The History of the World’s Greatest NightclubsAfter the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new counter-culture emerged as the city came together to form a new identity. That cultural shift inspired the birth of Berghain, an iconic but ultra-private techno hotspot and sex club. Berghain ushered in a new era of hedonism, excess, and freeing secrecy that gave the city’s queer community a space to release their inhibitions and establish Berlin’s place as a party capital.
Part of the allure of the world's biggest nightclubs is exclusivity. The world inside the club is your oyster. If the bouncil lets you in, it helps to make the community you find inside the club that much more special and unique. Those kind of clubs come with their own set of rules. In this episode, we're traveling to Berlin, Germany to take you inside of a club known as one of the most famously private, selective, and sexiest nightclubs in the world, Bergheim.
It's called the tapest door in the world.
Bergheim is arguably the hardest club to get into. Media is not allowed and the owners don't give interviews. This is part of what defines this legendary venue. Doesn't matter who you are, and even if you're lucky enough to get in, you're not promised the second night, and his strict door policy helps to protect the community inside. This club was made for queer people and allies who want to break away from mainstream society.
One of the overarching goal of the selection policy is to try to create a space where those who might feel rejected in other spaces feel home, and that's big parts of what makes it so special.
That's Claudio he was born and raised in Berlin, but for him, you're not truly from Berlin until you've partied in Bergheim. So when Claudial turned eighteen, he made it his mission. He was going to get into that club. It was a freezing cold fall night, nearly a decade ago.
People are drinking, people are laughing, having fun.
Claudio and a group of friends walk up to the towering stone building and get in line. They've been standing in line for a good few hours. They're chilling, they're cracking jokes. They're making their way up the line.
But the close do you get to the door, the more the conversation's diet gets quiet, get tense, and people are like excited, and people make sure their outfit is the way they want to be seen. They stop smiling and they try to look cool.
They're a rows and rows of people, each of them trying to play it cool, but at the same time desperately locking eyes with the one person who could grant them admission.
The entrance to Burkaine and there's like infamous bouncer with his crew. His name is friend Mark Uat and he's quite a quite a character.
Spin is the kind of person who used to wear bow ties because he likes the way they compliment his barbed wire face tattoos.
And his job is really to make sure that the crowd in there is composed of people who know how to party, who create a good vibe.
Sven and the bouncers at Burke Eye are looking for a certain look.
The bouncers only admit people that they see an edge or value for the party, or that they know very well. So you can either earn your admission by just being persistent and going there quite Sometimes.
Your look it has to be fire. You need to be there to create the party vibe, and that can mean whatever you want. At the door, Spinn was doing more than checking IDs. He was curating. Sometimes when you approach the bounces at Burgheym, when you finally make it to the rope at the front entrance, the bouncers just stand there for a minute, feeling you out. The anticipation grows, and more often than not they turn to you and politely say not tonight, and that's your cue to exit the line. This one night, though Claudio and his friends rolled the dice.
We approached the bouncer, it got serious. Where in little groups like I think two three groups of two three people each and then just one group after the other tried it and failed miserably, so none of us got in, but.
He was undeterred. So he tries again another night.
And to this time we split up in like two two and I was alone, and same procedure, and this time everyone got bounced.
But then the bouncer looked him up and down.
I got in and that was when I got addicted.
Even today, he has no idea why he was chosen that night. No one has been able to crack that code, but he was willing to leave behind his friends for a shot at his first night at Bergheim.
From this weekend on, really, I didn't miss an opportunity to go to Berken for about two three years. I went there, certainly more than one hundred times.
Claudio says the community at Bergheim was really what sucked him in. He says he became addicted to getting in, to being immersed in that scene.
Ye have crazy fomo and as just really vibrant, and it feels like a school excursion at some point where he just enter and I always went alone because just from the first couple of times in there, I met so many people there that I didn't want to come with other people and would be limited in my ability to roam moraunt and talk to different people.
So I really appreciate or.
Really love this going there on my own, being completely independent, and then having so many acquaintance and loose friends and party friends in there that really make the night yours that you own, that you control, but you're still not alone.
If you could get through the gauntlet outside and cross the threshold into the club, a night at Bergheim was a choose your own adventure. You were never alone, but going alone meant you had the freedom to make the night whatever you wanted it to be. You were destined to find your new party family inside. For Claudio and clubgoers like him, it was intoxicating. The first night Claudio made it inside, he walked through a tiny steel door.
It looks even tinier when they're like four or five huge bouncers standing in front of it, and then it goes to the left where you've the checking room. So they do pretty intense body checks to make sure that you don't bring harmful things into the club.
They were looking for drugs, but Bergeine has a reputation of keeping drugs out it helps create a safe space inside. And then after the body check, he went to pay his cover.
And we went there for the first time with twelve euros. And then you're in front of the cote room.
The cloakroom is like the code check. Claudio starts to smile as he remembers this part.
In front of the cloakroom, everyone is changing their dresses. So the way you enter Berken is never the way you party there. So everyone comes with their party dresses, but they are hidden, like they're in a bag. Like no one dances in jeans or long pants because it's just way too hot and way too limiting.
The goal is to party in whatever feels most comfortable and freeing. You don't wear heels to a place like Burgey unless you can rage in them for twenty four hours. You could buy the most expensive outfit, but by the time you got inside, nobody cared what you were wearing. And instead of getting a number at Cocheck, you.
Actually get a chip that is on a leash and that you can put around your neck. And that's one aspect that I really like because psychologically like it unites the people because everyone is kind of wearing the same chain. Around their necks, which makes it feel a bit cultish or kinky.
It doesn't matter. It's the burg Hid way. The club has secret areas to hook up in, so of course cameras are a no no, but they don't take your camera or phone. There's just an unwritten rule. You honor their policy.
When you're the buddy check, they ask you to cover the camera phone with colorful stickers. It's strictly forbidden to take any photos inside the club, which makes a lot of sense because it just liberates people and it like what happens in Burkehne stays in Burken is probably one of the most oftenly quoted sayings from there. Also, there are no mirrors in the entire building, so it's really encouraging you to focus on what you experienced.
That's right, no mirrors anywhere, not even in the bathroom. Once you're inside, it's about your experience. The club isn't looking for you to take selfies in the bathroom to share with your friends on Instagram or TikTok. All comes back to privacy. Burguyn is an experience. It's dark inside, the windows are closed most of the time, and every once in a while as the night turns into early morning, a sliver of light might pour into the room from an opening door for a moment, breaking the spell of the darkened dance floor. The music journalist Tobias Rapp described it this way.
I always thought, it's like you feel like a vampire that gets attacked by the sunlight. It says, oh, no, the sunlight, there's reality out there. It says, if you're the creature of the night, you're an internal twilight zone of this club, like a vampire. And then you see, oh, and it's like an extra effect. The sunlight is like an extra effect that reminds you of the dangers of leaving.
And this is what makes Burgui In one of the most important and special nightclubs in the world. It's unlike anything else, and only though who have been lucky to get in understand that once you do, you might never come back. From London Audio iHeartRadio and executive producer Paris Hilton This is the History of the World's Greatest Nightclubs, a twelve part podcast about the iconic venues and people that revolutionized how we party.
World.
Some of the world's most legendary nightclubs were known for the unique community. They welcomed others for the cultural movements they started, and some for the musicians and DJs they introduced to the world. The best nightclubs champion new music, transform lives, and provide an escape from life's pressures. One more thing. This is the history of some of the world's greatest nightclubs. Not a ranking of every club in the world. It's an exploration of the spaces, people and club nights that made a lasting impact on nightlife and music. Today. I'm your host, Ultra Nate. I'm a singer, songwriter, musician, and I found my purpose in club culture. This is Episode nine. Berghein, Berlin, Germany. Bergein is part night club, part sex club. It's been opened since two thousand and four and remains ultra private to this day. It became a place for a new kind of counterculture after the fall of the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine. The city came together to heal and healing men, finding their own identity as one city not too Bergin revolutionized Berlin and put the city on the map as a party city and cultural epicenter. There's no way Bergin would have existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few years after World War Two, Germany was split into two separate republics, West Germany, which was an ally of the US, the UK, and France, and East Germany was an ally of the Soviet Union. But people living in the two Germanys had vastly different political, financial, and social lives. So to stop people from East Germany moving to the more prosperous West, in nineteen sixty one, the Soviet East built a wall that ran through the middle of Berlin. It represented the ideological divide between the East and West and just how divided the city had become. A few years later, in nineteen eighty nine, the Berlin Wall came down.
This was the night of the Big breakout. Checkpoints across Berlin had finally buckled before the extraordinary political pressures wrecking this frontline communist state.
At the time, TV news stations were televising people from the East side jumping over the wall and pulling concrete blocks down with their bare hands. After decades, the people of Berlin were coming together to reinvent themselves.
I moved to Berlin in nineteen ninety immediately after the war came down, and I spent the nineties going out. I was one of these people who were part of this crazy nightlift of the nineties.
That's Tobias Rapp, who we heard from a moment ago. He's a writer and a journalist for the newspaper Despigo. The wall coming down represented liberation, so people wanted to live it up, to go to parties and celebrate the new world they were stepping into.
There were like hundreds of groups of friends like me and my friends who just squatted something and did something with it, parties or art or whatever. And these are the roots of the Berlin nightlife.
So the city was in flux, and on the east side there was a ton of abandoned buildings everywhere. Back then, Berlin was nowhere near a destination city like it is today.
In the May of nineteen ninety, if you looked at East Berlin East, some part of the city back then, you had literally thirty percent of the city empty, like every third building was empty. And if you like, that's quite literal freedom.
But with newfound freedom came a multitude of opportunities and directions to take. It was all new for this healing city.
It was very difficult for Berlin to find a new identity after the war fell down, because it was difficult to find lines of tradition that you could feel a relation to. I always say Berlin has lots of history and not so much of tradition. And in the nineties there was a lot of cluelessness. Where are we? Who are we? What should we do?
Tobias wrote a book called Lost and Sound Berlin Techno and the Easy Jet Set. It's about techno subcultures and Berlin history. Berlin was trying to figure itself out, but Tobias says there was one thing they were one hundred percent clear on.
Berlin was always a gay city. So the gay community and the queer community was always very, very important in the city.
Berlin wanted to honor the queer community that had always been such an important part of its culture, and in two thousand and four bergheim was born back.
This the symbol not only for parties, it's also the symbol of what Berlin developed into being right now, because it's not something that the government invented or that big companies invented. It's something that has deep roots in the city.
Berghein founders Michael tay Flea and Norbert Thormann had a vision for a new kind of subculture.
To me and to lots of people, I think that subculture, music, nightlife is what constructed the real new identity of the city. I think it's impossible to underestimate how important this culture is for the definition of the city. This is who we are. We are a city that is not living in Prussian times. We are a city that lives in the twenty first century. And the symbol for all of this is Berkheim.
Norbert and Michael are famously known for not giving interviews, which adds to Berghein's private vibe. I guess the club is left to speak for itself, and I think it does. The building is massive. The founders were looking for a building with deep Berlin history, something that kept them grounded but gave them room to grow, and they found it.
They called us and we agreed on a site. Visit so and it's a really beautiful all power station in the middle of the city.
That's Thomas Carston. In two thousand and three, he and his wife Alexander Earhart started an architectural business called Studio Carhart in Berlin. He remembers the moment he walked into the gigantic building, which had been derelict for years.
From the first second we all experienced the kind of magic situation. It was very dark, it was dirty, but it was still an impressive building because so you walk in on ground level, but the view goes up eighteen meters to the ceiling. It's very high.
It was like walking onto the set of a Jurassic Park movie.
Little plants were growing inside and birds living there, flapping around. So the first visit was Kia Lipsay in expedition into something mysterious.
The industrial building was mysterious but a beautiful find, and the inside would be transformed, and there was one thing they were sure about.
We want to keep the look of this power station, so this shouldn't be touched.
The total transformation took one year, and by late two thousand and four the space was ready to roll. The opening night was hectic and nerve wracking.
I remember actually this each thing quite well because I think we have been there an hour before opening with the owners, with the bar people working at the door, and we, of course we sat there and just observed the people coming in and the community was at that time was a mixture of a gay community, and because it's a gay club, hit friendly, so it's a mixture gay people, not gay people partying together until today. And all these people were really excited and like high emotional when they entered. The was super emotional.
Almost instantly, it became a well known party spot and space to listen and dance to the best techno and electronic beats in the city in Cyberghind. Everyone was welcome, here's Tobias Rap again.
The opening party was one of these crazy events. I think it went on for seventy two hours and it was pretty wild. And I remember standing on the stairs that connect back line the Teco dance flow. I was standing there just watching this crazy dance floor and next to me was standing with huge two meters big dangerous looking skinhead, hooligan kind of guy. And he was standing there right beside you, and we were both watching the next one. And I looked at this huge, statious looking guy, and I was like, Hey, it's amazing, isn't it. And he looked at me and smiled and was like hugging me and was like, yeah, it's amazing. And to me, in a way, this stayed in my mind because to me on the streets. I would never have anything to do with this person. But this club in a way was able to transform, transform you for a night and makes you a better person.
In a way, a new kind of culture was born. It was a subculture.
You don't have to adhere to the super matrix rules of the commercial world.
You know.
That's DJ Cassei.
I'm a DJ, have been for the last twenty years, and right now I'm in Mexico for a gig.
We spoke to DJ Cassie. She was in Tuloom, a Mexican beach town and haven for tourists and party goers. Growing up, she never thought she'd become a DJ. She actually wanted to be an opera singer and who child, I know what that's like. I thought I was going into medicine. After years of playing at other underground parties, the burg Eyne owners liked her sound and gave her a shot. She became a resident DJ at Burgeyn, and the club's culture was everything she wanted.
No one gave a fact where we came from, what we were doing. No one gave a fuck if they were a gay or straight, or in a closet and having some fun anyway. On the weekend, you know, like just trying to figure out who they were, and I was trying to figure out who I was, and I was allowed to figure out who I was.
As a DJ.
DJ Cassie played at Bergheim during its opening month back in four the winter.
The best time to go out, and Berlin usually was from I would say January to April because weather was shit great.
You really didn't care if.
You were hanging out in a club for twenty four hours.
It was a Friday night and she was twenty nine. As she walked into the club, she had an overwhelming sense that she was stepping into something otherworldly, something holy.
The massive cathedral church sheet tend me to hire room, you know, and it had like this gallery on the side with a glass walls.
You might have heard tracks at the time like this one hard minimal, driving, powerful yet curious, like hard boots walking down a snowy sidewalk on a cold Berlin night. Cassie would take the other route through the back door and end up in another part of the club.
When you're in Bergheim, you can walk to the left and then walk up the stairs and then you go into Panorama Bar.
Cassie would play at the Panorama Bar, one of the two main rooms in Bergheim, the Panorama Bar.
It has the shutters that lay close down when the daylight comes, but it's never really dark because it's not a blackout shutter, it's just an normal shutter. You had the massive windows on the left, you had the DJ booth here at the one end, and the bar on the other end, and around the bar on the back of the room there was like a hangout area with like one leather bench or leather seating along the wall.
There are also little dark rooms scattered throughout, big enough for two to four people. These were private sexual spaces.
So you couldn't really see what was going on. And then you had the bar seating area. The other bit along the window was just basically dancing and hanging out and then the dance right from the djit booths to the bar, you know. So it was the setup was extremely brilliant because you could hang out or you could dance.
There was no way you could.
Hide and un let's go into one of these little codes there on the side.
Burghan was perfect. You could dance in the open but hide away for a moment. And of course most important was the music.
But what I loved about it that the records can have a different impact. You can make them sound in different ways, so you can mix house and tech no really well because it's like a very clubby sound, you know. So it's like whatever is pumping is pumping, it doesn't matter what it is. And obviously you have longer sets so you can develop with two people on a journey.
As for the music, if you wanted to listen to how style sounds, you'd go upstairs to the Panorama Bar. If you wanted to dance the night away to hardcore techno, you stayed downstairs. DJ Cassi credits the owners of Berghin for confidently making a name for themselves in the evolving party city.
I did love the onus and how they saw the world and how they saw their role in Berlin.
Burghin stamped its reputation as a gay club, but it also welcomed straight people too. According to DJ Cassei, the owners knew that they wanted to welcome everyone who moved a little outside of conventional society.
They did start a unique way of hosting a certain form of dance music, or hosting dance music in a very smart way and also allowing.
Individuals to be free in an environment where you could just like dress however you wanted, be who you are and obviously be respectful to other people and just enjoy yourself.
Burghin became a place for people to connect to music in a fresh new way.
It wasn't I meant that was allowing these exchanges.
And I don't know if that's counterculture, but it's I think it's like true culture. Maybe it's counter in the sense it's an untiground culture and people want to go and want to experience this, and so we do our own thing, we play by our own roles.
And that attitude of inclusivity isn't just supported at Burgheye, it's cultivated.
I mean for me as a DJ was extremely important and special because I was appreciated for my individual self, like no one gave a fuck where I came from, if it was a girl or not, like Mischa and or booked me because they like me as a DJ, and this was always something that was important to me. It's like to be booked because they like me as a DJ, not because they'm a woman. Because you have blanking heth way and all this stuff, which is obviously extremely important. I'm not thising this and I get it, but they're also something that are completely taking away from what I'm actually interested about, what we should actually be focusing on.
Berghin played by its own rules and it helped create a whole new sound in Berlin. Here's journalist Tobias rapp.
Berghein was very important for defining a specific kind of pure, very minimal, very brutal techno sound. That's the sound that always had roots in the city.
As we know by now, techno and house music didn't start in Berlin, and Berghin wasn't the first club to introduce it to a broader audience, but it did find its own unique identity there.
It's a sound that combines Detroit influences and Chicago influences but also local Berlin influences into a specific sound that has to do with the room and with the sound system in the room. It was very important for that a sound that had a very industrial kind of element in it. And at the same time I think also that the Panoramaba was also important for exploring house music as a rough, hard party music, very underlocked to Chicago house, like, not the nice kind of house, but the rough, evil kind of house sound.
Bergheim was a dream come true for DJs. They would produce experimental tracks, play them at Bergheim, and then watch the crowd, monitoring their reactions to figure out what was and was it working. Because like Paradise, Garage, Decititia and so many other clubs we've explored, Berghem was a musical testing ground. It was the place to try out new ideas. Here's Claudio the club that we heard from earlier.
Every DJ tries to play music that you've never heard there before. So it's a lot of very experimental and very undergroundish music because that's like if you play at Burkhan as a DJ, this is your moment as in a career of the DJ, so you typically would play songs no one ever heard and would be like your hidden gems, because you don't want to be like a pop culture DJ.
New styles were being explored and new music was being created too.
And also with Burkhin tech now you can hear like producers.
Would make tracks that would sound good on.
This dance youre and I find that very interesting and amazing how a club can influence certain style of music and even instigate something you know and I think for this backtid had a strong effect on the tech we've seen and gave a lot of producers new inspiration and impetus, and allowed a lot of young people to discover something.
Berghem has been opened for almost two decades. Today it's become too successful for its own good. It's a club that wants to stay underground, but it's been forced into the mainstream.
Bergheind is a very very strange beast. I would say it's a very very exclusive, subcultural place with its own rules. It's very apart from society, and at the same time it's super mainstream. It's one of the most well known places in Germany. Even my parents know about it. Everybody knows about it. It's as famous for Berlin as the place where the Philarmonic Orchestra place.
In twenty sixteen, Bergheim was listed as a cultural venue by Germany, which means this ultra private club is considered high art. In Germany, entertainment venues are taxed at a high rate. It's being labeled a cultural hub. Burgein's tax got cut by more than half. Burghine for this and other reasons, has remained impervious to the many economic factors that have driven nightclubs out of business. Namely, they're so frequently started underground and on a shoestring, so when cities like Berlin grow richer, those clubs go out of business. Burghine has managed to preserve its identity in part because the city has recognized the club as an important cultural landmark, but also because the founders have insisted it remain exclusive. The owners still have control of the culture inside. It's still private, it's still selective. Berlin, on the other hand, has embraced its new identity as a cultural epicenter.
It's still an autistic hub. I think also because the city doesn't have that much other things. It has the politics system and it has culture, but we don't have industry. We don't have finance, we don't have advertisement, we don't have publishing houses or The industry that makes Germany a wealthy nation is in southern Germany. It's not in Berlin, not at all.
According to Tobias, Berlin does have an up and coming tech industry, but it's still in its infant stages. In his eyes, Berlin might not have a lot of things, but it does know one thing for sure.
The city itself now knows what it has in its nightlife. It's billions of euros that the nightlife and the music industry brings into the city.
So much so that during the height of the COVID nineteen pandemic, the Berlin government gave nightclubs grants to help them weather through the economic hardships. Because clubs like Burghin are what draw people to Berlin.
Burkehin is a symbol for a certain freedom and the possibility of an artistic life and the creative life. If you want to be a unisporrying artist, you can still come to Berlin. But Backhand was a symbol for that, and maybe it still is a symbol for that.
Berlin has worked so hard to be the Berlin of today.
I remember the time when it was impossible for Germans to see themselves as cool. Germans didn't see their country as culturally attractive.
Now, the people of a once divided city see Berlin as one whole and as one of the most culturally important cities in the world. Tobias has a final thought for those who want to visit.
It's a beautiful and lively scene, but it's also a bubble in a way, and I think that's the beauty of it. Subculture is always living in about the subculture is not that much the real life. That's why we go into subculture because it's something else, you know. But if you're living this life, you should never forget that it's a very special and fragile thing that you're living in.
And if you're lucky enough to get into Berkhin, remember one thing.
This club invites you to be somebody else for a weekend. This is very important, I think, and it's only possible because there's a spirit of freedom that pretty much comes out of the gay queer scene that is really, really, very very special.
Berkhine has changed lives, but like the saying goes, what happens in Berkhine stays in Bergkhine. In the next episode, we're heading to Abitha to spend a whole day and a whole night at the superclub Space, the most awarded club in history where people would party in the sun and dance under the stars. The History of the World's Greatest Nightclubs is produced by Neon Hummedia for London Audio and iHeartRadio for London Audio. Our executive producers are Paris Hilton, Bruce Robertson, and Bruce gersh. The executive producer for Neon Humm is Jonathan Hirsch. Our producer is Rufio, Faith Masarura. Navanni Otero and Liz Sanchez are our associate producers. Our series producer is Crystal Genesis. Our editor is Stephanie Serrano. Samantha Allison is our production manager, and Alexis Martinez is our production coordinator. This episode was written by Crystal Genesis and fact checked by Sarah Avery. Theme and original music by Asha Avanovich. Our sound design engineers are Sam Beer and Josh Han. I'm your host, Ultra Nate, and we'll see you next time. On the history of the world's Greatest nightclubs that the
