the pavement.
“There were squats everywhere and some amazing bands,” he said, “very influential in Germany, all used to record at the Rauchhaus, like Ton Steine Scherben and Fehlfarben. But it was the best and the worst of times: there were constant police raids; I’d hear shootings through the night behind the Wall and read on the front page of the paper the next day what had happened outside our door.”
When the Wall fell, a third of the buildings lay empty in the eastern half of city, and techno activists from areas like Kreuzberg began to search for new spaces to party: by early 1990, the first improvised clubs opened, as basements became bars, and unused municipal buildings – from warehouses to power stations – formed a spider’s web of a DIY scene.
We jump into Steve’s golden Opel Vectra to drive east along the former no-man’s land of Bethaniendamm. At Schilling Bridge, we reach Maria, a seminal music venue in Frederichshain that opened in 1992. Nackt and Steve agree that this former storage unit on the sandy banks of the river Spree is ‘one of Berlin’s Top five.’ “It’s as famous for indie/rock bands as for techno,” says Nackt, who left the small town of Burghausen for Berlin just after the Wall came down. “Warren Suicide have played amazing shows here, and so have Peaches, CSS, Simian.”
Frederichshain was one of the most heavily bombed parts of Berlin in the Second World War, with more than half its buildings destroyed and the allies specifically targeting its industries (it housed Berlin’s central wheat and rye mill, as well as its first hospital).
The area still feels bleak, dominated by Soviet-era housing blocks and the wide sea of railway tracks leading to the Ostbahnhof, as well as one of the longest surviving sections of Wall, now the 1.3 km Eastside Gallery, its 100 or so post-revolution images – including the famous kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker – crisply re-painted this year.
With its low rents (compared to West Berlin) the area is now being ploughed (or plagued) by corporate monsters – the 02, MTV Europe, Universal Music – as part of an ongoing construction project along the Spree, dubbed Mediaspree. The boys, along with Berlin’s youth, are worried the clubs will close to make way for riverside apartments.
“Already Bar 25 – an institution – has shut,” says Nackt, “but then again, it’s been having closing parties for ten years.”
Talk turns to Ostalgie, the rising wave of nostalgia for the old East Germany, from the resurrection of brands of foods to the interactive GDR museum in Mitte, where you can try out a Trabant, or pretend to be a Stasi officer.
“Look,” says Steve, wagging a finger from the wheel at a Soviet block, “the whole Ostalgie thing is so big tourists can even stay in a ‘typical GDR apartment’ with 1950s furniture.” We laugh.
“Anything goes in there,” he says. We are bumping along a sandy track – the city was built on sand – towards an imposing power station in Frederichshain, where wide-eyed kids drift outside in colourful T-shirts, and a row of yellow cabs lies in wait for their blurry business. It’s a hot Sunday afternoon, but punters will have been going since Saturday night; some clubs keep going until Monday evening.
“This is The Berghain,” says Steve, as we step out. “For years it was known as the Ostgut – now it’s one of the most famous clubs in Berlin.” The boys hope to show me the Panorama bar with its Wolfgang Tillmans artworks, and the thud of minimal techno bangs like a headache. Can we take a photo inside? We ask nicely. “No,” he growls, “and no journalists.” We turn round to leave. “I’ve seen things in there I couldn’t even repeat,” says Steve, with a devilish smile.
So it’s off to somewhere more cultural. Haus Schwarzenberg is an old laundry factory in Mitte that is now a café/bar, gallery and cinema; it’s where Steve loves to DJ, and Nackt’s fellow band member Cherie has shown her art. As we enter a dark, flag-strewn alley lined with picnic benches, Steve explains that it’s run by artist duo the Dead Chickens, who moved here in 1995 after being based in Kreuzberg in the 1980s.
We sip cappuccino in the peeling courtyard, and Steve shows me the bar spooked with the artists’ famous ‘monster’ artworks. “It’s the last oasis of real alternative art in the city,” he says, as we climb grafittied stairwells to explore the white spaces of the Neurotitan gallery upstairs, which specializes in comics and graphic art.
There are few cities whose mythology is so closely tied to its nightlife, and back down in the courtyard, conversation bounces round other seminal eastside clubs – Bang Bang (GDR décor again), Tresor (housed in the main central-heating power station of Berlin), ZMF (in the basement of the biggest furniture factory for the east, “kind of rotten but in a nice way,” says Steve) and Lovelite (“a typical warehouse, like so many clubs in Frederichshain, in the middle of nowhere,” says Nackt).
The inevitable commercialisation of nightlife has, of course, long since taken place, but the boys agree that an underground creativity still pervades – if you avoid the weekend ‘clubbing tourists’ who fly in just to hang out at the Berghain or Tresor. And the unification of East and West Germans at the first techno parties as the Wall fell is celebrated in the annual festival, the Love Parade.
But there are more places to tick off today, so we speed off again, in Steve’s old car, towards Kaffee Burger, a classic East German boozer, which dates back to the mid 1930s and has Fifties GDR lettering on the windows. A faded poster advertises its famous fortnightly Russian discos, and inside, the aged décor is visible under bright lighting. It’s easy to imagine the secret meetings of political dissidents, over wheat beer and schnapps, here in the mid-70s, as they plotted an escape to the West. “It’s been around forever,” says Nackt, “but it’s still a cool after-hours place.”
The Volksbuhne in Mitte was a theatre, originally built in 1914, but rebuilt in 1954 after devastation in the war, hence its Soviet appearance. “Its name means Free People’s Theatre,” says Steve. “Before the Wall came down, it would have shown plays by Brecht.”
Now it has the reputation of being one of the most experimental theatres in Germany, “where art meets rock.” The lads have both played here and pose outside proudly. “Warren Suicide sold this place out with a full string ensemble,” says Nackt, whilst Steve has thrown his renowned ‘Berlin Insane’ parties at the venue.
“Look at that sign,” Nackt climbs out of the car by a huge expanse of turfed grass, laddered with wooden platforms, where tourists appear shrunken as they nibble sandwiches. He’s pointing to the words Stadt Des Friedens. “City Of Peace,” he says. How ironic. This is the site of the former Palast Der Republik, the controversial Communist ‘Parliament, built in 1976 to rubber stamp decisions made by the Politburo, and finally pulled down earlier this year. The boys have mixed feelings about its destruction; in Berlin, after all, it’s impossible to hide the past.
“What should we do?’ asks Nackt, sarcastically. “Knock everything down that reminds us? What about the Reichstag?”
“There’s so much embarrassment here about the GDR,” agrees Steve. We lean on a pine fence as Nackt scratches in the words, ‘Stephen Was Here 09.’ “Now you’re part of Berlin’s history,” he says to me, “like Hitler.”
We end our road trip back in West Berlin, in Kreuzberg, whose main thoroughfare, Oranienstrasse, has long been a focus for alternative subcultures. It’s Roman-straight, leafy in parts, and, halfway down, Steve points out where singer-songwriter Nick Cave lived in the Eighties, and nearby, the legendary club Trash (“a bit like the Electric Ballroom in London, but run by Hell’s Angels”), which no longer exists.
Current flavour of the month is the bar Luzia with its anything-goes music policy. Housed in an old butcher’s, it’s spacious, dark and heaving with bespectacled folk smoking on shabby sofas. “It’s a great place; they might do a double shot when you order a normal one,” says Steve.
Further down the street is the oldest club in Berlin. The SO36, named after its postcode and once frequented by Iggy Pop and David Bowie, has the feel of a community hall, albeit one drenched in pink and red lighting, but it’s played host to everything from gay Turkish nights to bands like the Dead Kennedys, Stiff Little Fingers and the Cramps.
As we grab a beer inside, Steve tells an extended story about a night here in the 80s, when riots exploded on the street between punks and the police, and he ended up being arrested – and freed – twice. Nowadays you’re more likely to get punters queuing in police drag, but sadly, the venue faces closure – not without protests along the street’s bars – due to noise reasons.
Before I leave, Nackt wants to show me Berlin’s hottest new area. The feeling amongst some Berliners is that East Berlin has ‘peaked’ – and anyway, after 20 years, the division between East and West is surely beginning to blur, isn’t it? Perhaps, say the boys, though people still talk of the Mauer im Kopf, or ‘Wall in the head’, the feeling that a psychological barrier still exists.
We snake round the corner of Kreuzberg and Neukolln (in the former West), known colloquially as ‘Kreuzkolln’, its main vein, Hobrechtstrasse, dark and unassuming. “The scene constantly shifts a bit further south or east,” says Nackt. He points out the bars Salon Petra and Mama, with their cracked walls, wonky lamps and packed crowds, but outside Raumfahrer (which means Spaceman), we stop. Tonight, alas, it’s closed, but Nackt says, “this is probably the coolest bar in Berlin simply because no one’s discovered it yet.”
The next evening, I return with my friend Tom to road-test his theory. It’s a spacious room, and we enjoy slugging back Pilsners on stools in its semi-wallpapered, red-lit interior. But Nackt’s right: it’s a place so hip that it really is empty.
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