Somebody managed to film inside Berghain

Berghain sits atop the pinnacle of European clubbing. It is a super club. It is a secret club. Its door policy is so legendary that its bouncers end up writing memoirs. Rolling Stone described this techno mecca as a “religious experience.” More than anything, Berghain is the nightclub with a reputation for being impossibly hard to get into. Its unbreachability and inaccessibility  to garden variety techno chasers only adds to its enormous standing and allure.

The question all the exclusivity builds to is simple. What could possibly be going down inside this place to make so many people so desperate to get in? Left purely to the imagination the inside of Berghain is anything you want it to be. For me, I always pictured it as a sort of grungy, heroin chic late 90s bacchanal, very much resembling the first scene in Blade, the only place in the world where a man can wear a fetish-y floor-length leather trench coat and look good in it.

But the inside of Berghain isn’t like this:

It looks like this:

Phone cameras are supposedly taped up before entry, so it goes without saying that videos and pictures aren’t supposed to happen inside Berghain. We could debate the rights and wrongs of what’s happened here. On one hand it’s a dick move to go into a club that specifically asks you not to use a camera and then go in and use a camera anyway. There’s probably enough grounds to delete the video.

On the other hand, out of sheer voyeuristic curiosity, there’s something fascinating about getting a look inside Berghain, and judged on that 43 seconds, something disappointing about it as well. It could be any big club in any big city. It’s smoky, sweaty, ecstatic. The people don’t look like extras from the Matrix. They look, simply, like people. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the kid with double vodka orange in the Fabric smoking area.

Maybe the fact that it’s not different from any other club is why the owners of Berghain are so keen to stop people taking pictures in there.