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When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry.
So I went on to better help to try to look for therapists to help me with that.
My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering,
I really needed help.
I was reminiding a lot, really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback
was just life changing.
Visit betterhlp.com slash free economics for 10% of your first month of therapy.
I'm a reporter, a writer.
I try to answer questions, not unlike what you do, Steven.
Although our questions are sometimes a bit dumber.
But sometimes they're not.
Sometimes they're smart.
That is PJ Vote.
He has been making podcasts for nearly as long as I have.
The shows are often about life on the internet and how technology changes us.
So your current show, Search Engine, despite the name, isn't a show about life online
for the most part?
Is it?
No.
The reason it's called Search Engine is because it's a show where it's a bit of a joke.
What are Search Engine is supposed to be?
You ask it a question and very cheaply and very quickly a machine gives you an answer
that might be pretty good.
There are like a human powered bespoke, incredibly expensive to run.
Very slow Search Engine.
It gives answers in layers and over time, as opposed to bang, here it is.
Yeah, yeah.
Oftentimes the answer is who can say.
But we give you like human level complicated and complex answers.
Today on Free Kinomics Radio, a bonus episode with PJ Vote and Search Engine.
It's sort of about economics, the economics of a famous nightclub in Berlin.
I'd heard the basics.
A decommissioned power plant turned into a multi-story nightclub.
People talked about this place as a kind of grimy heaven and like traditional heaven.
Grimy heaven was also supposedly very hard to get into.
One guiding principle of our show is that just about anything can be interesting if you
were willing to look closely enough or from the right angle.
In this case, the door policy at a Berlin nightclub is connected to municipal tax laws, the
Cold War and more.
But also, the Free Kinomics Radio crew doesn't get to go clubbing very often, like never.
So thanks to Search Engine and PJ Vote for letting us tag along.
This is Free Kinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything,
with your host, Stephen Dubner.
So PJ, give me the genesis of this episode of Search Engine.
We're about to hear each of your episodes is built around a single question.
Where the question for this episode come from?
Okay, so two friends of mine, lovely young man.
Both kind of conscientious people, like straight-laced, buttoned up, home-of-war midnight, hard-working
and professional guys.
They said they had a question which had sprung from a vacation they had been on.
And it was unusual vacation.
The two of them had flown eight hours from New York City to Germany to try to go to this
techno club called Berkheim.
Are you familiar with Berkheim?
Before you and I started talking about this conversation that we're having now, I was
not familiar with Berkheim.
It used to be before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was a Soviet power plant in East Berlin.
Four stories taught like a very imposing building.
More recently, it has become a techno nightclub and supposedly the techno nightclub, like the
most exclusive fun, like everyone who loves this stuff wants to go to this place before
they die.
A kind of mecca.
But the other thing about Berkheim is that it has the most strict and scary door policy
in the entire world.
They love to reject rich and famous people.
A lot of the people you think would be allowed into any room have not been allowed into
this room.
And if you want to try to get in, you have to wait in a line that on a good night, you'll
stand in line for four hours.
On a bad night, you might stand in line for eight hours.
So these guys have taken an eight hour flight to Berlin to stand in a line for four to eight
hours for the chance to maybe get into this nightclub.
They actually stood in line three separate times.
Here are Chris and Dan describing to PJ how when you get to the front of the line, you
encounter the selector, the guy who decides whether you will be admitted into Berkheim.
So you get up and then there's a number of calculations that are going on in your mind.
Do you look at the bouncer in the eye?
Do you look kind of at the ground?
Do you smile?
Do you keep a straight face?
Do you say anything?
And I think on this try, this was like our authentic friendly selves attempt.
I smiled at the guy he asked how many people were.
I said to I was friendly.
I think I asked him how his night was going to the answer.
No, of course not.
One of my calculations was whether or not to look like I was having fun and into the
music.
So I kind of like was dancing a little bit, but you know, very like minor movements.
And I don't think that strategy worked.
So you walk up, you say like how's your night?
He says nothing.
Is he just looking at you?
Is it he?
It's a he there's Sven the main dancer.
If Berkheim itself is the epitome of what you would think of East German old techno nightclub,
then Sven is the epitome of what you would think of as the bouncer, the lead bouncer for
that venue.
What does he look like?
A large man with a large number of tattoos and piercings on his face.
And there's two others.
Apparently, there's some sort of communication between the two of them, some sort of silent
communication.
But it's not legible.
There's only one amount of legible communication and that's the decision.
And how do they communicate it to you?
It's always one person they pull up at a time or a small group.
And sometimes they're immediately rejected.
Like they don't even get to say a word.
The bouncer just puts his hand out and they just keep walking.
They're just subtle.
Yeah.
And they just point towards the street.
It's not so much a point as an open palm out the direction that you should be going.
So the gesture you're doing is actually the gesture one used to be like, welcome to my
home, but it's welcome to not my home.
The arm goes out.
The palms outstretched.
Like look at this.
You're not going to a nightclub.
Yes, you're welcome to go anywhere else in Berlin.
You can probably tell from that part of the conversation how things went for Chris and Dan.
Here's PJ again.
They flew to Berlin.
They tried three separate times across three separate days to get into this place.
They were rejected each time.
And there was just something about the draw of these guys are they're not people who are
like, if there's a red velvet rope, I got to be on the other side of it.
They're not seeny guys.
It was like the fact that they were willing to spend their vacation just standing on
a line being told, no, maybe very curious about them in this place.
Okay.
So that's what you need to know to get started here now from the search engine podcast
is an episode called Why Didn't Chris and Dan Get Into Burghine with PJ vote.
When we started all this last July, all I really knew about Burghine was that it was a
Berlin techno club and that was very hard to get into.
But I started researching the club itself maintains a very minimal footprint online.
200,000 people follow Burghine's Instagram account, but the club has only ever posted
one photo in 2015.
A picture of a sign that says in all caps, taking photos is not allowed.
The sign presumably from inside the club itself.
Burghine like Vegas claims that what happens there stays there except in Burghine that seems
to actually be true.
Some information about the club nevertheless has circulated.
The story of Burghine, as I now understand it, begins 30 years ago.
In the early 1990s, two Germans, Norbert, Thormann and Michael Toifelah, had begun hosting
a men's only gay fetish party, sometimes at an abandoned air raid shelter.
After a few years, the party outgrew that bunker, the pair took over and abandoned Railroad
depot.
At the Railroad depot, they started a club called Ostgut.
Ostgut is legendary, open to people of all genders and sexualities, but still a space
run by and largely for gay men.
A den of hedonism where consenting adults supposedly engaged in all sorts of unusual behavior.
One line, at least one video was raised from inside the club.
But the video is pretty tame.
It's from July 2000, looks like camcorder footage.
A greenly shot DJ hovers over a console, twiddling knobs, while nearby a crowd of German
shadows rides under a strobe light.
Ostgut may have lived forever, except the city wanted to build a big arena.
So the Railroad depot was knocked down in 2003.
Berghine was its reincarnation, the palace that replaced Ostgut, this time too big to knock
down.
A thermal power plant originally built by the Russians in the Soviet era, four floors,
on the very bottom floor, a dedicated basement gay club for men only, at the very top, a bar
with big windows, opening onto a panoramic view of the city.
On the floors in between, where the power turbines once sat, an enormous dark cavern, the main
dance area.
The entire space governed by its own particular rules.
Berghine is not a standard posh club with bottle service.
It's open from Friday until Monday, and most people stay there for 12 hours, 24 hours,
or more.
Now it's not a standard.
Berghine is best known for one weekly party, club knocked, club night.
Club night is a misnomer, because while the party starts Saturday evening, it continues
all the way until Monday morning without interruption.
A few books document the history of the scene that birthed this party.
I've found Tobias Raps lost and sound to be particularly helpful.
He writes about how, when Berghine opened in 2004, the party was by and for Berliners,
but word soon spread internationally.
A European budget airline called EasyJet had just opened a new hub in Berlin, and other
Europeans started taking EasyJet flights to the city to come party.
The legends kept growing.
Eventually it grew large enough to draw Chris and Dan, two of the many Americans who made
the pilgrimage to TechnoMeka.
It was a marvel.
A three-day party, good enough to draw thousands of people, every weekend, people who would
fly to Germany without even a promise they would gain admittance.
That was Club night at Berghine.
Most of what people discuss online is not any of this.
Instead they talk about Sven, the intimidating bouncer who Chris and Dan encountered and
then coward in front of.
Sven Markhart.
Sven Markhart is a tall, imposing man in his early 60s with giant lip rings that look
like silver fangs.
His hair is slicked back and silver, tattoos of thorns cover much of his face.
He looks like a bad guy in a John Wick movie, and he has played a bad guy in a John Wick
movie.
That was just a cameo one time though.
Sven has run security at Berghine since Club first opened 20 years ago.
Sven's backstory grew up in East Berlin, the communist side of the wall, before it fell.
There's this one documentary Berlin Bouncer that profiles Sven.
In one scene he gives a talk in front of a crowd.
He's wearing all black tinted glasses.
Sven discusses the early chapters of his life.
How his teenage years were defined by the feeling of being stuck outside a much more significant
kind of door.
Sven saying, we just wanted to see the other side of the wall.
We didn't really want to leave home.
We just wanted to find out.
What were we being deprived of?
What weren't we allowed to see?
Sven has said that as a young gay punk rocker living in East Berlin was risky.
He was frequently picked up by the secret police.
He was devoted to his photography career, but after the wall fell he chose to stay on
the East Berlin side and his art career stalled there.
Sven's brother was a DJ and Sven started working the door at his parties.
It turned out Sven's eye for people worked not just in photography, but also here.
He had a talent for deciding who should be let in.
He developed a reputation.
That's why they chose him for Oscar and later for Burkheim.
The fact that this much of Sven's biography exists in public, of course goes entirely against
Burkheim's secretive ethos, but Sven has continued to pursue his photography career.
And so every few years when he has a new exhibition or a photo book, he talks to journalists.
Questions about his photography, which he wants to discuss, and questions about how to
get into Burkheim, which he has to tolerate.
Those are the terms under which the gatekeepers, at places like the New York Times or GQ,
will allow Sven entry, and understanding the way of these things he obliges.
Sven, the man with the answer to our question.
What was the bouncer at Burkheim scanning you for?
I should say, I emailed Sven and requested an interview.
I've never been less surprised to not get a reply.
But in the documentary, there's this prickly moment where the interviewer seems to have
directly asked Sven the rules of the door.
Sven responds, not with helpful tips about what shade of black to wear.
Instead he says, sternly, we don't need to question the rules that are in place.
He does allow that as a selector, his responsibility is to only let people in who, once they join
the party, won't impede the freedom and self-expression of the people who are already inside.
It makes sense, but it does not provide clues.
And in any situation in which official sources remain this tight-lipped, speculation will
reign.
And it does here, mostly on TikTok.
They're a cottage industry of people who claim to have gotten through the door, now
style themselves as helpful experts, explaining what exactly they believe Sven is scanning
for when he looks at people like Chris and Dan, trying to get inside the mind of a 62-year-old
gay German ex-punk.
Be really casual, don't be flamboyant, don't speak too much.
Don't talk to loud in the queue, and under no circumstances engage in louder.
Literally, just basically be as casual and blend in as possible in order to get in.
So we've got that.
It's not possible to know if any of these people are actually telling the truth.
Again, you can't record inside a burqain, which means you just have to take the word
for it.
I promise.
People say that you need to wear black to get in, but that's not true.
It helps, but it's not a must.
I know, guys.
Just be yourself, and if you get in, you get in, and if you don't, try again some other
time or call it a wrap.
The advice offered by these supposed gurus, frankly, does not feel all that usable.
Try to get in, or maybe don't.
Wear black, but you don't have to.
One thing is like, look, sorry.
My favorite artifact of all the online burqain speculation is this website called burqaintrainer.com
that will actually drop you into a surprisingly high-rise simulation of the burqain line.
The site takes control of your webcam and then scans your face, analyzing your emotions
through your expressions, how angry, sad, euphoric your face is, giving a virtual simulation
of Sven's gaze.
And then the first person video virtually walks you step by step up to the doors of burqain.
The music gets louder as you get closer.
The website warns you that Sven will ask you three questions.
So I did it.
So it's a mass of my ear.
When I arrived at the virtual door, a German man, presumably an actor playing Sven asked,
is this your first time here?
I said yes.
Best of a hot speed?
He asked, do you know who's DJing tonight?
I said yes.
What's the worst thing on it?
He asked whether I'd take in drugs.
I said, nine.
After a moment of scanning, the virtual bouncer told me, not good today.
And then made the hand gesture toward the street.
The same hand gesture Chris and Dan had gotten.
To be honest with you, this rejection by a fake bouncer, it hurt my real feelings.
I'll tell you something about myself that won't surprise you.
I've never been considered cool.
I know cool people.
I'm not against coolness.
I just don't possess it.
I'm uncool enough that I have to ask the cool people I know to explain to me why certain
things are cool right now.
How did we decide big pants are back in style?
If you have to ask, you're not cool.
And I do have to ask both professionally and just because of my personality.
So I'm not cool and I'm old enough to be okay with that.
But this was a little different.
At Berghine, where Sven ruled, it seemed to me that the source of his power lay partly
in his refusal to explain himself.
My job as a journalist was the opposite, to understand and explain.
And I just couldn't resist the challenge of trying to understand something that was
designed to obscure itself.
That was why even after all this internet-sluthing and documentary watching, we would
continue digging for the better part of the year.
We would talk to lots of people.
We'd read too many books devoted to the telemedic study of German techno, its origins and subgenres.
And in the end, we'd emerge with an answer.
What was Berghine scanning for?
And why?
How would a place like this come to pay?
PJ Vote will keep looking for the answers to those questions after the break.
I'm Stephen Dubner from Frekenomics Radio and you were listening to a bonus feed drop from
the Search Engine podcast.
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner and this is a bonus episode from the podcast Search Engine.
The host is PJ Vote.
In America, in the circles I run in, people complain a lot about capitalism.
I don't think they're bothered by the exchange of goods and services.
I think it's their shorthand way of saying, everything here is just too driven by profit.
Even things that start out good can be squeezed to death by our ceaseless desire to
rent every possible dollar.
In Berlin, a place where until recently, capitalism and socialism both operated.
In Berlin, it feels like something else is going on.
The nightlife industry there brings in one and a half billion tours in dollars a year,
but they're strange dollars.
The Crown Jewel, Berghine, operates by turning away thousands of paying customers.
And despite demand, it keeps its ticket prices pretty low, all well existing in a building
that is 37,600 square feet in a very hip neighborhood.
And not only does this all seem to work, it's worked for a long time.
That doesn't happen in nightlife.
Clubs don't stick around.
Studio 54 was open for less than three years.
Berghine is on its 20th.
And people attribute a lot of that success to Berghine's strict and strange door policy.
You can tell the story of that door as a story about culture, about cool, but cool we know,
never explains itself.
So let's get inside Berghine from a different direction.
I'm going to tell you the story, not about DJs and bouncers, but about lawyers and lobbyists.
About the municipal regulation and policy that allows this club to exist the way it does.
A story that begins in 1949.
Hi, can you hear me?
Hey, I hear you well.
How's it going over there?
Well, well, well.
Looks light and ring.
I'd first heard about him from one of my best friends, Kay Burke, a nightclub founder herself.
People in Berlin called Litz the mayor of the city's nightlife.
So did Kay explain like, who I am and what we're up to over here?
I think she might, but it was also quite sometimes a goal.
So maybe you can film in again.
Yeah.
So I have this podcast called SirChangin where we just try to answer people's questions, no matter
how simple or complicated we do like really serious stuff.
Like we just did something about Fentanyl and the drug supply in America.
But we also do really silly stuff and kind of like everything in between.
And what level are we here in this conversation?
We're closer to silly, I think.
So we have these friends I want to tell you about who just like didn't get into Burk Island
and are confused about it.
But it's sort of an excuse to tell the largest story about nightlife.
Like I think for people in the United States, it's a place you go and you spend $500 on champagne.
And like, you know what I mean?
It's like $10 on a can of beer.
Yes.
Without a glass.
Exactly.
Germans like Lutz call this style of nightclub bottles and models, shorthand for the economic
model that drives them.
Clubs like these are what most Americans think of when you say nightclub.
Spots that tend to make their money by enticing rich people to pay for tables and by bottles
of champagne so that they can feel important.
The clubs are like little status factories.
In Berlin though, that same word, nightclub, describes an entirely different operation,
fueled by a different economic model.
And Lutz's job is to protect that status quo.
He's nightlife's advocate in the offices of city bureaucrats, the spokesperson for Berlin's
club commission.
I wanted Lutz to tell me how Berlin's unusual nightlife scene had come to be.
And that story is a story of two arguments.
The first argument takes place in the late 1940s.
Argument one is about a very specific rule.
Curfew.
In Berlin today, there is no curfew.
The first and clubs stay open as long as they want.
And can you tell me the story of how Berlin came to be a city with no curfew?
Like what is the origin story of that decision?
The decision is almost 80 years old and it happened right after World War II.
So in 1949, we had already a divided city between the eastern sector and the western sector.
The eastern sector controlled by the Russians and the western sector controlled by the British
to French and the Americans.
And in the eastern part, there was a curfew at 10 p.m.
So all the restaurants, bars, hotel bars, cabaret bars, it's really had to close at 10 p.m.
In the eastern part, in the western part, it was 9 p.m.
So an hour earlier.
And there was this, let's say, representative of the hotels and restaurants of Berlin.
His name was Heinz Salamayah.
Heinz Salamayah.
There was no club commission back then.
Heinz was instead the deputy director of the Guild of Berlin Hoteliers.
In photos, Heinz has an enormous smile and combed back hair.
He looks like someone who held forth at a restaurant or two.
Heinz did not like the curfew.
He particularly did not like that his side of the city had an earlier curfew.
The person to complain to was General Howley of the US Army, the Americans West Berlin Commendante.
A meeting was set and Heinz supposedly came prepared.
The story is that he brought a bottle of whiskey to that meeting.
So they met and they were talking about it and General Howley said,
yeah, the British and the French, they're not really supporting any idea of losing this curfew.
They say it's a security issue.
So you have to give me an argument that I can give to French and the British.
And the problem was that at that moment in the western part,
people had to go out of the bar and then they went to the eastern sector for another hour,
which was also not really liked by the Americans.
So he said, if you kick Germans who are partying at a certain hour,
you kick them out of the street, you're going to have a security issue.
So you have to better find a solution for it.
It was a well-reasoned argument.
The Allies did not want drunk Westerners crossing east in search of a later last call.
And worse, there had been an emerging cold war of curfews.
With each side, the east and the west repeatedly extending an hour past each other
to try to capture all the income from drunk Berliners.
Eliminating curfew would solve the security issue and win the night war.
General Howley was sold.
He said, OK, let's try this out for two weeks.
And since then, 1949, we have no curfew.
Berlin, one of the rare cities that has no curfew at all.
In 1949, when the city permanently deleted its curfew,
obviously techno music did not exist.
Raving was something people did in insane assilums.
If anyone was listening to music in a club late at night, it was probably jazz.
But this decision set Berlin on a path.
Nightlife is funded more than anything else via the sale of alcohol.
A city without a curfew can have a legal party that runs through the night,
even the runs multiple nights.
Half a century-ish later, techno will hit Berlin.
People will begin to throw raves in illegal spots without permits.
This will happen in a lot of cities at the same time, to Troy, New York, London.
But what makes Berlin different from those places is that here,
many of those raves can actually become legitimate businesses.
Can find permanent homes and clubs.
General Howley's 1949 agreement is the first precondition for Clube Knocked at Berghine.
It sets the stage for party that can last for three days.
But years later, as the scene starts to mature, a second argument takes place.
An argument which almost kills these night clubs.
Argument 2 is about taxes.
In the early 2000s, Berghine was a rising young club,
alongside already established spots like Trisor and the Kit Kat Club.
And Berlin's tax authority started to take a closer look at these places.
How much money were they bringing in?
Shouldn't the city be getting a bigger cut?
Government tax agents walk into Berghine, presumably without needing permission from Sven.
They're there documenting everything they see.
Asking a question.
From a tax perspective, what is happening in these rooms?
In Germany, if you pay money for a ticket and enter a venue where music is played,
you may be having one of three different experiences.
You might be experiencing high culture like opera,
in which case the city will barely tax the ticket.
You might be at a concert like the Rolling Stones,
in which case the city will moderately tax the ticket.
Or you might be experiencing entertainment.
This happens in casinos, in porn theaters.
In that case, the city will take a big tax bite, almost 20%.
Before the tax officials began to take a closer look at the club scene,
these venues had been mostly taxed as concert venues.
But now, in 2008, the city started to ask pointed questions.
Was it DJ really a musician?
Was it techno show really like a concert?
The perception that people in government had says that a DJ is not a concert.
People are going there to have sex or to drink or to whatever,
but not because of the DJ.
They even sent people to clubs and documented that people were not facing the artists.
They were talking to each other.
Oh my god!
It's such a death.
To kind of prove the point that it is not a concert.
Wow.
I've been a cousin of the people who were not facing the artists.
They were not facing the artists.
Exactly.
But they said, clubs are different.
People go there to meet people.
Not because of the artists.
They don't even know who's playing these kind of argumentations.
Berghine was the club that actually took this case all the way to the high courts.
Berghine won.
The Berghine in the government's books was cemented as a concert venue.
A place where people went because they loved techno music.
Weirdly, this is one part of the answer to Chris and Dan's questions.
What was the bouncer, Sven, scanning for the door?
He needed to ensure they were true technoheads.
Not people there simply for entertainment.
That consideration, a funny side effect of the argument the club had had to make in court years ago.
It may have been part of what filtered them out.
Chris and Dan, not true technoheads.
Berghine's victory in court meant that any German nightclub that could prove it was meeting Berghine's cultural standards
could be taxed like Berghine.
Lower taxes meant they could keep their overhead low.
Lower the overhead, the less pressure to make money.
The less pressure to make money, the more they could continue to keep their nightclubs dedicated to preserving Berghine's counterculture.
We're going to come back to this strange court case and its consequences.
But before I left Loots, I wanted to ask them specifically about Chris and Dan.
What was it about them, the way they looked, the way they dressed, that it signaled they didn't belong at Berghine?
Just to be clear, Loots does not represent Berghine.
But as spokesperson for the club commission and as a Berghine regular, I thought he might be able to help.
Can I show you a couple of photographs and you tell me if the person seems like...
I mean, that is a selector.
So I can only give you my personal opinion.
Yeah. Is it okay to ask you your opinion on it?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Of course.
Okay, this is one person.
Well, very friendly, maybe queer person, very soft, happy, he's wearing some kind of top that doesn't really say anything.
It's too generic of a top, the vest.
I think it looks authentic to him, but this person looked very innocent.
Yeah. And you also want to save some people for getting into something that they maybe don't expect.
Okay, can I show you? So this is the person he went with.
Yeah. I would probably send them to Schwutz.
What's Schwutz?
It's all this best known gay club.
And that's the perfect life for those two guys.
Because they don't seem like technical guys to you.
They seem like gay guys who are going out clubbing.
They don't look like heart, you know, like standing in the middle of a sweaty club and going for hours and enjoying this.
And you know, they're standing with like having a chat, you know, like, and that's okay to have some of those folks in the venue, but it's really about getting out of your inner self and showing your animalistic side of yourself.
For very good reason, we don't celebrate the idea that you should judge people based on how they look on the outside.
Those judgments often lead us astray.
And yet, let's from a photo could tell Chris and Dan were after respectful, healthy, wholesome, partying.
Not the sort of darkness that occurs in Berghine's techno dungeons.
They didn't belong here. They belonged, he's suspected, at another place called Schwutz.
I wondered what Chris and Dan would make of that judgment.
So later I asked.
Chris told me Schwutz, they loved Schwutz.
It was the club they'd ended up at after being rejected from Berghine.
Berlin, this magical city, had somehow sent them to the place where they really belonged.
Loots was not a selector, but he did seem to have a selector's eye.
Your read is so good.
Chris, who I know better, he's a lovely, he's on my favorite people to spend time with.
If I were having a party where it was really important that someone dance in the middle of dance for eight hours, he would perhaps not make the cut for that party.
I think the first question you have to ask yourself, are you a participant or are you a visitor?
And it shouldn't sound sophisticated or arrogant. It's just like a club.
The definition of club is being part of a club.
If you're not part of the club, why should you being able to enter?
I think the idea of just buying myself in is the opposite of a club where it should actually be.
A club should bring people together who have similar interests, similar preferences.
A club should bring together people of similar interests.
Absolutely.
But what if you're someone who doesn't belong but still wants to just go check it out?
Is there a way to sneak in?
Is there some other way into Berghine that is not going through the bouncer?
Loots did have advice about this.
My tip that I usually give is make a plan of exploring Berghine.
Maybe from the outskirts, go to venues that are not very known.
Go to places that are somehow interesting for you because you did your research
and you saw some artists you want to see in the out there playing.
So go there.
And you get in very easy because when you said are not very known, don't have this level of selection.
Usually there's not even the queue.
And then you get friends with the bartenders, you make friends with the DJs there.
And you have an amazing time in an unknown venue with unknown artists.
Basically.
And the next time you're coming, you're going to reach out to them.
And because they like you or they connect it to you, they will ask you to start in their home with dinner.
Maybe you go to a bar, you make an offering.
And even maybe they make sure that you get it on a guest list of some venue that they're going at that night.
But I think it's part of that journey that you also have to make to be part of the scene.
Loots said the process he's describing.
This is the real way into Clube Noct.
Make yourself a part of the scene.
That line outside Berghine, he said, that's for people who haven't been able to or who haven't known to try.
While Loots was saying this to me, I was nodding yes furiously, might noggin like a broken bobblehead.
Of course it all made sense.
And as a person obsessed with belonging and exclusion, I was lapping it all up.
We finished our conversation.
We hung up, and then not long after, this spell of Loots' idea dissipated.
What were we talking about?
If you wanted to visit the most exclusive nightclub in the world, go to Germany and start methodically befriending Germans in the city's electronic music scene.
Okay.
Normally, that would have been the end of things.
And perhaps it should have been the end of things.
But not long after this, a friend of mine, an American, asked me a question.
They were celebrating a big milestone in their life.
And they wanted to do it in Germany.
And Berlin, actually.
They wanted to spend some time there.
Perhaps even try to see some of the city's famous nightlife.
That sound like fun?
Could I make some time away from work?
Yes it did.
No I couldn't.
I bought myself a plane ticket.
That again was PJ Vote with the first part of a two-part story.
To hear what happened after he got to Berlin, look for search engine in your podcast app.
The second part of the story will be available there on June 26th.
And I'll be talking to PJ a bit more after the break.
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The Burghain Nightclub sits at the intersection of what used to be East and West Berlin.
Its name comes from the two districts on either side, Kreutzberg in the West and Friedrichsheim in the East.
PJ Votes last name, which spelled V-O-G-T, is also German.
A vote is referred to some sort of feudal landowner, kind of the middle manager of whatever the feudal era.
It was not a very high status position, but high status enough that people might not like you.
Do you feel you have a little bit of ancestral, if only impressionistic connection to your German roots?
I didn't think so until I went.
And I was not expecting to feel anything at all, and I felt so much in a way that kind of shocked me actually.
When did you first go to Germany?
I actually went on a reporting trip for this story.
This was the first time you'd been to Germany.
I went once as a 17 year old euro rail thing, and so I did that for a minute, but I didn't crack the surface of the city in any meaningful way.
This was the first time where I really felt like I don't know, I felt the weight of the history.
I felt this feeling that Berlin is a place that is both like, I hate when people over generalize about places that they visit for a week.
I thought these are people who believe in order and following rules, sometimes to great historical tragedy, but who also, like everything always exists in balance, and it's also a place where people love to let loose and break rules.
And I felt like I could feel both of those forces in a way that felt very alive to me.
Was it a place that you felt oddly at home, you're saying?
A little bit, yeah, I was really surprised because I tend to be skeptical about a lot of claims that like our memories or history are somehow encoded genetically.
Like I just never experienced that feeling.
And to one other people talked about I was like, oh, that's great for you, but I never expected to feel it.
And I felt both, I felt I got there and like I'm not Jewish.
My grandfather was Jewish and he converted, but I felt that stuff a little bit in a way that I wouldn't have thought.
And then I also felt German stuff in a way that I wouldn't have thought it was like someone having a mildly religious experience who is a pretty profound atheist.
It really kind of wobbled me.
In retrospect, do you think one reason you chose to answer this question about Bergein was because it afforded you the opportunity to go to your ancestral homeland as faint as the connection might have been?
Yeah, although I would not have known that until you asked that question.
Did you spend time inside Bergein?
I did.
I made a promise I wouldn't talk about where I saw in detail, but I will say.
Did you promise?
And do I care that you promised to them?
I promised myself I was like, I really, so it's funny.
When I walked up to the club, I felt like such a schmuck Stephen.
So one of the things about Berlin that also I thought was really brilliant is that they do not allow cell phones in any of these spaces.
They'll put a sticker over your camera.
If you whip that thing out, you are out.
You're out right away and it really makes spaces feel different to have people not be on their phones.
Bergein, it's roots are as a gay club and it's real roots are as like a really profoundly dirty gay sex club.
And I say dirty without judgment.
There's one section that is still devoted to that that is easier to get into, but the dress code for a Friday night is socks.
So I didn't go.
But even the main club is like it's really it's like a space that's devoted to that and so you already feel like an interloper and the rule is sort of like this is a place where adults can do whatever they want.
And where they're guaranteed privacy and nobody talks about it.
It's basically like German culture is real is they really don't like surveillance for very specific historical reasons.
I found it to be like an entirely, all this just makes me such a cook, but like I was like this place is profound like it feels profound to be in a place where like.
I don't know really dedicated to complete self expression where nothing that happens gets judged.
I mean, I went on a Sunday afternoon.
It was like 2 p.m.
There were Berliners there who were just that was their Sunday.
That's what they always do.
Those aren't people who wait in line.
There were people who probably been waiting for eight hours and just gotten in were so excited.
I saw more expression of ways a human body could look or be dressed than I've seen in my whole life.
And there were things that were happening that were like very burgh.
Like they have something called a dark room, which is a room you can go in that's very underlit where people can do what they want to do to each other.
Usually gay man, but there's also like they have an ice cream parlor.
I had a really nice survey.
And a cappuccino.
So on freakingomics radio, we tend to talk to experts and academics, institutional people with credentials of one sort or another.
What I love about your interviews is you will often interview people whose formal credentials may not be that impressive, but they know a lot.
And you are really good at getting them to teach us things that we might not find out any other way.
This really makes you say, yeah, I think we're good at like sometimes people might have a really specific experience that has given them a really specific education.
And you just want to share that and it's like, it's weird.
This is not a thing I expected to be talking about today, but something that I got to interview the serial team when they were launching their new season.
And I asked them a bunch of questions about their work and they asked them the question I wanted to ask them, which was,
do you ever grapple with just the, what are we doing here of this?
Like, besides that it's interesting and fun, why are we making this stuff every week?
And they were like, we're doing journalism. It's very obviously important.
It's in the public interest.
How is this a question you have? And I was like, yeah, me too.
But it's the thing I really, I'm really like, what is in a deeper way the point of this?
One of the answers I sometimes audition for myself is every one of us is going to die.
Before we die, we're going to survive some things.
And one of the things stories can be our instruction maps and they're not perfect, but it's sort of like,
here's how I got out of that place with my soul intact.
One of the things we do sometimes that I love when we get to do is like, talk to somebody who just navigated something,
psychologically complex and learned a couple of things about it. But in a way where you really do feel,
it's not like, drink water and exercise and be good to your spouse, but more like, no, no, no, here's how I got out of that.
Like this, I really figured something out. Let me tell you the trick.
That again was PJ Vote, host of the Search Engine podcast.
I hope you like hearing a new show in our feed once in a while.
Let me know. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. If you'd like to hear more search engine, you can get it on any podcast app.
Some questions that PJ has recently asked there are, where did all the roaches go and do political yard signs actually do anything.
We will be back right here very soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio.
Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com,
where we also publish transcripts and show notes. For Search Engine, this episode was created by PJ Vote and Shruthi Pinomanei,
and produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking this week by Claire Hyman, Sound Design, and Original Composition by Arman Bizarrean.
For Freakonomics Radio, it was produced by Theo Jacobs, with help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Alina Kulman, Delvin Aboujee,
Elinor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Ripon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Canfer, Lyork Baudich, Morgan Levy,
Neil Karuth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lepinsky. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhiker's, Our Composer is Luis Guerra.
As always, thank you for listening.
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