Personal notes based on limited knowledge.
Half journal half guide.
Not definitive, just things I like.
Berghain:
My Berghain success ratio is 2:2. Two acceptances, two rejections. My favorite time of the four was a rejection. My favorite time was at 5:30am and it was early September but the mornings were already starting to get frosty and I walked to Berghain three miles from another club.
Here is what happens when you approach Berghain at dawn: the surroundings start to get industrial and where before you were alone, suddenly, silently, you are tracing in the footsteps of shadowy duos that are materializing in the hazy morning along the peripheries of the outlines of warehouses. You realize that everyone is moving towards the same place. You split from your friend outside the Berghain spätkauf because rumor has it you do better in line if you’re alone.
Here is what happened to me on the morning of my Favorite Berghain Rejection: I waited two hours and when the Australian girls in front of me asked me for a lighter I didn’t answer because rumor has it you aren’t supposed to speak in line. Every few minutes, artists in leather would walk past the masses in waiting and be swallowed by the building and the sun was rising and the men behind me were whispering that it was fashion week so the crowd was cool and the air was otherwise silent and the building was pulsing from the music but it was more a vibration than a sound. I was shaking in the cold so violently that my body almost didn’t feel like my own. When I got to the front the bouncer asked how old I was and I said I was 22 and then she shook her head no and I drifted back through the sunrise to the outskirts of the warehouses where the road meets the wasteland and where I ordered an uber. I didn’t mind. I was cold. I guess I didn’t have the je ne sais quoi.
The shower of my Berlin apartment was full of plants and all glass and facing South and when I got home the sun was high in the sky and I turned the water as hot as it gets and I let black eye makeup wash down my body and pour down the drain and I watched the sun pour through the window and reflect off the warehouses outside and it felt almost better to have seen the building pulsing from a distance and to have left it at that.
Here are some things that happened when I actually got into Berghain: There is an ice cream machine, there is a bar that feels rather fancy for being located inside the apparent Grittiest Place In The World, there is expensive art, there are people leading each other around on leashes, there are dark rooms, there is a dance floor that my friend who is Spiritual said was playing music in the frequency of Satan but that I liked, there are big windows facing up so you can only see the sky and not the ground and sometimes you catch a glimpse of the light and no matter if it’s day or night you’re surprised that anything else still exists outside. There are a lot of people who like to stay on the dance floor for days at a time. I had about five hours in me and then I went home and I still think I liked the line more than being inside. There’s a mystique to watching a building pulse with music you can’t hear that I think embodies why people find this place magic more than anything else. But what do I know? I got rejected twice.
To Get a Tattoo:
The location of the studio where I got My Berlin Tattoo is secret (only available if the artist sends it to you specifically which makes it feel niche). I only have two tattoos total and the first is four tiny triangles symbolizing “the elements” that I got during a borderline manic episode in Budapest when I was 18. I’m not qualified to give tattoo recommendations but I liked the Berlin tattoo place. I like Schoenberg (where the secret location is) and I liked the tattoo artist who was nice to me even though I was an hour late and I like the fine lines of the ink and the artistry they use. Of my two tattoo experiences, the Berlin one wins out. My Berlin tattoo is based on a painting by Emily Cole who is Thomas Cole’s daughter and who is not famous but who has beautiful sketches hanging on the wall in the Thomas Cole House in the Hudson Valley. I also really like the Hudson Valley. The Green Valley sketched in Gray Berlin. What I don’t like is tattoos that have too much meaning. The name of the studio is Golf Club Berlin and I think it’s the best.
Techno
Here are my techno notes that extend beyond Berghain: Renate (the best) — also Sisyphus and Anomalie Art Club. I don’t like About Blank but the garden is dope and everyone loves Tresor but I’ve never had fun there.
Wild Zur Renate is my favorite place in Berlin. One of them, at least. The first time I went to Renate it was with my sister in June and the landscape felt vast and new and with no comprehension of how the city unfolds, I felt like the uber there was winding away from Berlin entirely and towards something that I was sure was secret. There are high walls outside the garden and there is smoke that seeps through the upper window panes onto the street and the first time the bouncer asked my sister and I who we were there to see we said we didn’t know and so we didn’t get in. Later, we came back at dawn and my sister said she’d flown all the way from the States for Unhuman’s set. After that, we were granted entry. Unhuman is a techno artist that neither of us had heard of before. Renate is in an old apartment building and the rooms are still intact which means the dance floors are small and the hallways are endless and the interior seems to stretch on and up and as you wander through it like a maze. Like deja vu to a childhood dream where I’m walking through a house that has no end.
There is a sign that hangs above the garden: DEAR FUTURE NEIGHBORS. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: THIS CORNER HAS BEEN DEDICATED TO CULTURE, MUSIC, AND ARTS FOR MANY YEARS. THE SOUND BELONGS TO THIS AREA AND SHOULD BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT BEFORE BUYING OR RENTING SPACE HERE. THANK YOU.
After I started going to Renate every weekend I started to realize that it actually was extremely easy to get in. The last time I went to Renate, I realized that I was starting to know my way around. The last time I went to Renate I was sitting in the garden and a group of American boys started asking me about Where I Went To College and How I Ended Up Doing An Internship In Berlin and I realized I was starting to wish I was at Berghain and then I realized that I was starting to feel jaded and then I decided it was ok that I was leaving Berlin the next day because I never want to become jaded to places that I truly do think are magic.
Crying at sunsets
If you take a car to what feels at first like the suburbs and what is actually just a corner of Neukolln and if you find a shopping mall there and if take the elevator up to the 5th floor garage, you will find a line of people drinking beer and dressed in black that snakes around the premises. At the end of the line, you will find a ticket booth and a driveway stretching up to the rooftop, and on the rooftop you will find a beer garden, string lights, two bars, fake Jeff Koons reconstructions, a club in what looks like a makeshift beach hut, a sandbox, a dance floor and vista views that stretch over the entirety of the hazy sunset that is settling across Berlin. The TV tower will look like it is on fire and the glow of living room light through people’s windows will start to flicker on throughout the city at only a few shades of separation from the color of the fading sky. This is not my favorite sunset in Berlin.
My favorite sunset in Berlin is walking home in the type of early September dusk where it’s only cold when the sun starts to go down and where I’m walking on the wide boulevards that cut through the whole city and where I walked on everyday. No matter where you stand on those boulevards, the TV tower always looks like it’s the end of the line and it always looks like it’s directly in front of you. There’s a sense of limitless space to those boulevards that reminds me of places I’ve been before. The boulevard sunsets reminded me of Budapest and it reminded me of what sunsets look like when you’re driving on the highway and it reminded me of the type of repetition that I like in the mundane. Sometimes these sunsets made me panic because they gave me deja vu and they made me think about how I swore I’d seen this same sunset before but now that was four years ago and they made me think about how time passes too fast and so these sunsets were nostalgic, but I still like nostalgic sunsets best.
The Greens
The Greens is a coffee shop where everything is green. Where there is a loft and wild plants and light streaming through the windows and earl gray tea cake and outside, more gardens and a warehouse complex. Often, outside, there are also pop up art events, and with them, a sense that this complex in which The Greens is located is alive with energy and unmarked spaces, and people running in and out who somehow all seem as if they are meant to be there. My first time at The Greens I bought green lemonade and I sat in the loft and then after, nearby, I sat in an art exhibit that was simulating the ocean after the water freezes over for good. The simulation was about the apocalypse but the shades of blue projected were peaceful. When I went back to The Greens, the art exhibit next door was gone, and in its place was an opera. I don’t like opera and so I didn’t go in, but the sounds echoed through the parking lot and the coffee shop and down the hallways that snake through the rest of the complex. I don’t know what the rest of the complex is for. It’s called Alte Munez though, and it seems like something different every time.
Mars (and its neighbors)
Mars is in a crematorium in Wedding on the edge of Silent Green. Silent Green is a museum and event space and a garden that is full of light and sculptures and a smooth glass building that creates stark sense of departure from the rest of the neighborhood's gritty exterior. In Mars, you can order cocktails and octopus tacos and you can listen to live violin music float across the garden and through the neighboring graveyard and around the shadows of the crematorium chimney. Before the new owners moved into the space, they brought an energy healer to test the residual waters. A crematorium, they were worried, would hold onto a past that was not conducive to peaceful violin music and colorful small plates. The energy healer said the space was already perfect, though, and while I don’t necessarily believe in energy healers, I would have been surprised if they found anything dark here. Silent Green does not feel dark. The gates to Mars are always open and the lawn is full of picnickers and the flowers are swarmed by honey bees and dragonflies and it obviously should be pretentious but it isn’t. Other places near Mars are Freya Fuchs and The Forsberg and Panke. It took me three tries to find Panke, tucked into the back of a Berlin classic warehouse complex on the edge of the river, but on the third try I found a dark and arguably grimy but also cool dance floor and a beer garden hidden behind a fence by the river. There are glowing neon signs that could almost be apocalyptic but that feel cheerful here. Freya Fuchs is a candlelit dive bar and the Forsberg is a neighborhood spot that actually feels like it belongs to a neighborhood in a way that you can’t find when you’re closer to Berghain or Kreuzberg.
Other bars:
Other bars I like are: Multilayerladen (Famous. In Kreuzberg. Full of swings and bunk beds and little candles and when you finish your drink you can send it down in a little cart on a pulley back towards the main bar. The coziest spot). Filmkunstbar (Dancefloor on the weekends, quiet on the weekdays. The owners have a dog I like and the basement is full of vintage DVDs). Klunkerkranich (Secret mall rooftop with my second favorite sunset). Salut Bar (the best cocktails and you have to ring a doorbell to get in after certain hours so this place still feels secret).
Other food:
Other food I like is: Cookies Cream (Vegan. Also hidden. Everything I love most in Berlin is hidden, although now this spot is famous so its hidden attributes are intentional and arguably therefore less real. Still dope though. The website says to look for the chandelier if you want to find where to go. Then you have to ring a doorbell and ascend winding stairs and the meal is 8 courses and is one of the best I’ve had). Kink (Where I always go when people visit. Good octopus which is my favorite and a good rustic garden which creates a nice contrast with the bar inside that is dimly lit and streaked with red light). Katz Orange (A courtyard restaurant with fresh veggies and where I went with my mom on my first night in Berlin. The facade of Berlin is less pretty than most cities in Europe but then the courtyards are prettier and you feel like you’re at a dinner party and you feel like you’re in a garden). Clärchens Ballhaus (Where Tarentino filmed and where you can go to ballroom dance classes and where the food is actually German. The best German food I had was when I got stranded for one night in Cologne, but the best German food I had in Berlin was here.)
Riding the UBahn to the end of the line in the middle of the night:
Inevitable if you exist in Berlin after dark and particularly if you are trying to find your way to Sisyphus. The station will be empty enough that it will feel echoey, but not enough that you are actually alone, and as you drive by the techno clubs you will feel the music make the subway cars shudder. The fast food stands stay open in the stations and they cast a yellow glow across the gray space of the stations that, at 4am, will start to feel quiet even as the rest of the city stays fully alive.
Circus hotel:
The best hotel in Berlin and arguably the world. They have little licorice candies that they stock in every room and they host circus performers for free and they sometimes have contests to host other artists for free as well. The cocktails in the bar are good and I stayed here for 10 days in June and then another 10 days in August and so by the time I had left I had basically moved in. I’ve never spent as much time in a hotel before but I’ve also never found a hotel nearly as worth spending time in. Other things I like about the Circus Hotel: There are sculptures of funky animals in each room, there is an honors bar with mini bottles of wine on the roof and there are local pub crawls at the hostel bar next door, there is a little coffee shop and a little courtyard where you can drink the coffee from the coffee shop and there is also yoga on the roof although I never woke up in time to go.
Litchblick Kino
A tiny arthouse theater that is the type of theater where you should see movies that are too long to watch without being bored if you’re in a theater that isn’t cool. The theater only has a few seats (probably less than ten rows) but the film quality is beautiful and the sound is sharp and another nice touch is that the bathrooms are down a garden alleyway and they open with a large wooden key that stays otherwise hidden at the front desk. The theater is in Prenzlberg which is homey and cute and after watching three hour movies you can go to bars next door like Im Sontag August which are always busy and always good.
Uferhallen
I think that Uferhallen is the most special place in Berlin, but I can’t really speak on Uferhallen because this place is for artists and I only visited as an outsider. Berlin is more for the creation than the showing of art, and when studio space is more significant than gallery space then the essence of the work becomes more important. Then the essence becomes the process and not the product. The essence of Uferhallen proves this to be true. Uferhallen is on the outskirts of Wedding in a low industrial complex that was once a train station and was once so close to the wall that it was almost in No Man’s land and that now is peppered with wild flower and a restaurant in an abandoned bus and studio spaces stacked on the buildings flat roofs and no signs marking the space to outsiders, just sculptures rising out of cracks in the cement and painters studios visible through the slits in open doors. An artist showed me around Uferhallen and he showed me the way the flat roofs of the space meet the openness of the sky and he showed me how if luxury architects built up on off these roofs then the light would be trapped above the new highrise buildings and then the wildflowers on the cracked pavement ground would wilt. There’s an appreciation for the openness of space here that makes the concept of unused land seem particularly sacred. There’s beauty in the lack of utility that comes with cement and brush strokes and low flat roof buildings lined with wildflowers.