Rave & Ritual | Research Thesis

Rave

& Ritual embodied liminality

in Berlin’s post - wall club scene

Alexandros Tzoutsas

Department of Architecture, University of Patras

source:anonymous

Rave & Ritual: embodied liminality in Berlin’s post - wall club scene a research thesis submitted at the Department of Architecture, University of Patras Alexandros Tzoutsas, author Konstantinos Grivas, editor - supervisor professor

June 2019 Department of Architecture, University of Patras University Campus, GR 26500, Rion, Patras T +30 2610 997553 E archisec@upatras.gr

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00_intro 01_ecstasy & politics 02_identity & ritual 03_social integration & making of community 04_liminality & communitas 05_creative city 06_urban planning & city identity 07_temporary space & re-use 08_Detroit & city alliances 09_tourism practices & techno-tourism 10_Berghain 11_outro 12_bibliography

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00_intro

The term ‘techno’ was initially inspired by Toffler, who in 1980 popularised the idea of an information - based post - industrial society in The Third Wave. Toffler suggested that the ‘agents’ of this new era, this new wave, were the ‘Techno Rebels’, people who would be able to take control over technology for their own purposes. As a music genre, techno utilises relatively accessible electronic music technologies, widening the use of ICT to a rebellious DIY underground resistance: music by the people for the people, in effect a type of electronic folk music1. The term ‘techno’ and its vague futuristic implications struck a chord with music producer Juan Atkins and his DJ - producer friends in early 1980s Detroit, as well as with the British music industry and press, who marketed their techno and the ideas around it to a wider world audience. As a musical genre, techno can be understood as both futuristic electronica and industrial nostalgia.

It is abstract and foregrounds seemingly otherworldly machine noises rather than producing simulated version of acoustic musical instruments.

Its speeds, rhythms and structures can vary widely, from break and broken beat to chill out music.

The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the growth of non-traditional desires for “religious experience”, for liberation in the sense Heelas identified as the postmodern quest for personal freedoms2, for difference, without seeking essential, or fundamental, difference. This desire has been fuelled by a constant search of connectedness with the personal self, as well as a longing of transcendence to another higher level of ecstasy by the use of devices of psychoactives, new technologies and consumer experiences agglomerated in public events. In recent times, a growing corpus of work has introduced sites accommodating alternative forms of spirituality, gathering places for those ‘hyper-syncretic’ seekers of self and enchantment, varying from sociological to anthropological and religious studies. This research has created a new point of focus on raves, that will be used in this part of the thesis to further analyse how club culture can be seen as a new form of religion as well as part of a ritual in a postritual architectural space. Borrowing terms laid down by anthropologists who have studied the processual stages of a ritual, I will try to evaluate if a rave can be perceived as a cultural resurgence of the festive and if so, then how are its mythologies of an elsewhere realised and how ti can provide new avenues for experiences of the sacred in an atomised society.

1 Rietvield, Hillegonda C., Sacrificial Cyborg and Communal Soul, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.49 2 Heelas, P., Expressive spirituality and humanistic expressivism: sources of significance beyond curch and chapel , in S.Sutcliffe and M.Bowman (eds)Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality, Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press. , p.50

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The Dancing Plague of July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea turned onto a narrow street in Strasbourg and began dancing. A tortured, convulsed, involuntary dance fever that gripped her for days. It would be one thing if this was an isolated case of psychosis, but Troffea’s creepy moves were somehow contagious, and about 400 people were infected with the so-called “dancing plague” over the next month.

Many of them died of exhaustion, heart attacks, or strokes

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01_ecstasy & politics In a world where spiritual connection intertwines between finite types of religious expression and personal paths of connectedness with the ‘otherworldly’ constantly communicated in the digital age, the technorave offers a safe space which is often felt by its participants as a means to communicate, or potentiate a profound sense of freedom and recognition.

This means that ravers select this kind of expressive medium through music and dance to voice, in a way, a sustained experimentation with subjectivity and seek connectivity not only with a community of people who share the same beliefs, but with themselves, too. It is apparent then that ravers as modern day spiritual seekers ‘select, synthesise and exchange amongst an increasing diversity of religious and secular options and perspectives’3 and as this happens the rave itself becomes a provisional node in an emergent network of seeking. In this chapter I will try to analyse how club culture and spirituality intertwine in a contextual environment of new forms of religious experience which aim for a certain familiarity with the person’s self as well as others through the collective experience of ecstatic dance, and in which ways this process can be perceived as a form of political action in a post industrial society.

The greek root of the English word ‘ecstasy’ and German ‘ekstase’ is Ek-stasis. It signifies a moment of standing (stasis) outside or beyond (ek) oneself, or the putting of something out (ek) of place (stasis). However, ecstasy today plays off the word’s multiple roots: the specifics of a pill (the drug ecstasy), the sense of openness and elation - an oceanic feelingand an intoxicated or trance state. Representation and signification are downplayed, meaning is effaced, and the subject takes on new shapes through the overwhelming stimulation of the party. At its most intense, ecstatic experience can shift a subject’s relation to the world, to others and their sense of self4. Psychoanalytical research will show that while rave licences a carnal knowing evident in the night - long intimacy of the dance floor, the gnostic ‘knowing’ may be catalysed by the ekstasis mentioned above. So club culture invites its subjects to become more aware of themselves by ‘letting go’ and immersing into a trance state which will allow them to further expand the boundaries of their self expression and knowing. But is it truly a spiritual dawning, a new beginning and rebirth?

If the party is more than a pre - linguistic womb then how does it reveal 3 Sutcliffe, S., Seekers, Networks and “New Age”, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 15, 1997 (2): 97–114., 4 Gook, Ben, Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, Society for the History of Emotions, Vol.1 No.2, 2017, p.22a 6

information to its subjects and why does it constantly anticipate a post humanist awakening, potentiating the evolution of self and , more broadly, human consciousness? As techno music and post - rave dance gatherings foreground their techno - logical imagery as an abstraction, the experience of self annihilation and rebirth in the context of a machine aesthetic creates a spiritual cyborgian atmosphere5. It is at the same time a sacrifice of the body as well as of a sense of self. The post - industrial individual sacrifices the self ritually to achieve a spiritual transition into a cyborg - like subjectivity.

Ravers adopt electro - techniques of the Self, a slight variation of the ‘technologies of the self’ which Foucault identified as permitting individuals to effect ‘a number of operations on their bodies and souls, thought, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’6. In the techno milieu, subjects use these ‘consciousness technologies’ which are thought to improve memory and cognitive capabilities or assist conscious evolution and trigger feelings of communion, relatedness and emotional oneness.

The most celebrated and far reaching means of self programming resided in inducing the euphoric sensation dubbed ‘entactogenesis’ by actively triggering the release and inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin - a mood shaping neurotransmitter stimulated by the compound MDMA (ecstasy or ‘E’). This drug offers to ravers a sense of empathy or sympathy and is totally differentiated from the classes of hallucinogen or psychedelic, and amphetamine or stimulant drugs. Users have witnessed a quality of gnosis, of access to a wonderful secret which is a larger global consciousness through instant self actualisation. So, if raves can be seen as a form of cultural rupture, then drug use in club culture must be accompanied by a context and a disposition, enabling ritual consumption: the substance must therefore be acknowledged - and this can prove no small task - as a ritual tool, and not an end in itself.

Ekstasis has often been considered to rupture gender - identity boundaries by liberating, or “disarticulating’, dominant feminine or masculine subjectivities, or more broadly, attending to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘micropolitics of desire’, through a sensuous intervention in the regulation of desire7. These two scholars oppose micro politics to the politics of 5 Rietvield, Hillegonda C., Sacrificial Cyborg and Communal Soul, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.54 6 Foucault cited in Pini, Matteo, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House, Basingstoke, Hamphshire, Palgrave, 2001, p.144 7 St. John, Graham, The difference engine: Liberation and the rave imaginary, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.19 7

molarisation. Where the molar (or ‘arborescent’, to use the equivalent term) designates structures and principles that are based on rigid stratifications or codings which leave no room for all that is flexible and contingent, the molecular which is the basis of micropolitics allows for connections between people that are local and singular. This means to an extent that the enabling conditions of micropolitics allow for the desire constrained by the orders of a capitalistic state to be deterritorialised, so that it becomes a desire exterior to the capital which is then reterritorialised or folded back into the social field.

When this happens the liberated desire integrates into itself the flows and components of the social field to form a ‘desiring machine’8. The heart of micropolitics is the construction of these new desiring machines as well as the creation of new linkages between desiring machines. So, if club culture can be perceived as a desire mechanism formed in order to subject itself into a broader spectrum of micropolitics, then ecstasis is the means to generate political action through raving. A party is no more a field of micro - politics than a carnival of narratives, no more utopia than a heterotopia, a concept that defines couterspatial ‘laboratories’ accomodating people, performances, language and objects, multitudinous and juxtaposed9, all of which interact with each other in order to further achieve political action through amplifying desire in a sense which views political action on a smaller scale and a person to person, or person to community level.

In a fundamental sense, club culture is very similar to what Anthony Giddens has termed emancipatory politics, particularly with respect to acts of liberation from systems of power (defined as illegitimate) of all sorts.

Giddens, in collaboration with Ulrich Bech and Scott Lash (1984) coined the term reflexive modernism, which means that a tendency is expected toward de-politicised behaviour within traditional political systems as well as a tendency toward politicised behaviour within the area of traditional private life. This means that beyond the antagonisms between social groups that have moulded traditional industrial modern society, something is developing and spreading that could be designated as an existential strategy. This strategy is used by people that although distance themselves from traditional political institutions, they nevertheless struggle in a political sense for their right to their own lives10. In the same way, as raving creates

8 Watson, Cate, Micropolitics of desire: participant self observation, Critical autoethnography and the (re)turn to the baroque, University of Stirling, 2009, p.3 9 St. John, Graham, The difference engine: Liberation and the rave imaginary, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.32 10 Kotabra, Joseph A., Johnson, John M., Postmodern Existential Sociology, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., AltaMirra Press, New York, 2007, p.90 8

resistance to the social and political layers of the capitalistic state in an unpolitical -at first view- human environment through cultural and political ruptures. These raptures are understood by its subjects even with techno music itself: ‘the clock speed of the information society, the body as a place of self - portrayal, the eroticism of presentation, the chaotic structure of the meeting places. Techno culture is both political and un-political’.11 Within this framework, people who attend rave - style events are searching for ways to manipulate their own positive self-perception and ‘design’ their difference to the rest of the social group that rests outside of the club culture sphere. Political action, in this way, is making yourself seem different only if others notice that you are different. In this sense, techno as a lifestyle is above all the conscious projection, in the media as well as interjectionally, and dramatisation of being different, it is the place where people can still demonstrate creativity and fantasy, for example, through the unaffected combination of the most different fashion styles when designing their own outfits. This alone amounts to a difference from society’s normal form. However, we are not dealing with differences, with differentiation, alone in this case. We also encounter fundamental distinctions: we are dealing on the whole with a politics of differentiation12.

11 Bech, Ulrich, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, Polity, 1997, p.120 12 Hitzler, Roland, Pfadenhauer, Michaela, Techno-Soziologie Erkundungen einer Jugendkultur, Opladen:Leske, p.12 9

02_identity & ritual In recent sociological and anthropological studies, club culture can be seen as a practice of identity experimentation and self - evaluation for anyone who takes part in a night - long party. These events could be perceived as contemporary rites of passage, where one is part of the mass of a few hundred to a few thousand strangers, with a sprinkle of friends here and there, and where the abstract machine aesthetic of the music can somehow feel comforting. Dancers inside a nightlife venue such as a club are constantly offered the possibility to shed a sense of alienated self and instead submerge into a world of electronically produced powerful tactile - acoustic and fragmented visual impressions. These overwhelming soundscapes are nothing else but the psycho - cultural terrain upon which the rave happens, actualised occasionally through the architecture of the club and engineered more by the participant’s experimentation with social structures of normality and personally characterised identifications of the self.

For Goerges Bataille, human spirit is defined as ‘subject - object’, the merging of self with the other. This involves the destruction of the object, to release its spirit in death, but in the case of rave - styled events almost the opposite occurs: subjectivity disappears, merges with the surroundings, with what otherwise would be conceived as the ‘other’13. This other is either the object, such as presented in technological metaphors of techno, or other subjects, such as occur in a strong sense of community on the dancefloor. In this way, a contemporary sense of spirituality is achieved.

Yet, despite the experience of the spiritual as universal, disembodied and transcendental, this is an illusion. The subject never exists in a vacuum: it is embodied. The subject’s relationship with the other is never the same: it changes through time, discursively. As such, a notion of spirit is unstable.

However, raving can include an experience of death - rebirth similar to unselfconsciously losing a sense of self on the dance floor, by breaking the boundaries of the self through exhaustion, repetitive beats and the use of dance drugs, as mentioned above. So, spirituality, like sexual joining, can be achieved ritually14. This means that the raver, in a spiritual moment of peak - experience, is vulnerable, as is any person experiencing a religious ceremony or rite, during complete submission to a belief system or any other scheme of knowledge revelation, according to anthropologic theories.

This vulnerability in a definable social group could work to enhance a sense of community, especially regarding marginalised social groups - hence

13 Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, Zone Books, New York, 1989, p.34 14 Rietvield, Hillegonda C., Sacrificial Cyborg and Communal Soul, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.47

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the intensity of say, gay dance gatherings. The raver, while dancing for endless hours is experiencing a dual reality of constantly feeling part of the whole - whatever characteristics, social statuses and inclinations that group of people have- while at the same time venturing in modifications of self identity with normative social constructs.

In this respect, we can talk of clubbing as a form of ritualistic behaviour which permits its subjects to a form of ‘play’ with modes of social relationships and structural identities. The psycho-social effect of clubbing in redefining people’s sense of self has features that accord with Victor Turner’s notion of ritual transitions. In the actual situation of ritual, with its social excitement and directly physiological stimuli, such as singing, dancing, alcohol, incense and bizarre modes of dress, the ritual symbol, we may perhaps say, effects an interchange between its poles of meaning.

Norms and values, on the one hand, become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values15. This constitutes the first strategy at deconstructing and reconstructing subjectivity, which involves as a first gesture the outer self, the frontier that makes communication with others possible and at the same time a desire for otherness, for reconfiguration of the self, for abandonment of part of the ordinary subjectivity. It is an expression of the usually contained and forbidden, and the paradoxical show of both affront and vulnerability. To achieve this effectively, raves must also provide a safe place for its subjects to immerse into this self - experimentation, which is something that is ensured by the group’s social solidarity and is abundantly reported by party - goers as an anthropological constant arising when a group transgresses into the margin16.

The notion that nightclubs are a popular venue for rites of passage for many young adults, not only because of the status that nightclubs posses as adult icons, but also because they provide a stage for performative dramas involving negotiation of various social configurations, is further analysed by Jeremy Northcore in a study that interprets young people’s relationships in an urban environment and examines how these relationships are deconstructed and reconstructed in the nightlife spectrum. In his papers, he dissects young people’s relationships into categories of personal, structural and categorical relationships in order to link the indentify - defining activities seen in nightlife and the transitional nature of their lives in general. He further states that through their clubbing practices, young adults are seen 15 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, p.30 16 Gauthier, François, The ‘Instituant’ Religious Experience of Rave, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.73

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to affirm the structural identity associated with adulthood through experimenting with an independent identity forged through categorical relationships and with personal relationships that characterise adult type partnerships. The emphasis that young adults place on personal relationships in their peer group is viewed as a provisional safety net for avoiding any loneliness and awkwardness associated with these wider interactions. Over the long term, this means that these temporary flirtations with an adult identity will, for most participants, give way to a more durable identity rooted in the structural ‘adult’ roles of partners, careers and parents, at which point the appeal of clubbing will lose its importance17.

So, if clubbing can be seen as a means of assisting young adults to bridge the divide between the structural roles of childhood to adulthood, then one can say that there is an intermediate phase during this process in which different social statuses are attached upon the subject’s personality and then reconfigured practically through relationships -both short lived and transitory as well as more durable in time- played out inside and outside the club.

In this specific example, what should also be largely considered is the fact that the way in which the nightclub itself amplifies the elements of urbanity may serve as a more powerful and immediate sign of the mythic metropolis than even the real city environment that lies beyond its walls.

Inside the nightclub, hedonistic excitement of youth and popular culture merges indistinguishably with the freedom and excitement of life in the big city. Almost exactly as the activity on the streets outside, the nightclub emphasises on movement, sound and visual excitement with the strobe lights illuminating the large group of people moving and dancing together through an uncontrolled and quite ‘free’ space. However, club - goers themselves see nightclubs as inextricably part of the urban scape and do not tend to treat nightclubs as significations of an urban setting as much as inartistic elements of that setting. This means, that the various identity experimentations and alterations mentioned above, while happening inside the club also have a critical relationship to the urban milieu not only in the way they are conceived through ravers but also in the form they become recognisable for the subjects outside of it and in relation to the city. Hence, nightclubs have become something of what Baudrillard18 refers to as a ‘simulacrum’ - originally the signifier, but now the signified. The urbanity of the real world is incorporated into the nightlife of the city, but in symbolic 17 Northcore, Jeremy, Nightclubbing and the Search for Identity: Making the Transition from Childhood to Adulthood in an Urban Milieu, Journal of Youth Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, Rutledge, 2017, p.6 18 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, Semiotext(e), 1983, p.50 12

way that leaves no understanding of the relevance and importance of everyday life in the city. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are simply significations and symbolism of culture and media, which club culture is a part of because it creates a perceived reality which nonetheless gives away to feelings of excitement and even spiritual growth or gnostic knowing.

Copying intrinsic characteristics of the urban environment and amplifying them to a nightclub sometimes means that the simulacrum will precede the original to the point where distinction between reality and representation will vanish.

In cultural anthropology, the term rite of passage has been innovated

by French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work ‘Les rites de passage’ (or ‘The Rites of Passage’). Van Gennep’s first sentence of his first chapters begins by saying that ‘each larger society contains within it several distinctly separate groupings … In addition, all these groups break down into still smaller societies in subgroups […] as a kind of house divided to multiple rooms and corridors, a passage occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another, he simply changes rooms’19. In the same work, Van Gennep distinguishes three separate stages in rites of passage: separation (the ritual exclusion of a person from ordinary life), liminality (the period of marginality or seclusion) and incorporation (the re-aggregation of a person into society with their new status). Club - goers start the evening in their peer groups, later seeking to engage wit the wider clubbing community as the night wears on (this is separation leading to liminality) and hopefully (if things go well) end up engaging in meaningful interaction with a wouldbe partner (aggregation with a new status). If we were to translate these three stages in the case of the rave then they would translate as adventure, peak and plateau and finally, comedown. But what truly links club culture to the above anthropological threefold division of rituals, is probably the organisation of the space in which a rave happens: everything is oriented towards producing a confusional space where references are blurred through in-distinctiveness or sensorial overkill. The rave environment stresses this disorganisation of space and deters any attempt at resisting abandonment to the flow of bodies and sound. The vastness of the main rooms, the stroboscopic lighting, the colour hazes and smoke induce a confusional state, where ‘the parasites of chronology narrative, beginning, middle and end are all gone’20.

19 Van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, Routledge Library Edition, 1960, p.10a 20 Joos, Jean - Earnest, Opening on the surface, in Ben Saâdoune, Nora, Hayeurand, Caroline, Galland, Emmanuel, Festive Ritual, Macano, Montreal, 1997, p.11-12a 13

This experience of the rave could also be regarded as a manifestation of the religious ‘fête’ , or ‘celebration’. According to Georges Bataille, the ‘festive’ is a religious category, specifically a human fusion in which this accursed sharing of feelings is given expression21. In reality, the paradoxes of the human and social sphere collide, as this celebration is fuelled by desire and often considered animalistic. Its participants can come back from this sort of confusional state with a feeling of replenishment, as if having received some kind of impetus from the outside world. Through its instinct of preservation, the festive is necessarily ritual, as it must provide return from the uncertainty of the margin: but it also differs from ritual as it allows for an unrivalled degree of spontaneity, play and creativity. In a post - industrial world driven by capitalistic forces, proper religious celebrations such as bacchanals, carnivals and orgies have disappeared from the face of the Western world and this means that luxury, expense and transgression had been emptied of their spiritual substance and anaesthetised, channeled into forms of entertainment or leisure commodities. So raves are the hedonistic encounter of the archaic and the technological and as cultural events participate in the resurgence of the festive, mentioned above, providing new avenues of the sacred in atomised societies.

In expressing the desire for a new relationship to the natural world -which is plausible in many psy trance raves and festivals- rites performed also articulate a post-Christian return to something likened to the Eleusinian Mysteries22. Indeed, preference for hallucinogenic substances like LSD - similar to the consciousness-altering substances thought to have been used in the Eleusinian initiation rites - generates resonance. But research will show that these types of events open humanity up to a longing for remembering a generalised heritage of tribal and sacred dances, of pure animalistic motion through the participation in a rite. Reading French raves, Gaillot remarks on how they draw participants back to ‘ancestral practices and customs, opening up a space to resonate with the echo of the bacchanalia and orgiastic delirium that have populated the margins of our history… Dionysia of modern times [raves] … may be as old as man himself’. So if raves are calling upon new ritual experiences through dance based on the wisdom of modern day culture creating thus an ephemeral sacred space, transformational experiences and art with intent, then it is likely enough to say that club culture has a strong revivalist sensibility in the way that subjects sample from existing traditions, cobbling together

reinvented traditions and adopting new technologies in the veneration of time. A rave then, is a return to mass dancing and collective gathering of people who through ritual processes flight to the foundation of consciousness by achieving ecstasy, as mentioned above.

21 Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, Zone Books, New York, 1989, p.54 22 Hoffman, A., The message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for today’s world, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, Forte, R., Council of Spiritual Practices, San Francisco, 1997, p. 53 14

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03_social integration & making of community Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany around 1989, one can find that enthused communities of people came together to live out a sort of developing energy and experiment in social and urban conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future through Berlin’s techno scene. The Cold War’s end signalled the release of many young Germans from a state of social and political stagnation, who in turn rushed to the city’s club culture to celebrate through various raves the promise of a newfound freedom, in a re-unified urban environment. This enthusiasm quickly broke into an ambivalent feeling of ecstasy, mixed with melancholy, as re-unification itself quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion: the experience of clubbing acted both as a form of political action, cultural expression and a new egalitarianism in social transformation. Berlin was a place -or better, a series of voids, gaps and openings- where the intestines of an insurgent musical form could be lived out in the suspended everyday of the Wende (the political interregnum between the Fall and re-unification) and its aftermath. However, whatever is the relation between these bipolar emotions carried out in the public, the need to feel part of a larger community of ravers is evident in these early years of German history and it is the techno scene trajectories that created the conditions for social integration to emerge between East and West.

Consequently, it is interesting to point out the ways in which techno music in post-wall Berlin was used by its citizens as a tool for creating both difference and unity in an imagined community with intense subcultural characteristics and argue that the societal conditions mentioned above managed to create spaces of cultural expression that with the passage of time came to be what the techno scene is today in the city of Berlin.

After the fall of the wall in November 1989, the people of Berlin felt unified. The now overfamiliar footage of joyous embraces at the Berlin Wall shows ecstatic people enjoying a longed-for moment of political disintegration and social unification. In the days and months following Germany’s reunification, people sought in other forms the emotional intensity that attended this collapse. For many, the sound and feeling of the Wall falling came to be the sibilant hiss of smoke machines filling concrete rooms, basements booming with kick drums, bodies mixing and moving without regard for Cold War identities. Although techno music was already popular in West Berlin even before the fall of the Wall, it was now the possibility of partying together that was important for many. Techno parties held a promise of freedom in new spaces where Germans could now anticipate the heightened enjoyment of a new social order. ‘At the early techno parties, 16

The original Tresor location, on Leipziger Strasse 126 - 128 in Mitte, Berlin.

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[eastern German] breakdancers from Alexanderplatz, football hooligans, former East German punks and radio junkies encountered a West Berlin conglomerate of Schöneberg gays, Kreuzberg squatters, students, artists, English soldiers on furlough and American expats in Berlin for the cheap rents’23. This means that after years of social division, the techno scene enabled Cold War enmities to momentarily fail away. In the meantime, the international techno-house revolution was in full swing. A new type of music was being created: new sounds that unified industrial and house elements, soon after dubbed techno-house, with protagonists in Belgium, New York, the Netherlands and England. The new sound was radical and excessive just like the fall of the Wall. The popular explosion and artistic innovations of electronic dance music post-1989 were exceptionally rapid and extensive.

The sudden availability of new club spaces in the East was combined with the extensive reception of Detroit techno, collaborations between East and West German organisers and DJs, and the increased access by East German producers to new instruments, DJ equipment and computers24.

When the Tresor club opened on March 13th 1991 by Dimitri Hegemann and his allies in an underground bunker of the former Wertheim department store, no one believed that it would arise to 25 years of existence. Tresor is so important for the emergence of the techno scene in Berlin because it quickly became the epitome of underground club culture in Berlin. It was the prototype for Berlin clubs in the way that it still shapes the club scene to what it is today. Chris Liebing - Dj and producer from Frankfurt - tries to describe in the 2004 documentary SubBerlin:The Story of Tresor the unique atmosphere that the underground cellar created back then as being ‘something really special, since you’re playing at a place where the energy is so concentrated. It’s a vault, the walls are 1.20 m thick and the energy the people take there is preserved as it multiplies. And that’s why the ceiling is wet and dripping -that’s the way it has to be’. So what this means is that there was a certain correlation between the social energy of young German people partying and the spatial arrangement of the club, creating a setting where there were almost no lights but only stroboscopic flashes and a lot of fog. It was a place where one could dive into their own world, where extremely heavy beats were almost like an acoustic narcotic being utilised by club-goers as a ritualistic tool to achieve a feeling of ecstasy.

In the same documentary, Regina Baer - part of the club’s management 23 Matos, Michelangelo, The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance music Conquered America, HarperCollins, New York, 2015, p.5 24 Nye, Sean, Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 2, p.160a 18

- states that ‘you have to look at the time when Tresor was founded and how it developed. That’s something that you cannot create artificially. It happened after the fall of the Wall and it was the only club at the time that was accepted by both the East and West people’. Many Tresor visitors had their first ever contact with people from the other part of the city right there25. One then can understand that at 130 BPM (beats per minute), in the thick fog of dry ice, it really didn’t matter where you came from and this created an unlimited sense of freedom for Berliners who wanted to try all the new things: ecstasy and techno were the key. It was a phase that both former East and West Germans didn’t want to miss. Following the opening of Tresor, a series of other clubs started appearing on the face of the city such as Planet and Walfisch on Köpenicker Straβe and Bunker, Elektro and WMF that followed.

Dimtri Hegemann and the Tresor crew applied the principles of interim usage of evicted buildings to East Berlin -often without being totally clear about notions of private property- and that’s how they ended up with a fixed-term tenancy contract for Tresor as an arts gallery. In the following years there were times when the club offered its vacant spaces to artists to live and transact their residencies, which created a connection that later would be carried out in the organisational matters of the Love Parade, for example. The fact that the club operated for the first years as a semi-legal venue though created some considerable amount of trouble between the management and urban administration, the building authorities and so on.

The relation wasn’t the best since the club owners felt more persecuted than supported most of the times, which goes a long way to show that German authorities didn’t consider the techno scene as a place of important cultural value in the first years it appeared in Berlin. This culminated in the police raid in 2003, which was probably the first time that club-goers witnessed police brutality. The people were surrounded by police men and were not allowed to move in any way, something that ultimately resulted in the venue’s shutting down. The city has sold the land to an investor group who were interested in building office spaces on the Leipziger Straβe location so the venue was set to be demolished. The club reopened on the 24th of May 2007 in a renovated power plant on Köpenicker Straβe in Mitte, trying to echo the underground aesthetic of the former venue. Hegemann makes it very clear for him that the music has to be reflected in the type of building as well as the interior, so that the ‘soul’ of the place in not lost26.

25 Laarmann, Jürgen, Explosion of Techno in Berlin, Red Bull Music Academy, September 2018, article online: http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/09/techno-and-the-fall-of-the-wall 26 Hegemann, Dimitri, Call it Techno, interview by Melanie Houston, Electronic Beats, 2007, web.

19

Nowadays, the successful recreation of the space further helps maintain the club’s position as a creative hotspot but also sustain the venue’s narrative and positioning it within a strong musical and geographical framework that allows new recruits to the scene to experience old aesthetics and new musical developments at the same time27.

The humanising quality and societal counterpoise that techno music brought to the people of Berlin could also be further argued by the scene’s cultural attributes too. Techno can be classified as a formation of lifestyles that refer to global patterns of culture. The scene has created a store of symbols and forms of knowledge that exists more or less independent of local limitations, the borders of nation-states and traditional fields of cultural activity and habits. One could easily then characterise the Techno scene as an example of a translocal and transnational national construct for the purpose of sociability28. This effect that the techno scene has is intensified more when applied in an urban environment that formerly constrained its citizens to specific societal norms and regulations, like Berlin.

Love Parade celebrations, 1991: the parade goes down Straße des 17. Juni through Tiergarten

18 May 2007 27 Beate, Peter, Breaching the divide: techno city Berlin, in Stahl, Geoff, Poor but Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes, Peter Lang Publishing, Switzerland, 2014, p.12 28 Hitzler, Ronald, Pfadenhauer, Michaela, Existential Strategies: The making of Community and Politics in the Techno/Rave Scene, Postmodern Existential Sociology, Altamira Press, 2002, p.89 20

Another important moment in the first years of the emergence of club culture in Berlin is the Love Parade, which took place for the first time in 1988 when 150 people came together on a weekend in mid-July to dance to techno music on the streets of Berlin. Within a decade the Love Parade has become an annual ritual, with participants numbering up to one million -nearly a thousandfold increase in a decade. The gathering has little to do with either ‘love’ or ‘parades’, as it is conventionally understood: less of an event than a happening, the Love Parade was the first time that young German ravers took techno music to the streets, in an act of visibility. It was a moment in time where the public sphere of the city of Berlin was invaded by its community of subcultural production who danced for endless hours to the rhythm of techno music, reclaiming thus their position in a newly reunified Germany. One could say that the act of raving out on the streets of Berlin could be re-imagined as an undoubtedly psychedelic vision by the sound pumping straight out of the speakers and flowing through the streets at a Love Parade party. There was a moment in time where the participants of the Love Parade sought out ways in which the endless rhythmic beat could replace the mundane barrage of noise that otherwise surrounds people in the city everyday - a kind of social utopia that became at least at certain moments, a reality - without those dancing being aware of this potential29.

As an event of mass participation, the Love Parade belongs to the domains of either ‘politics’ or ‘entertainment’, fields that have become increasingly interconnected and subordinate to economic imperatives.

Since the end of World War II, however, traditional politics has not been the major beneficiary of the decline in the power of organised religious authority30. Instead, entertainment has emerged as the field dominating the management of both experiences of transcendence and people’s affective attachments and identifications. So one could question, what is the Love Parade if not a political demonstration? Is it a display or celebration and what causes does it support? Whereas the Love Parade is intimately related to stylistic and technological developments in popular music it has virtually 29 St. John, Graham, Party, Love and Profit: The Rhythms of the Love Parade (Interview with Wolfgang Sterneck, translated by Garcia, Luis - Manuel, DanceCult - Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, October 2010 30 Church membership in Germany has been declining for decades, with a dramatic post-unification decline in the West. Since unification, the Evangelical Chirch, Germany’s largest Protestant church, has been losing approximately 300.000 members yearly. The Roman Catholic Church has been losing around 160.000 members yearly. Even before unification, 70 percent of all East Germans did not belong to a denomination. (as seen on: Lazar, David, Karst, Edward, Cash Strapped Churches Increasingly Moved by Entrepreneurial Spirit, German Information Center, New York, The Week in Germany, October 10th 1997, p.6) 21

no relation to the domain of conventional politics. For one, the Love Parade does not fit readily into standard genres of mass events, which has made it extremely difficult for politicians to appropriate this happening for their causes. Just like the act of raving, the Love Parade exists as a machine experience that relies on techno music to encourage the magic of a social transformation, from collective waiting to emancipated ecstatic dance -an action that creates feelings of community and oneness produced as primarily nonverbal, dependent solely on the force of participating in the rave.

Furthermore, the Love Parade was an expression of de-politicisation like a lot of other non-government movements formed in the Federal German Republic and actually amounted to a renunciation of clearly collective goals. Later, the fall of the pseudo-socialist dictatorships of Eastern Europe led not to the creation of a free social form, but rather tot the blind adoption of capitalism with all of its accompanying effects. These social developments were also reflected at a personal level so a general resigned political indifference started being evident between people, who in turn started increasingly looking to him/herself, to entirely private happiness and success as well as personal fun, development and entertainment above all else. Under the scope of prevailing neoliberalism, the perspective was increasingly narrowed to the ego, to consumption and career - and not the common food or even a new social perspective. The love Parade reflected all of this at the time, it was about a vague ‘love’ as primal longing and about ecstatic partying as an escape from the everyday, but all of this at an entirely de - politicised and consumerist level for the purposes of an increasingly commercialised mega - event.

In addition, if one takes into account Love Parade’s mottos throughout it’s history, the conception of a Techno-globe in communicated also in a symbolic level, bringing into being this communal identity of ravers on a local level but also all around the world. Captured in parodic slogans, such transcendent pretensions are too grand and sweeping, too emptied of content to be meaningful without the assistance of drugs or dance or the accompaniment of the techno pulse. But these slogans are not meant to direct ravers towards a certain political engagement. They are effective only at the sensual level: as linguistic mirrors of both transgressing into the social margin and the ‘empathogenic’ effects of ecstasy and other designer drugs used by ravers31.

1989, 1 July / Berlin

150

3.2 32

6.6

1990, 7 July / Berlin

2.000

“The Future is Ours” The second Loveparade had the slogan “The Future is Ours” and was visited by about 2,000 people, which was an increase of about 1200% compared to the year before. Thanks to the fall of the Wall in autumn 1989, young people from East Berlin were able to participate for the first time.

18.9 8.4 6.000

16.6

6.6

1991, 8 July / Berlin

“My House is Your House and Your House is Mine”

The summer of 1991 went down in techno history as the “Summer of Love“. Thanks to nationwide advertising, the parade with the motto “My House is Your House and Your House is Mine“ also attracted fans from other parts of Germany. 6,000 ravers from cities like Frankfurt am Main, Cologne and, of course, Berlin danced in perfect weather on the Kurfürstendamm.

1992, 1 July / Berlin

29.3 15.000 2.9

64.9

“The Worldwide Party People Weekend” The techno movement became increasingly popular, and Loveparade was well established on the scene, which was reflected in an additional increase in the number of visitors. With the slogan “The Worldwide Party People Weekend”, 15,000 participants from all over Germany raved on the streets of Berlin.

Even the sudden heavy rain did not spoil the mood of the event.

1993, 3 July / Berlin “Fifth Anniversary”

30.000

10.1

In the fifth year of the Loveparade’s existence, its fans celebrated with the theme “Fifth Anniversary“. Among the 31,000 participants were also numerous international guests. The parade had become more and more professional over the years. But for the residents of the Berlin-Charlottenburg district, the colorful parade slowly became a nuisance because of the noise and the large amount of waste.

1994, 2 July / Berlin

24.6

120.000

27.8

“Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen” (“Peace, Joy, Pancakes”) At the first Loveparade, 150 cheerful ravers danced along the Kurfürstendamm boulevard to the amazement of numerous passers-by. The organizing team of Dr. Motte, a Berlin original, managed to prepare two floats for the musical accompaniment of this small parade with the motto “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen” (“Peace, Joy, Pancakes”).

15.4

“The Spirit Makes You Move” With 120,000 techno fans from all over the world, the parade first reached a six-digit number of participants. Because of the enormous expansion of the event, the organization of the Loveparade became increasingly difficult and bureaucratic. In addition, the first space and capacity problems on the parade route came up. The parade had the slogan “The Spirit Makes You Move“.

31 Bornerman, John, Senders, Stefan, Politics without a Head: Is the ‘Love Parade’ a New Form of Political Identification?, Cultural Anthropology, Volume 15 No.2, Wiley, American Anthropological Association, 2000, p.304 22

23

1995, 8 July / Berlin 31.1

15

“We are One Family” With the slogan, “We are One Family“, the eighth parade with 750,000 visitors was held on the new route in the Tiergarten park around the Victory Column. Both the techno movement and the Loveparade had become mass phenomena by this time. The Loveparade GmbH was founded in spring 1996, and the parade’s name and logo have been trademarked ever since.

23.2

1997, 15 July / Berlin

“Let the Sunshine in your Heart” One million participants, an unbelievable number, danced through the center of Berlin. The motto “Let the Sunshine in Your Heart” was a perfect match for the weather that day. For the first time, the Loveparade had an official anthem, and it received worldwide media attention.

1.000.000

12.5 1.100.000

21.5

3.9 1.500.000

24

“One World, One Future” The tenth anniversary of the Loveparade was titled “One World One Future” and attracted more than 1.1 million visitors from all over the world. For the first time, the closing speech by initiator Dr. Motte was broadcast by several TV stations. As in the previous year, a special anthem was produced by Dr. Motte and Westbam.

1 16

“One World, One Loveparade” For the first time since its start, the Loveparade had a decrease in the number of visitors. ‘Only‘ 1.3 million visitors were recorded at the twelfth edition of the parade with the theme “One World One Loveparade”. At the same time, the concept of the techno parade was exported to other countries such as Austria, Israel and Mexico, where similar events took place after the great role model in Berlin.

“Access Peace” Under the motto “Access Peace”, participants gathered around the Victory Column for the fourteenth edition of the Loveparade.

Due to terror warnings and persistent bad weather, there was a drastic decline in visitor numbers. Nevertheless, about 750,000 music lovers made a pilgrimage to the capital. Financing the event became increasingly difficult.

2003, 12 July / Berlin

23

“Love Rules” A total of 30 floats provided the sound for 500,000 visitors at the parade themed “Love Rules.” Since many record labels cancelled their attendance because of declining revenue, the parade could only take place thanks to the support of the Berlin Fair company. In return, the Loveparade was catered exclusively by the company.

500.000

4

2006, 15 July / Berlin

18

1.200.000

21

12 7

“Music is the Key” With more than 1.5 million visitors, the parade, which had become a worldwide mass phenomenon, reached its peak. This year’s theme was “Music is the Key”. The Tiergarten park was partially destroyed by the masses, which led to protests by environmental organizations. The damage caused by the participants of the parade was repaired by the city of Berlin; however, this caused enormous costs for tax payers.

“Join the Love Republic” In spring 2001, Berlin authorities denied the parade its status as a political demonstration. This caused an enormous increase in costs, which now had to be completely paid by the parade’s organizers. Nevertheless, the parade attracted one million visitors under the slogan “Join the Love Republic”. 250 DJs from 20 different countries provided the background music on 45 floats.

2002, 13 July / Berlin

1.000.000

750.000 8

1999, 10 July / Berlin

2000, 18 July / Berlin

1.300.000

24

6

1998, 11 July / Berlin

25.8

13

19

1996, 12 July / Berlin

500.000

750.000 1.3

2001, 21 July / Berlin

“Peace on Earth” Because of the war in Bosnia, the seventh Loveparade’s motto was “Peace on Earth.“ In bright sunshine, half a million participants danced exuberantly on the completely overcrowded Kurfürstendamm. Consequently, there were massive complaints by the residents, and the city administration felt obligated to find a new route for future parades.

“The Love is Back” After the Loveparade was canceled due to financial difficulties in 2004 and 2005, the fitness chain “McFIT” became its new sponsor in 2006. After a two year break, the parade took place with the slogan “The Love is Back” and 1.2 million participants. Due to the disagreement over the new concept of the event, this Loveparade took place without the participation of the founder Dr. Motte. The spirit of the founding years was gone!

2007, 25 August / Essen

400.000

“Love is Everywhere” After the difficulties of the recent years, the Loveparade now took place in the Ruhr region of western Germany. The plan was to host the parade at a different venue every year. The kick-off event in Essen under the motto “Love is Everywhere” attracted 1.2 million people according to the organizers’ information. However, there was considerable doubt as to whether this number was correct.

2008, 19 July / Dortmund

19 500.000

4 17

“Highway to Love” With 120,000 techno fans from all over the world, the parade first reached a six-digit number of participants. Because of the enormous expansion of the event, the organization of the Loveparade became increasingly difficult and bureaucratic. In addition, the first space and capacity problems on the parade route came up. The parade had the slogan “The Spirit Makes You Move“.

All data extracted from multimedia exhibition ‘nineties Berlin’, Alte Munze, 2019.

25

04_liminality & communitas

26

Based on the anthropological and sociological references mentioned above, in this chapter I will demonstrate the equivalence of Emile Durkheim’s collective effervescence and Victor Turner’s communitas, indicating that similar models of cultural creativity and revitalisation are introduced by both scholars and could be useful in attempts to map club culture as a new religious movement or as Corsten suggests ‘a symbolic and proto-religious practice of a modern urban youth scene’. If clubbing is for many both a source of extraordinary pleasure and a vital context for the development of personal and social identities then this theoretical approach facilitates a clear engagement with the fluidity and creativity of raves, their socioculturally revitalising effects as well as the ways in which they create a sense of community between people.

Firstly, a concept that should be further delineated is that of liminality, which in anthropology is the quality or ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet began the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage it is believed that participants stand on the ‘threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time or community and a new way which the rite establishes. If liminality is regarded as a time and space of withdrawal from nominal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinisation of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs32. This dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation which allows for new institutions and customs to be established. Liminal rites according to Van Gennep involve the ‘creation of a tabula rasa, through the removal of previously taken for granted forms and limits’33, implying this way the actual passing from one phase to the other. He describes that this phase comprises symbolic behaviours signifying the detachment of the individual from an earlier fixed state (in the social structure) to an ambiguous state where he or she lives outside the normative environment and is brought to question themselves in/and the existing social order.

In general, Victor Turner, seeing all societies as dialectical processes of the interplay of social structure, developed a theory of ritual that viewed it as a process, rather than a static or given situation (as virtually all anthropology had seen it before him). In the various works he completed while conducting his fieldwork amongst the Ndembu tribe in Zambia,

he became aware that liminality served not only to identify in-between periods, but also to understand human reactions to liminal experiences in the way it shaped their personality, causing a sudden foregrounding of agency and the tying together of thought and experience. He also believed that ritual has the function of making and re-making society as it is ‘a periodic re-statement of the terms in which men of a particular culture must interact if there is to be any kind of coherent social life’34 which makes a ritual the place where a society’s values, norms and deep knowledge of itself are reaffirmed and sometimes, created. In 1974, Turner further coined the term limnoid to describe situations which have the characteristics of liminal phases but do not necessarily involve a resolution of a personal crisis. This means that the liminal is part of society, an aspect of religious rite while the liminoid is break from society and part of play. Liminoid phenomena exist apart from formal rituals and are part of a specific social structure, especially in complex post-industrial societies and can be an independent domain of creative activity, not simply a distorted mirror-image mask, or cloak for structural activity in the mainstreams of productive social labour.

It is no surprise that the “-oid” here, as in asteroid , starlike, ovoid, eggshaped, etc. derives from the Greek “-eidos”, a form, shape, and means “like”, “resembling”: liminoid resembles liminal without being identical with it35.

Emile Durkheim, like Turner, also granted ontological status both to religion as well as ritual, meaning that he criticised the animist and naturist theories of religion as untenable and stated that religion exists as it is a system of given facts, in short it is a reality for those who believe it is. He pointed out that ritual exercises a profound influence over its performers, forces are awakened in their consciences and intense emotions are stirred up. It is in this effervescent social milieux and indeed from that very effervescence that the religious idea seems to have been born, which is a concept that both scholars have suggested pointing out that ritual enactments are neither secondary to belief nor a mere epiphenomenon.

Additionally, Turner viewed ritual symbols as condensations of cultural meanings, even of entire cultures but also as immensely powerful agents of change which is an idea similar to Durkheim’s concept that social life is founded upon ideological factors that at the heart of the reality of social life are ‘représentations’,

32 Gaillot, M., Multiple Meaning: Techno - an Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present, Dis Voir, Paris, 1999, p.20 33 Corsten, M., Ecstasy as “this worldly path to salvation”: the techno out scene as proto-religious collective, in Tomasi, L., Alternative Religions Among European Youth, Aldershot, Ashgate, p.16

34 Turner, Victor, The drums of Affliction, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968, p.6 35 Turner, Victor, Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Sociology, Rice Institute Pamphlet - Rice University Studies, Volume 60, no. 3, 1974, p.64a 27

which include symbols, myths and legends36. Only through représentations can human beings communicate with one another as they constitute the key to knowledge, to logic, to an understanding of mankind and through collective representations, which are necessary for the existence of society, and their periodically strengthening and recharging a notion to ritual is ascribed which is called re-creative effervescence. The key to effervescent assemblies and the collective representations they arouse is the joining of feelings and ideas. Emotions, especially intense ones during a ritual, are saturated with strong meaning and pervade representative objects, in other words symbols. These symbolic objects effectively bind people to the ideals of their social group, ‘making the obligatory desirable’37. This is similar to Turner’s view of use of bipolar symbols in a ritual: these symbols (good and bad, male and female, young and old, light and dark etc.) bind the orectic or sensory pole with the ideological pole effectively linking biological functions and emotion to the moral and social order38. Bipolar symbols thus saturate goals and means with affect and desire. This is the mechanism through which ritual makes and remakes the moral community. So, it is apparent that both Turner and Durkheim believed that the use of bipolar symbols in ritual effectively bind strong emotional content with ‘higher’ more abstract cognitive content, such as behavioural norms, values and cultural ideas, thus ritual performs a constraining but also revitalising function in society.

Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms describes that ‘once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each one echoing the others. […] People are so far outside the ordinary conditions of life, and so conscious of the fact, that they feel a certain need to set themselves above and beyond ordinary morality’39. So, it is likely to say that collective effervescence is a communal aspect that gives rise to intense shared passions and emotions, a sort of social energy regarding assemblies that involve intention and volition. Notably, it must posses a degree of unity, of intimacy, and the forces which it releases must be sufficiently intense 36 Olaveson, Tim, Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner, Dialectical Anthropology, Issue 26, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 2001, p.96 37 Shilling, Chris, Mellor, Philip A., Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescene, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action, British Journal of Sociology, Issue 49 Vol.2, 1998, p.196 38 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1969, p.52-53a 39 Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford Wold’s Classics, 2008, p.212

28

in order for new ideas in morality to emerge, as well as ideal conceptions of society that ritual subjects may believe that can be further realised in the future and outside the ritual sphere (the latter is specifically characteristic to what Durkheim coined as re-creative effervescence). Effervescent assemblies then are in this light ambiguously dangerous arenas, as effervescence presents ‘a transgressive possibility fuelled by a de-differentiating impulse in moments of heightened emotional intensity’40 , thus implying a dissolution of social and normative structures that can sometimes be seen as a danger to these structures. Furthermore, collective effervescence is also ephemeral or momentary in nature, an ‘active and fluctuating communion’41 that although is real, it cannot exist in a permanent or prolonged state. It is a temporary condition and must be recharged.

In the same way, Victor Turner saw communitas as something that occurs during the liminal phase of a rite and is an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and undifferentiated communion or community of equal individuals. This means that it is an essential and generic human bond that involves the whole man in relation to other whole men, devoid of judgement, as it is comprised of egalitarian, direct, non-rational bonds between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals who are equal in terms of shared humanity42. Similar to Durkheim’s idea of creative effervescence, communitas means that ‘human beings are stripped of status roles characteristics - people ‘just as they are’ getting through to each other’43 to experience a deep and intense feeling that belongs in the intuitive emotional realm, as opposed to the rational one. Furthermore, Turner suggested that society has a limiting or negative impact upon people, it causes them to be segmented into specific roles they must play and limits them to constantly seeing their differences, separating man from man and man from absolute reality. Describing the continuous in discontinuous terms is something that is not parallel to the concept of communitas because it is in its very nature a transitory and temporary entity, intrinsically dynamic, never quite being realised. In fact, liminality, the state in which communitas can emerge, is equated with movement and change but also with transient humility or modelessness, often resembling an Edenic, paradisiacal or utopian state, 40 Pickering, W.S.F, Miller, W.Watts, On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Routledge Press, London, 1998, p. 150 41 Ôno, M., Collective Effervescence and Symbolism, Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes, p.87-88 42 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1969, p.131 43 Turner, Victor, Variations on a Theme of Liminality, in Secular Ritual, S.F.Moore and B.Myerhodd, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1977, p.36 29

portrayed as a timeless condition, the eternal now, a moment in and out of time44. However, its creative force is undeniable because the experimentation in which ritual subjects undergo with social constructs and roles produces new symbols, myths and other mythopoeia which often go on to form utopian or alternative models, or new symbolic bases for societies and in in the end it is possible that a whole new cultural structure, embodied in symbols, may suddenly emerge from the creativity of communitas.

The ontological experience of connectedness ravers so often report as central to club culture could then be described and further delineated as the experience of existential collective or re-creative effervescence and communitas. According to Reynolds45, raving is ‘a frenzied behaviour, extreme enthusiasm and psychedelic delirium […] an instantaneous, highimpact, sensation-oriented experience’, which is a phrase that could be associated with a term used in club culture analysis, the vibe. This is a kind of energy or pulse which cannot be expressed or understood in words, but as that which can only be physically experienced, mirroring the exaltation and enthusiasm described by Durkheim when analysing the concept of collective effervescence. Ravers are cognisant of the fact that, in addition to the music, it is the people and the sense of community and connectedness at raves that create and sustain ‘the vibe’. The dance experience in a nightclub is also often described by the term ‘vitality’, further evoking Durkheim’s effervescence: ‘ […] it is partly a celebration of the energy and euphoria that can be generated through being together, playing together and experiencing others together. Yet playful vitality is also partly an escape attempt, a temporary relief from other facets and identifications of an individual clubber’s own life- their work, their past, future and their worries’46. Almost exactly like the effervescent feelings emerging in ritual processes, raving has the ability of creating possibilities for its subjects to distance themselves from the everyday life and disrupt the mundane while at the same time making the ecstatic possible, even in forms of utopian social fantasies outside of the club.

Correspondingly, a hallmark of the rave experience and another quality of collective effervescence / communitas is the quintessential non-rational, embodied and effectual nature. Ravers often indicate that they don’t attend raves to listen to music, but rather to feel the music that communicates 44 Turner, Victor, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell University press, 1967, p.102 45 Reynolds, Simon, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Routledge, New York, 1999, p.77 46 Malbon, B., Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 164 30

directly with the body, an experience that is further intensified by the use of sense - enhancing drugs creating effects so that sounds seem to ‘caress the listener’s skin’47. As dance becomes rave’s transgressive medium of embodied expression, one could parallel the feelings of communion emerging to the ‘unity experience’ of clubbing, as raves are sites of intense outpourings of emotion, especially empathy and compassion. These feelings, oversaturated with emotion then become attached to symbolic representations in a nightclub, such as the architectural space, allowing subjects to explore new forms of identity and pleasure through dance. In this way, perceptions of new socio-sexual spaces are created that emphasise the ‘embodied information’ that is revealed to ravers (fuelled at least partially by ecstasy), perceptions that allow ravers to feel the need to be with others and share common ideals about sociocultural structures and prototypes.

For example, during the plateau of MDMA effects, interpersonal differences appear to evaporate producing a condition of almost total identification of self with other, meaning that within the dance rapture, participants may lose or suspend subjective experience of themselves and merge into a kind of collective body, a place where desire and production meet in a sense of flow48. This description of the ‘melding of selves’ during the connectedness experience is similar to what Victor Turner detailed when describing the communitas emerging in the Ndembu rites of passage, as well as for example the hippie happenings of the 1960s. Such a relationship is always a ‘happening’, something that arises in instant mutuality, when each person fully experiences the being of the other.

In addition, the rave experience has also been universally recognised as a transgressive, levelling and humanising experience which although has become a middle-class phenomenon in North America, for its progenitors and for many today is perceived to be inclusive, a place where race, class and gender lines are dissolved, where people can be themselves and be accepted. Historically, this can be justified for example by the roots of house music and its ethos that were ‘born of a double exclusion’: the gay AfricanAmerican club and party circuit of Chicago49. Although, today, rave-styled events cater to particular socio-economic groups and ethnic communities with metropolitan centres, the general idea is that a rave is open to anyone and is a safe space for people to experiment with normal modes of social

47 Reynolds, Simon, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Routledge, New York, 1999, p.84 48 Tramacchi, D., Chaos engines: doofs, psychedelics and religious experience, in St John, G., FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor, Common Ground Press, Altona, 2001, p. 174 49 Reynolds, Simon, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Routledge, New York, 1999, p.59 31

structure. So, in the same way that the ideas of collective effervescence level all humans to one big social bond while at the same time respecting their differences and creating opportunities for new paths of spiritual growth to emerge, club culture through raves accepts all forms of human and social expression through the medium of dance experience. As Fritz points out ‘a rave makes the political statement that we are all equal, and that no matter how different we may think we are, on a more tribal level, we all have the same basic needs as human beings. In this light, rave culture offers a firm foundation on which to build a new political order which may, in the not so distant future, lead to a way more humanistic and personal system of government’50. Moreover, collective effervescence as mentioned above, has a culturally revitalising quality due to it volatile, destabilising and even sacred nature that is often actualised through utopian imaginaries of the present political and social tendencies of the world we live in. Communitas is equated with movement and change in the same way club culture echoes the eternal present: for example, techno music ‘stretches time into a continuous present […] the music itself drugs the listener, looping consciousness and then derailing it, stranding it in a nowhere/nowhen, where there is only sensation, where now lasts longer’51. So, the urge for sociopolitical change and the drive toward utopian social models, is closely linked with a personal transformation at rave events which in itself is a lateral strategy echoing the same processual methods used by Turner and Durkheim to describe the emergence of communitas in rituals.

Finally, it is important to note that modern consumer cultures are routinely critiqued for their alienating impact, their absence of meaning and superficiality. It has also been argued that extreme levels of individual stress and adverse health result from these features and are an effect of the relativisation or outright deterioration of particular sociocultural contexts due to the process of globalisation. The advance and proliferation of technology and communications media contribute to these effects, facilitating the processes of globalisation and destabilisation of both individual subjects and communities52. Acid House and rave cultures themselves have been regarded as prime examples of this process with Antonio Melechi, for example, likening the rave to a giant void, a touristic ritual of individual and cultural disappearance: mediated, simulated, hyperreal53. This tendency of

50 Fritz, J., Rave Culture: An Insider’s Overview, Small Fry Press, Canada, 1999, p.216 - 217 51 Reynolds, Simon, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Routledge, New York, 1999, p.55 52 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, Semiotext(e), 1983, p.66 53 Melechi, A., The ecstasy of disappearance, in Redhead, S., Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, Aldershot, Avenbury, 1993, p.32

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the post - industrialised societies to host the formation of sects and cults, could be categorised as the fieldwork of New Forms of Religion, or NRM, in which club culture and rave-styled events belong. NRM followings attempt a re-sacralisation or reenchantment of the world, they are experimental cultural practices that try to make sense of life and further formulate efficacious cultures. While, in a sense, Melechi is right in describing rave as a symptomatic of the void of consumer cultures, what he fails to recognise is that it is simultaneously an adaptational strategy, conscious or otherwise, to the meaningless of existence within them. Ravers have reappropriated the tools that were given to them by modern consumer cultures and capitalistic forces of governance in order to create a community within them, setting dance culture as an example par excellence of the sociocultural revitalisation stirring within consumer cultures. Although most rave communities posses little to no formal social structures and are perhaps characterised as collectives or ‘neo-tribes’ they could be included in the category of NRMs as they contain several features common to the latter. For example, the fact that religious iconography in NRM can be appropriated syncretically from other traditions is connected to club culture’s hallucinatory, ecstatic or altered consciousness experiences transpiring in embodied, visceral and emotional states: radical personality transformation is a result of such ecstatic experiences. Also, the creation of ‘surrogate’ family and community units and support mechanisms as well as the formation of ideal or utopian social visions and programmes in NRMs is also in club culture translated as charismatic leadership and the development of cultus formations in the form of the DJand his/her followers. Last but not least, an opposition and resistance from existing authorities, social institutions and power structures and the concomitant adaptation of ritual performances is common in both subjects54.

54 Olaveson, Tim, Rave as New Religious Movement?, Club Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2003, p.98 33

05_creative city

Richard Florida’s concept of the creative city tells us that while cities must be efficient and fair, a creative city must also be one that is committed in fostering creativity amongst its citizens and to providing emotionally satisfying spaces and experiences for them. Alongside this concept, he further analysed the rise of the creative class and the creative potential this group of people has for the economic development that is driven in large by lifestyle factors such as tolerance and diversity, urban infrastructure and forms of leisure and entertainment. These two concepts were used

by Berlin’s regional authorities to promote a certain image for the city that would foster this kind of creativity in such ways that new professional scenes would emerge in the field of design and production as well as other various activities that themselves would become sources of income and economic growth. In this chapter I will try to comment on the way the city’s sociocultural spatial fabric has been affected by the approaches to economic growth that have been paved by the creative city concept as well as how this has affected the rise of the subcultural economy at play in the city and the tourism influx, over the past few years.

Since 1989, when the fall of the wall in Berlin occurred, the city has been bursting with creativity in all sorts of ways: people from all over Germany as well as the rest of the world gathered in the city to create together and express themselves artistically. These twenty or so years that have passed since that time made the city into what it is nowadays, with its continuously flourishing arts and culture scene, very often developed in the underground and subcultural parts of it. Alongside came the renovation of the city’s built environment with the foregrounding of its many cultural activities. This profound overhaul also generated a frenzied entrepreneurial energy, an effervescence made manifest in the many gallery, music, theatre, film, design, new media scenes borne out of the offices, bars, cafes, squats and club cultures of neighbourhoods such as Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Friedrichshain55. So Berlin keeps on reaffirming its role as a creative city and the (sub)cultural capital of Europe with its reputation being expressed through a sense of creative promise, a complicated appeal that is spread through word of mouth, artistic and social networks, urban ‘boosterism’ campaigns, the proliferation of cultural policies, numerous creative funding bodies and academic institutions, urban planning directives, and attractive investment opportunities.

55 Stahl, Geoff, Poor, but Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes, Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Switzerland, 2014, p.8

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According to official statistics the creative and cultural industries in 2015 accounted for 21% of the city’s GDP56. The success of these industries has in turn attracted many investors looking for opportunities to profit from the situation. This attitude has also been encouraged by Richard Florida’s concept of the creative city and the creative class, as seen on Cities and the Creative Class published in 2003. A neoliberal notion of the city and of artistic production within it is introduced in order to further influence local governments in designing urban policies that favour economic growth over the actual production of art by focusing on the importance of the creative class hence excluding many others. It is evident that during the last decade in Berlin, this attitude has been fostering gentrification and moreover, the commodification of many underground or subcultural artistic hotspots.

However, it is important to first delineate Florida’s ideas while at the same time questioning whether or not they offer any good to the sake of the city and what does this shift on cultural policy imply for the underground scene of Berlin.

Richard Florida understands the development of modern cities through creativity, he sees it as a moving force that brings the city forward and also interpreters all humans as creative beings since according to him we all have creativity within us. And yet, by using the term creative class Florida means ‘workers who have the good fortune to be compensated monetarily for their creative output’57, people who want to work in places that are innovative and different while engaging in jobs that ‘create meaningful new forms’. This alone leaves everyone else that is not affiliated with this particular class of people outside his concept on how creativity can affect the economic progress of an urban environment, meaning a large portion of the underground cultural production is excluded. Later on, he stars introducing to us all these sort of different indexes which describe a certain type of character each time, starting from the ‘Gay Index’, the ‘Bohemian Index’ and so on. It seems as if we go from one index to another, counting people, putting them in boxes: artists, gays, bohemians and so on, while at the same time separating cultural creativity from entrepreneurship with the later being handled through other institutions and areas of work not belonging to the cultural area. Thus, creativity is targeted as a value that we can prospect on, a value in which cities are going to invest in, not for the 56 Novy J. and Colomb C., Struggling for the Right to the (creative) City in Berlin and Hamburg: New Urban Social Movements, New ‘Spaces of Hope’?, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 37.5, p.1823 57 Florida, Richard, The Cities and the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban Regional Research, Volume 29.4, p.6 35

sake of art itself but for developing their economic growth58. A new form of capitalism is in this way introduced, which is meant to seduce those who were opposed to it in the first place (i.e.: the underground or subcultural movement) and this is translated today into a culture of hip consumerism, a flourishing trend that we can witness in many cities, especially Berlin.

‘Far from being an oppositional movement, capitalism has absorbed and integrated what was used to be thought as alternative or cool’59 and this is how Florida understands the link between the bohemian community and what he calls the creative community: he sees humans with talent as a capital on which a city must speculate and invest.

Berlin has always been a vibrant cultural scene and this is thanks to the many empty or unused spaces that the city had to offer after the unification of the East and West part of the city. These spaces were often taken over by artists and cultural production actors to develop their projects for little to no rent, which means that ‘large parts of Berlin’s creative activities were founded on the conditions of the Zwischennutzung - the temporary, in-between use of abandoned space for little to no rent’60. These spaces found all over the city offered opportunities for people to open up studios, communal housing projects, beach bars and also nightclubs setting the city as the capital of underground culture - yet this situation is under attack by creative city planners, who in turn try to use this fame of underground cultural activity not only to attract new building projects but also to place them exactly on the areas where art met political involvement and alternative lifestyles. So what is happening nowadays in Berlin is the fact that many activists, squatters and groups of neighbours are fighting and rebelling against the expansion of profit driven urban planning within their neighbourhood. This actually shows that many members of the actual creative class, are against its entrepreneurial, neoliberal spirit as presented

by Richard Florida.

The motto of the ‘creative city’ entered the local marketing discourse of the city of Berlin for the first time in the year 2000 and the newly elected government in 2001 began to incorporate various policy measures to promote Berlin as a creative city. These measures were put up by the Berlin Senate (the government of the city - state of Berlin) to improve conditions for cultural industries, create opportunities for new businesses and start-

58 Deschamps, Tristan, Berlin as a Creative City. Tensions in Urban Development and Underground Roots of Creative Process, Paper Minor Arts & Heritage, 2014, p.3 59 Florida, Richard, The Cities and the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban Regional Research, Volume 29.4, p.116 60 Jakob, Doreen, Constructing the Creative Neighbourhood: Hopes and limitations of creative city policies in Berlin, City, Culture and Society 1, 2010, 193-198.

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ups and in general to encourage ‘creative clustering’ in ‘under-utilised’ urban spaces or in specific ‘disadvantaged’ areas61. Furthermore, the city marketing companies began to include the city’s various subcultural, alternative and counter-cultural scenes into their marketing imagery, such as the temporary ‘urban beaches’ on the banks of the River Spree.

Specifically referencing the struggle for the right to the city’s waterfront, it is important to mention the conflict which has surrounded the most prominent example of urban redevelopment plans in Berlin which is the socalled MediaSpree project. The area, which covers about 180 hectares and spans 3.7 km along the eastern banks of the river Spree in the Kreuzberg - Friedrichshain district (eight times larger than Potsdamer Platz) has since the 1990s been a hotspot for temporary uses and sub-cultural activities (beach bars, techno clubs, small music labels or a trailer site) that has not ever attracted the interest of the city’s cultural and urban policy makers. But, in 2001 and 2004 two major global media and music corporations (Universal music Germany and MTV Central Europe) relocated their headquarters to re-used warehouse buildings of the Osthafen (East Harbour). Both organisations claimed that Berlin’s alternative culture was an important factor in their relocation to this specific area since the city’s electronic music scene, the independent labels and the city’s club culture are accountable for Berlin’s reputation as a global music city62. This creative enrichment was then used as a sort of brand-making policy for the MediaSpree development and is seen by the government as an important economic activity, which is of course something that echoes Florida’s concept of the creative city.

What was before seen as a derelict urban area now suddenly appeared to have potential for urban growth with the creative industries being the mechanism that could literally uplift it, both economically and culturally. As stated by the Senate Department for Urban Development in 2007: ’looking at the implementation strategy, the club scene and newly established firms of the music economy demonstrated in an exemplary manner how a vital urban culture can establish itself on an urban wasteland’. However, the new plans for the city’s waterfront development required the removal of many of the creative uses that already existed in the area to make space for new large-scale development. Some of the clubs have been forced to leave while the beach bars’ leasing contracts are vacant or annulled already.

61 Ebert, R. and K. Kunzmann, Kulturwirtschaft, kreative Räume und Stadtentwicklung in Berlin (The cultural economy, creative spaces and urban development), disP — The Planning Review 171, 2007, 64–79.

62 Bader, Ingo, Bialluch, Martin, Gentrification and the creative class in Berlin - Kreuzberg, Porter, Libby, Shaw, Kate, Whose Urban Renaissance? An International comparison of urban regeneration strategies, Routledge Studies in Human Geography, Routledge, New York, 2009, p.96a

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This in itself proves that these original creative communities were only used as a means to an interim solution of upgrading the urban quality of the area. Creative city planners are hence trying to build creative industries clusters on urban locations that were already culturally active beforehand, placing these actors or initiatives in a position of risk in the name of ‘redevelopment’ through a neo- liberal vision63. Once again, the philosophy behind MediaSpree can be seen as a parallel to the way Richard Florida excludes creative people who do not comply to his notion of the creative class: the (at first) short term use of small locally grown cultural entrepreneurs for the cultural branding an area which would in turn contribute to the attraction of other larger creative actors and then the subsequent marginalisation of the former. This is detrimental to the overall cultural life of the city of course since parts of the subcultural and underground economy of Berlin need long-term prospects too.

MediaSpree Development: axonometric analysis of programms found on the riverbanks of Berlin (source: Urban Catalyst)

63 Deschamps, Tristan, Neighbourhood Culture and the Creative City in Berlin, Creative Cities Final Essay, 2015, p.6 “Be Berlin Campaign” : the place to be for change (2009), advertisment showing the beach bars on the Spree river.

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06_urban planning & city identity Berlin’s reinstatement as the capital of Germany in 1991 after the fall of the Wall has raised great expectations of its transformation into a major European metropolis. Since that time, the city has been a prime playground for speculative real estate investment, which left behind a pile of unoccupied office space. On the other hand, new islands of economic growth have been developing in Berlin, particularly in knowledge-intensive economic activities and the media industry, while at the same time there is a subcultural economy emerging all around the city that takes advantage of the vacant spaces left behind after the reunification, such as squatting plots, political spaces of free expression led by grassroots movements and nightclubs.

Although this ‘new Berlin’ has been treated as a project of demonstrating the diversity and openness of the ‘new Germany’, this reinvention of urban space has heralded a selective vision that entails the wilful forgetting and deletion of some marginal histories and simultaneously the promotion of other ‘sexier’ urban identities and pleasures. In this chapter, I will try to analyse the constant procedure of branding and erasure of post-Wall Berlin led by the German government and urban planners that is used as a strategic platform which enables the city’s authorities to imagine and plan its urban future towards globality. Tourism promotion and urban development approaches and projects such as the Mediaspree development plans or the ‘poor but sexy’ accusations made by mayor Klaus Wowereit will be used in order to further prove that Berlin is a city ‘forever to become and never to be’, a city living through its past and always looking out for the future.

Image Campaign “You are in Berlin” (1999 - 2000)

Over the past thirty years, cities have been investing in place marketing strategies and place branding campaigns in order to attract investment, economic activities, skilled workforce, talented creative workers, tourists but also to enforce and strengthen local community pride and identity. This has been a process that ‘entails the various ways in which public and private agencies - local authorities and entrepreneurs, often working collaboratively - strive to “sell” the image of a peculiar geographically - driven place, usually a town or city, so as to make it attractive to economic enterprises, to tourists and even to inhabitants of that place’64. Constructing such a narrative through visual representations of the potential of places works as an active initiator for people to start to feel some sort of connection or attachment to the places being advertised, either because the authenticity of the place is being translated through the media campaigns mentioned 64 Philo, C., and Kearns, G., Culture, history, capital: a critical introduction to the selling of places, Selling Places. The city as culture capital, past and present, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.3 40

“The New Berlin: The Five Strengths”

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above or because they are attracted to it (e.g.: tourists).

Place branding is therefore a process whereby the place is associated ‘with wider desirable qualities in the perceptions held by relevant target audiences’65. The aim of this procedure is dual: the city authorities invest in these kind of promotional campaigns in order to form a unique selling proposition (in the context that all cities are in some sort of ‘popularity contest’ with each other) that will secure visibility to the outside and reinforce local identity on the inside. Place marketing activities thus interact with place making activities (architecture, planning, urban design and urban development) and with the cultural politics of collective identity and memory construction through space66.

The construction of these visual campaigns though often entails a highly selective process that imposes these images onto the actual urban diversity of a place and reduces true place identity to an easily packaged ‘urban product’, ready to be consumed by either the local residents of a city or the incoming tourism influx. During this place marketing process, it has been observed that a certain homogeneity begins to appear and places tend to resemble each other more and more. This can happen through the reproduction of similar ‘urban boosterism’ projects such as waterfront developments, iconic corporate buildings and anything that has to do with a kind of show-off architecture, or through the use of similar catchwords and slogan concepts in the marketing campaigns. One can then understand that the very selective nature of this branding process allows for the authentic qualities of a city to be commodified and rendered attractive, advertised and marketed for economic gain or social control, or even both67. Sometimes, these qualities can often be ignored or marginalised too, while others that are considered will attract more popularity to a place are promoted more in the process of re-imagining the city and of course this creates a conflictual response between residents and tourists alike. A prominent example is the promotion of culture for itself, as an expression of a local identity and as a form of personal and social development, compared to the recent ‘marketing for creativity’, fostered by conceptions made by Richard Florida. The latter targets specific cultural spaces and agents while neglecting others - a process which has implications for the local economic development policy 65 Karavatzis, M., Ashworth, G.J., Partners in coffeeshops, canals and commerce: marketing the city of Amsterdam, Cities, Vol. 24, No. 1, Elsevier Ltd., 2007, p. 16 66 Colomb, Claire, Staging the new Berlin: Place marketing and the politics of urban reinvention post - 1989, Routledge, London, 2011, p.26 67 Colomb, Claire, Kalandides, Ares, The ‘be Berlin’ campaign: old wine in new bottles or innovative form of participatory place branding?, Towards Effective Place Brand Management: Branding European Cities and Regions, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2010, p. 175 42

choices.

There are a lot of reasons why culture is chosen as a key future in place - branding strategies to promote uniqueness. First and foremost, the arts and culture offer special messages for the place. History, heritage and popular culture life are often exclusive to a certain place because of their intertwining historical, contemporary, social and geographical circumstances. Secondly, most branding messages want to convey a humane vision of a place, through the selective rendering of parts of it in promotional campaigns and the cultural life of cities offers an easy way to do that. A third reason could then be the fact that various art and cultural activities communicate vibrancy, excitement and happening. A dull place is unlikely to attract tourists, talented workers and investors. Last but not least, since place branding is not just about communicating with the outside world but it’s also an internal search for a local identity, branding authorities want local residents to perceive their places as lively spaces for the arts, culture and life and this can be done through promoted brand stories involving the arts and culture68.

However these place - branding strategies are being employed, one thing remains certain: the goal is to create a sense of authenticity for the city which would in turn attract people to it. Of course, these processes alter through the passing of time. It would be a rather inauthentic picture if a modern society is presented as static or one that is changing without commercial influences or foreign engagement. Place branding commodifies society but this exercise is contributing to an ‘emerging authenticity’. The concept of authenticity in place branding then must be acknowledged by place branding authorities as one of the socio-economic processes that is part of the evolving society. These authorities though often present the place brand as the actual identity of the location, this means that the brand story should accurately reflect the place’s culture - but this is not always the case. The city ‘image ‘ or ‘vision’ can often become a tool to redirect attention away from actual economic and social problems such as local unemployment, diminishing public expenditure on key services, weakening local democracy and increasing social inequalities.

After the first years of its reunification in 1989, the regional authorities of the city of Berlin have been trying to create a new ‘image for the city’ through various visual representations and promotional campaigns that 68 Ooi, Can - Seng, Stöber, Birgit, Authenticity and Place Branding: The Arts and Culture in Branding Berlin and Singapore, Re-Investing Authenticity: Tourism, Place and Emotions, Tourism and Cultural Change, Channel View Publications, Bristol, 2010, p.68-69 43

‘Berlin changes everyday. Creativity is a force of life and people are always experimenting and setting new trends. We at MTV will definitely feel at home here.’ Catherine Mühlermann, CEO of MTV Germany (2002 - 2003)

concentrated the public’s attention on new messages that showcased Berlin as an aspiring ‘world city’. Through social and spatial transformations that were occurring in contemporary Berlin, the city underwent a constant process of branding and erasure that has also been given precedence in the symbolic cultural economy at play. ‘Showcase Berlin’ (Schaustelle Berlin) was advertised with the slogan ‘stages, buildings, boulevards’ (Bühnen, Bauten, Boulevards). In the mid-1990s, the dominant theme for the city was one of ‘becoming’ and the mottoes ‘Berlin is becoming’ (Berlin wird) and ‘Berlin is becoming a world city’ (Berlin wird Welt Stadt) seemed plastered over every other vertical surface in the city69. At the same time, the city was trying to delete any negative connotations that were connected with its reputation that derived from its past, such as it being the centre of the Nazi regime, or the place where Cold war enmities were concentrated.

Moreover, in the early 1990s, as the centre of reunified Berlin became a giant construction site - around Potsdamer Platz, around the new government quarter and the Friedrichstrasse - a vast and chaotic sort of construction site landscape began to dominate the urban environment : the 69 44

Allon, Fiona, Ghosts of the Open City, Space and Culture, Vol 16 (3), Sage Publishing, p. 292

city was undergoing major transformations. The ‘New Berlin’ was emerging through ‘the production process of the real material built environment’ but it was also imaged, marketed, staged and branded to the public eye through ‘a production process of the imaginary, a social construction of a particular image and meaning’70, which entailed the discursive and visual construction of a new place identity. A strategic platform which enabled the city’s authorities to imagine and plan its urban future towards globality was established, which in turn had three main target groups: potential tourists, visitors and investors (in order to stimulate the urban economy), Germans throughout the Federal Republic (following the decision to move the Federal Capital from Bonn to Berlin) and finally the Berliners themselves.

Throughout the 1990s the place - branding authorities of the ‘new Berlin’ focused their marketing campaigns and events on three main sites which were visually constructed to symbolise the new ‘openness’ of the city, as mentioned above: Potsdamer Platz as the icon of the new service metropolis of aspiring global status, the government quarter as the symbol of the transparent democracy of the new ‘Berlin Republic’ and its capital city, and the Mitte/Friedrichstrasse area as the expression of the ‘European city’ model with its retrieved ‘urbanity’71. Openness and the virtue of a cosmopolitan city became both a social and visual metaphor, which was mostly symbolically signified at the time by the glass cupola in Norman Foster’s redesigned Reichstag building. ‘’Open’ means: ready for change, receptive, forward-looking, open to what is strange, different, new’72 and this was contextualised in a city that was thought to be the ‘most diverse and cosmopolitan city, [with] its repository of traditionally urban virtues like tolerance, experimentation and irreverence’73. Of course, these social qualities were something that identified Berlin even before its unification in 1989, since the counter-cultural scene of the time largely had its beginnings in the flight from national control. However, tolerance for sexual, social or cultural difference and alternative practices of all kinds became part of Berlin’s self-fashioning at the time.

Paradoxically, by the mid-2000s the ‘new Berlin’ was not so new anyore and the reality of the disappointing economic trajectory of the city did not 70 Lehrer, U., Image production and globalisation: city building processes at Potsdamer Platz, PhD dissertation, Department of Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 61 71 Colomb, Claire, Staging urban change, re-imaging the city: the politics of place marketing in the ‘New Berlin’ (1989 - 2004), thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) in Town Planning, University College London, The Bartlett School of Planning, University of London, London, 2008, p.150 72 Berliner Festspiele, Berlin: Open city. The city of exhibition, Nicolai, Berlin, Germany, p.120 73 Ladd, B., The ghosts of Berlin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1997, p.225 45

meet with the aspirations of urban planners and marketing authorities.

Unemployment remained high, many holes and brownfield sites still punctuated the city’s landscape and the status of a ‘service-industry’ oriented city seemed to be fading away. Things have been left out of the official promotional discourse for a long time, perceived as irrelevant when it comes to the economic growth of the city and not useful for its marketing to locals and tourists alike. This exact dynamic diversity marked a dramatic shift in emphasis between the early 1990s and the early 2000s: from a focus on cultural consumption to a focus on cultural production and the creative industries. What is interesting here was the gradual inclusion of alternative spaces of cultural expression in the marketing campaigns which was reflected by the increasing importance assigned by Berlin policy-makers and marketers to the so-called creative industries, creative ‘classes’ and the spaces they inhabit. The analysis and policy recommendations made

by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), problematic as they might have been, seemed to be extremely influential on local policymakers at the time. As the branding authorities began to be increasingly more aware of the potential of the ever growing creative industries for the local economy, they started adapting their economic and urban development policies to support these sectors proactively and including them in their citypromotional and marketing narratives.

One of the main characteristics in this place-branding change mentioned above is the continuous appearance of new types of previously non-represented ‘creative spaces’ into the imagery of city-marketing campaigns, from the tourism promotion publications to the discourse of national and international media on Berlin as a ‘destination’. Usually these spaces were not located in the cultural or political hotspots of the city and were totally neglected in the promotional imagery of the 1990s, but later on some of the ‘urban voids’ domesticated by virtue of innovative ‘temporary uses’ (Zwischennutzung), such as Berlin’s trendy ‘urban beaches’, started to serve as the image of a creative city74. Many of these advertisements also shifted the media’s concentration of interest from the built environment to creative individuals, in search for new images that could distinguish the city from its competitors. A new narrative consequently came to the forefront, with advertisements from 2001 specifically inviting ‘creative entrepreneurs’ to come up and start a firm in Berlin, mentioning the city’s nightlife and cultural scenes as key attraction factors. A year later, another advertisement, picturing the young female CEO of MTV Central 74 46

Barkham, P., ‘Ich bin ein sunbather’, The Guardian, Travel Features Section, July 2007, p.2

Europe, highlighted the constant change, experimentation, trend setting and creativity of Berlin as significant location factors75. This can in part be justified by the fact that urban policy-makers worldwide were now targeting the ‘off-beat’, ‘alternative’ and previously ‘underground’ subcultural and artistic sectors in their place-marketing strategies and decision makings, which allowed for cultural commodification and artistically inflected place promotion to happen76. This process has also been exemplified by the gradual integration of the hedonistic techno and club culture, and the gay culture into Berlin’s city marketing and tourism promotion campaigns. New types of sites associated with urban subcultures were slowly integrated into the new narrative of place-branding, such as temporary uses along the river Spree (including nightclubs and beach bars) and also the Badeschiff (a boat turned into an outdoor swimming pool).

One could say that the struggle for the creation of an antagonistic ‘creative city’ reputation also had a face, from one point onwards. Klaus Wowereit, the City Mayor of Berlin, has become an iconic personality, an almost celebrity - like persona representing a tolerant and energetic city since his election win in 2001. Back then, Wowereit had famously described Berlin, in a newspaper interview as ‘poor but sexy’ (‘Arm aber Sexy’). This little phrase quickly began to be considered as one of the most accurate marketing labels ever given to the city and became an unofficial saying both for locals and tourists alike. However, the mayor felt that in 2008 the city needed a new branding campaign and following the shift in cultural policy that was mentioned above, he launched perhaps one of the most famous ones under the slogan ‘be Berlin’ (sei Berlin). This specific campaign redirects the attention from places to people, since it aims at mobilising the active participation of the city’s inhabitants, through collecting their narratives about Berlin and encouraging the construction of strategic alliances among institutional players. Furthermore, it seeks to perform a new sort of place - marketing for the city, one which is dependant on the testimonies and success stories that Berliners themselves would send in the campaign’s website, encouraging them to be storytellers, ambassadors and in a sense ‘be Berlin’. Accordingly, a multiplicity of messages about Berlin make up the campaign under the threefold pattern of ‘be …, be …, be Berlin’. The 75 Colomb, Claire, Pushing the Urban Frontier: Temporary Uses of Space, City Marketing, and the Creative City Discourse in 2000s Berlin, Journal of Urban Affairs, Volume 34, Number 2, Urban Affairs Association, p.142 76 Peck, Jamie, Struggling with the creative class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley, p.760 47

‘be Berlin’ campaign featured entertainment - related temporary uses quite prominently, advertising the ‘rough facades, cracks, contradictions’ and ‘fractures’ of the city as assets. The city’s urban voids, previously left out of the place-making strategies, were now repackaged and granted specific cultural significance, as they were interpreted as new urban playgrounds for artistic production, consumption, creativity and leisure. These were of course unique selling points for Berlin and urban beaches and club culture started to appear in the international media as tourist attractions worth a visit, shifting away the public’s attention from the iconic sites of the 1990s urban redevelopment. But, what needs to be noted here is that these spaces always existed as the ground for social and sexual experimentation, since subculture has always been prominent in the city since the 1960s and 1970s. The emphasis now was on a disorder that could be glamorised and marketable, a seediness that is not only sexy but also a form of consumable spectacle for the city. Alongside the cultural entrepreneurial opportunities offered at the time in the urban environment of Berlin, ‘transgression itself was to be brought back into line and offered up as a package of commodified contentment … fed into the programmatic imagination, in an alliance between city politics and commercial imperatives’77. Once again, subcultural authenticity and change were presented as the city’s hallmarks and used to entice ‘culturepreneurs’ to locate to the city.

Each year, the campaign’s aspiration was reflected on the “title” that [be Berlin] had. For example, in 2009, Berlin was promoted as City of change, an art and cultural metropolis, an important location for science and business and a leading international city to live and work in. In 2012, with the campaign ‘A great place to live’, Berlin managed to overcome the negative side-effects of a large urban area with millions of residents by setting natural counterpoints. Furthermore, the ‘City of opportunities’ theme, expanded on the liveability factors of the city, adding extra aspects to the equation. This theme emphasised on additional motifs that focused on wide-ranging opportunities in areas like science, entrepreneurship, ideas, culture, nature and business.

The campaign has been a constant attempt to capture this nearcentury long agony of status-anxiety, to have the city and its citizens finally ‘be’. However, the nature of this calling to ‘be’ is most of the times restricted to entrepreneurialism, or taking advantage of the available cultural 77 Rose, N., Governing cities, governing citizens, Democracy citizenship and the global city, Routledge, London, England, 2000, p.106 48

attributes of the city and thus interpellate and produce an unsettled and restless urban subjectivity but at the same time an ambiguous civic identity.

There is an expectation from the people taking part in the campaign to commit to being a Berliner, whatever that may mean, but to also serve at the same time as an ambassador for the city. In this light, the city is about things happening at the level of the innovating individual and what the campaign is suggesting is that people will find a way to make their life in Berlin ‘eventful’ one way or another, since they are living in a site of possibility which would in turn offer the condition of reconstructing one’s self and actualising creative potential. The promoters of this campaign partly justify the need for the campaign using arguments which were already present in the discourse of economic-political elites in the early 1990s: that ‘Berliners do not like their city’ or are very negative about it. The campaign is, in that sense, in continuity with the various events and campaigns which through the 1990s were designed to improve the ‘mood’ of the citizens and stimulate their acceptance of the ‘new Berlin’78. Yet, when it comes to ‘social engineering’ in cities in transformation, one could say that in the Berlin context this specific campaign allowed for a variety of different messages that came from all sorts of different places to be expressed. This process is positive in the sense that it widens the facets of the world’s perception of the city of Berlin, but on the other hand it can carry with it some risks for the very spaces and people it depicts: commodification of previously noncommercial activities and symbolic gentrification leading to real physical changes in the city.

78 Colomb, Claire, Kalandides, Ares, The ‘be Berlin’ campaign: old wine in new bottles or innovative form of participatory place branding?, Towards Effective Place Brand Management: Branding European Cities and Regions, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2010, p. 183 49

07_temporary space & re-use After the fall of the wall in 1989, Berlin’s political and economic context has led to an explosion of bottom-up initiatives for the ‘temporary use’ of disused urban sites, a process that has been mobilised in the local economic development and place marketing discourses and strategies of the Berlin Senat (city government) and associated agencies over time. The mobilisation of temporary uses, adopted as a tool of urban revitalisation by German authorities, gives rise to all sorts of different paradoxes and dilemmas when these uses are met with real-estate interests and large-scale urban development that tends to ignore the importance of these ‘intermediate spaces’ for the social fabric of the city and the survival of the underground movement in Berlin. In this chapter, the temporary uses of urban space that have been harnessed in recent economic and urban development policies and in the official city marketing discourse in Berlin post-2000 in the context of the discursive and policy shift toward the promotion of Berlin as a ‘creative city’, will be further delineated by the gradual process of enlistment of new forms of cultural and social expression by policy-makers and real estate developers within the city. It is apparent that the dissonance of the ‘stakeholders’ of interim urban space in Berlin has consequently put pressure on the very existence and experimental value of the latter, while at the same time questioning the way these spaces pose challenges for conventional forms of urban planning and urbanism in general. So, if these interim spaces in Berlin offer new visual urban frontiers and their temporary use leads to localised conflicts about their future, then in which ways do they also offer a possibility of an escape from the controlled spaces of the city’s urbanist interventions and the consumerist bombardment of meaning and messages? What is the importance of temporary space and re-use of urban sites in the city of Berlin and what are the specific conflicts or struggles surrounding their transformation over time?

Despite the large amounts of urban redevelopment and regeneration processes that have taken part in the city of Berlin post-1989, the city still remains full of ‘voids’, with its fabric being uncontinuously interrupted by holes, wastelands, brownfield sites and vacant plots. There are numerous reasons that need to be taken into consideration in order to understand this phenomenon. First, Berlin used to be a formerly divided city by the Wall and thus the surrounding area around it was a ‘no man’s land’ which after the city’s re-unification remained empty. Also, extensive bomb damage during World War II and the destruction of unwanted buildings and monuments by successive political regimes left behind a lot of ‘vacant space’, wiping out 50

Schwarzer Kanal, an Alternative Queer Living Project and Trailer Site on the Southern Bank of the River Spree, Berlin - Kreuzberg (Photo: Florian Kettner, 2009)

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one fifth of Berlin’s 250.000 buildings and damaging many more. Both in East and West Berlin, the urban planning approaches adopted in the postwar era led to large-scale clearance and demolition and to the adoption of modernist urban design principles characterised by large open or empty spaces between buildings. At the same time, the abandonment of industrial and infrastructural sites caused by the rapid deindustrialization that took place after the unification of Germany has resulted in a significantly larger stock of empty, disused or vacant sites than other European national capitals or large cities. In general, Berlin had to simultaneously face the implications of the transition to a reunified city, to a capital city and a postindustrial city, all of which was translated in its urban fabric of voids. As of 2010, 3.181 hectares were classified as ‘vacant areas’, (‘areas currently not in use and not maintained, on which variegated stands of vegetation can often develop) which means that 3.57 per cent of the city’s total surface79 It was apparent at the time that such spaces were usually visually hidden from the public eye with billboards and left out of the city’s promotional imagery. The depiction of such spaces in the discourse of politicians and policy documents has often been marked by a rhetoric of ‘reurbanization’ and ‘densification’ which stresses the need to fill those ‘urban voids’. Yet most of these ‘indeterminate spaces’ are neither dead nor do they have to be filled immediately. They are spaces of urban wildlife, spaces of ‘micropolitical activity’, spaces of ‘alternative cultures’ or ‘spaces of transgression’ for marginalised social groups, youth or artists. For some groups not incorporated as part of the contemporary ‘imageable city’, the urban spaces popularly represented as dystopias may actually be practised as essential heavens, transgressive lived spaces of escape, refuge, employment and entertainment80. It is true, of course, that this didn’t happen all of sudden since in the 1970s and 1980s the city already had a rather famous reputation for its radical social movements (e.g.: gay, student, antimilitary, punk and squatting movements) of countercultural activities that all found common ground in squats and alternative living projects. In the 1990s, the underground techno music scene was heavily reliant on disused buildings and sites for its clubs and parties. As West Berlin never had much heavy industry, East Berlin’s industrial complex was privatised and relocated leaving many empty factories and plants in the city’s centre which have 79 SenStadt Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung (2011a) Berlin Environmental Atlas. 06.01 Actual Use of Built- up Areas / 06.02 Inventory of Green and Open Spaces (Edition 2011). Tab 3: Area shares of different uses of the total area of Berlin in ha http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/umwelt/ umweltatlas/eid601.htma 80 MacLeod, G., Ward, K., Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the contemporary city, Geografiska Annaler, 84B, p.164 52

been crucial for Berlin’s nightlife after the city’s reunification thanks to the phenomenon of interim use (Zwischennutzung).

The German word Zwischennutzung (‘interim’ or ‘temporary’ use) was coined to refer to activities that can be defined as uses in the urban fabric which are ‘planned from the outset to be impermanent’ and ‘seek to derive unique qualities from the idea of temporality’81. In the early years of the newly unified city of Berlin, these uses were flea markets, car boot sales, community or beer gardens, sports grounds, waterfront beaches and techno clubs. The term ‘interim spaces’ refers to those parts of urban space that are used temporarily, which means that their programmatic activity moves away from a focus on land use per se and instead focuses on a dynamic and open-ended sense of in-betweenness, a sort of urban intervention filled with unexpected possibilities. Another interesting fact about temporary uses is that the actors behind them usually come outside of the official, institutionalised domain of urban planning and urban politics. These include start-up companies, migrants, individuals or groups who make an ideologically motivated choice to withdraw into an alternative economical, political or social lifestyle, homeless people and illegal immigrants or parttime activists. What commonly happens with the the factory buildings and warehouses or run-down breweries which are either squatted or rented out by the city officials and property owners for interim use is that until the state succeeds to find prospective developers or the private owners manage to attract the investors with the sufficient funds to begin either the process of demolition or development, these spaces are rented out to various cultural entrepreneurs such as artist collectives and nightclub owners. This interim period can last up to a few couple of years, which in turn means that a lot of these spaces started out as obscure nightlife ‘hotspots’ and have since prospered and become internationally famous. Either way, this practice of interim use and the cycle of nightspot birth and death it engenders are essential for the world famous dynamism of Berlin’s nightlife economy and reputation82.

Intermediate users are often the first step preparing the ground for larger urban developments and this is the reason why their presence in Berlin is so important for the city’s urbanity. They first create certain qualities for a specific location in the city which in turn attract people there, regardless of the programmatic activity that is genuinely happening.

81 Haydn, F., Temel, R., Temporary urban spaces: Concepts for the use of city spaces, Birkhäuser, Berlin, 2006, p.17 82 Oktay, Enis, Nocturnal Transgressions: Nighttime Stories from Berlin, the New European Nightlife Capital, MPhil Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015, p.200 53

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Afterwards, these places become interesting for the established users which is of course problematic when it comes to identification processes in the urban fabric and the ‘right to the city’. This is exactly the reason why attempts are made to keep the window of opportunity in planning and urban development very small for interim users so that their temporality is not postponed indefinitely. Restrictions may occur and each case is different on its own but what is foremost important is how can users be won over to these areas and how incentives can be created in order to benefit from already existing urban, economical and social networks and react to the already existing locations suitable for temporary use. In consequence, one could say that intermediate users occupy places where classical urban planning has failed or is under the process of re-evaluation (in areas such as the Spree waterfront in Berlin, for example).

Temporary users seek to attract a lively walk-in clientele which sooner or later infrequently places them in competition with financially powerful commercial activities, as mentioned above. Due to their creativity, they discover architectural potentials in unusual locations and worry very little about the existing image of the site they have selected. Many temporary users choose a site in the city less for its location and more because of the temporary user milieu that already exists there. They want to participate precisely in that milieu but because of their more or less public character, most temporary uses are located near city centres. Clubs, for example, wish to be easily accessible. They often use unusual facilities in order to make themselves distinctive, but they avoid residential neighbourhoods due to the noise problem created and the arguments that could be made against them when it comes to their cooperation with the rest of the urban environment83. Thanks to the fact that the site is frequently left in its original state, it becomes possible to preserve its original aesthetic and historical character. For example, historical artefacts -ranging from industrial culture or postwar modernism- are appropriated and carried forward into the present and future.

In Berlin, when the wall first came down, there were whole areas of empty buildings that lend themselves to informal occupation. First came the squatters, many of whom were artists. The authorities accepted and sometimes even encouraged their activities just to get life back into the streets84, since so many parts of the city were left without any significant

social or urban life taking place in them. It was in this climate that clubs and bars flourished, with so many locations often ‘disguising’ themselves or changing locations every once in a while in order to curate their vibe and group of people that get in. The process of disguising the entrance to the club is also quite common when it comes to intermediate locations in the city, with hardly any entrance to the club being recognised during the day (no indication of name signs or neon frames). At night you had to go as a visitor in dark backyards, climb over rubble heaps or enter through steel doors.

The closer the club was to the veins of metropolitan tourism, the better it had to hide. Only the people who knew where things were also had the privilege of getting in. This is also something that separates underground club locations to bigger, more mainstream ones. If everyone knows where and how to get into a small underground club then this information is worthless since the club as a social discriminator no longer exists (meaning that the space can be seen as a machine that ‘chooses’ who is valid and who is not through the process of having bouncers at the door)85. On the descent to public prominence, the place starts to gradually attract more focus from the public until it starts appearing even in international travel guides. Even then it continues acting as a discriminating machine but its previous sense of authenticity is lost. Consequently, intermediate urban spaces that host club locations act as heterotopias due to their ability to produce difference, but only by exporting and afterwards losing their social status through disappearance from the city. How long a small club survives varies from case to case, sometimes it takes years, sometimes only a few weeks and as seen above, the public influence this process greatly.

As mentioned above, subcultural groups and their activities played a major role in the way interim spaces were appropriated by them in the city of Berlin after the fall of the Wall. The urban wastelands left in the wake of the deindustrialisation of East Berlin and along the former borderlands around the Wall, become the settings for an innovative culture of interim use, including electronic music subcultures. Abandoned buildings and closed industries in particular were turned into autonomous spaces and cultural centres86. Across the city such ‘urban voids’ were transformed into playgrounds for artistic production, consumption, entertainment and transgression. Subcultures often appropriate objects, languages and spaces but with a subversive approach: the original meaning of the

83 Oswalt, Philipp, Overmeyer, Klaus, Misselwitz, Philipp, Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use, DOM Publishers, 2013, p. 55 84 Fischer, Nina, El Sani, Maroan, Phantomclubs, in Blindspots, Jrp Ringier, SMBA Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, p.169

85 Heidenreich, Stefan, Die Berliner Clubs, as seen in Fischer, Nina, El Sani, Maroan, Verlag, Maas, Klub 2000, Berlin, 1998, p.50 86 Allon, Fiona, Ghosts of the Open City, Space and Culture, Vol 16 (3), Sage Publishing, 2013, p.294 55

appropriated object is distorted in order to create an image that is then used to promote their identities. Subcultural groups construct meaning by taking these objects from mainstream and dominant culture and injecting them with their own meaning. This can also be understood as a way of saturating existing cultural signs or artefacts with new or contradictory significance.

Moreover, it is this process that allows these groups to appropriate space not based on forces of capital, ownership or institutionalisation but rather to create a sense of group solidarity and community, differentiation from the public and homogenisation within the group. Subcultural actors hosting activities on interim urban spaces are thus interested in the unexplored, the strange and the ‘ugly’87.

Regarding architectural forms and structures, the aforementioned appropriation defies dichotomies between permanent and mobile, formal and informal, designed and improvised - especially when it comes to interim urban space. While experimenting with spatial manifestations of their activities, these groups subvert conventional ways of seeing architecture and certainly propose creative transplanting within urban space: ‘a canal bank is used for floating structures, existing waste vegetation becomes a garden, a roofless ruin becomes a terrace, an industrial shed a covered market and a bank vault becomes a club’88. However, the techniques of creating subcultural meaning are also applied at the scale of spaces and buildings within the city. Indeed, bricolage and the contradictory combination of incompatible realities, is pronounced in the occupation of spaces and objects within subculture. This is apparent in the produced visual impact between architectural monument and mobile, self-built dwelling structures, the discarded objects that are assembled into art objects, the found objects that have their original meaning and use subverted (a bus wreck that becomes a sculpture, a telephone box that has been turned into a toilet cubicle).

87 Nisenbaum, Marcio, Temporary Uses & Creativity: A Study on Interim Appropriations of Urban Space in Berlin, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences - Dessau Institute of Architecture, June 2008, p.41 88 Sheridan, Dougal, The Space of Subculture in the City: Getting Specific about Berlin’s Indeterminate Territories, Field: A Free Journal of Architecture, Vol. 1, The Belfast School of Architecture, 2011, p.106 56

Kunsthaus Tachelles, circa 1990

The urban fabric of Berlin before and after WWII. Figure ground produced by the Berlin Senat Department for Urban Development (Source: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/stadtmodelle/de/innenstadtplaene/sp/index.shtml) 57

08_Detroit & city alliances Juan Atkins, famous musician and Dj who allegedly had been credited as the originator of Detroit techno, has often spoken of the genre as a kind of alternate reality, a portal of an imagined realm of freedom. But in 1988 he also said that he believed it was necessary to tear down history in order to create the future: ‘We want to repudiate everything that reminds us of the past’ he insisted. ‘We don’t sit down and say “Let’s make the weirdest music we can”; it’s just a result of our environment. Detroit is a post-industrial city; the industry is closing down and technology is coming to the forefront.

The city has dried up and our music is a phoenix rising from the ashes of the crumbling industrial state’. The above statement creates resonance that just like in the case of the city of Berlin, there have been specific aspects such as social conditions, cultural backgrounds and/or economic and political changes that contributed to the materialisation of the techno music genre in the city of Detroit too. When talking about electronic dance music, Berlin and Detroit are often mentioned as intrinsically linked cities with specific geographical, cultural and political contextualisations in the way the historical and political background affected the freedom of artistic expression through techno music and club culture. In at attempt to compare the passing from industrial to post-industrial in both urban environments and how this affected the cities’ sociocultural fabric, I suggest that techno music is a reflection of its surroundings on the one hand, and of the community that exists behind it on the other.

There is so much to be said about Detroit’s complexities in the industrial, social and cultural decline that the city saw in the post-1945 period.

Nevertheless, it is these changes that happened within the urban fabric regarding its social structure, its economic and political failure that created the backdrop for the birth of the techno genre. In the early twentieth century, the city had been an American and international symbol of modernism and industrial achievement. Representative of this are perhaps Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, created in the 1930s at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

These murals celebrated the energy and optimism of industrial Detroit, and the black and white industrial workers as heroes of modernity. The city’s past is presented through an optimistic point of view, suggesting that the workers try to ‘dream of a world to meet [their] individual and communal needs, physical and emotional and spiritual, and then [they] make the tools that … will help make those dreams real. As the word changes [they] invent new tools … [and] fashion a world closer to [their] ends, invented with meanings and purposes of [their] own creation’89. Adapting one’s tools 89

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Cantwell, David, Detroit City: The anatomy of a record, The Journal of Country Music, Vol

Diego Rivera’s mural “Detroit Industry” murals, circa 1933.

Tresor interior, circa 1993 (source: Martin Eberle photography)

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and ways of reproduction of a communal future to the given circumstances of history is also very prominent in the way techno music emerged during the first years of reunified Germany. What is important here is the depiction of a working class in a state of utopia, a sort of industrialised euphoric community that for a very long time existed in bliss, until the 1950s signalled the end of it all.

Detroit was the home of the big three of America’s motor industry (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler), but the limited focus of its economy meant the city was hit hard by a post-1950s downturn. Its industrial, commercial and urban infrastructure was decimated in this period. Many companies and employers left the city after the civil unrest caused by the race riots of July 1967 while at the same time white, and to some extent black, middle-class workers fled to Detroit’s suburbs, leaving behind an impoverished inner city population, causing a massive suburbanisation of the city90. The racial divide of the city influenced the development of a futuristic and dystopian aesthetic as much as the class division among the African American population in Detroit. This racial segregation could not only be noticed in the nature of the city’s workforce but also within the urban environment too: the geographical partition that followed the 1967 riots combined with the already economical decline of the city formed a particular kind of social contingency that in turn later also manifested itself musically and politically. This interesting industrial to post-industrial shift combined with a focus on a new kind of social identity, contributed to the upbringing of a new atmosphere for Detroit which is very important when discussing musical production within the city limits.

This is also common for Berlin: although the city was never a very strong economic or financial centre within Germany, it was once an industrial centre that had to shift its identity into a post-industrial urban environment with a dire need to re-brand itself after the fall of the Wall. Moreover, the societal changes that the city faced post-reunification are tremendous and underline the ways in which cultural production played a very important role in affecting not only local but even global cultural production and eventually lifting up the spirit of the city. After all, the population of Berlin was also heavily segregated between East and West. Both cities have often been named as local sites from which a tradition derives91 and that tradition is 23.2, Country Music Foundation, Nashville, 2003, p.43 90 Smith, Suzanne E., Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, Harvard University Press, London, 1999, p.244 91 Lessour, Theo, Berlin Sampler: From Cabaret to Techno: 1904 - 2012, a Century of Berlin Music, Ollendorff Verlag, Berlin, 2012, p.7 60

of course techno music. and that tradition is of course techno music. For a very long time, the Detroit techno artists shared with the most active portion of the Berlin techno scene a sense that the link between identity and social location could be broken due to contra-competing states of (Cold War) visions, a link that was made redundant in the ecstatic borderless visions of the future they conjured, within club culture92. Although in Berlin the social divide that was prominent within the first years of reunification was not based on colour, as it was in Detroit, the economic and political background is nevertheless important for the progress of cultural production within the city.

Consequently, what happened in both cities was at first a social displacement of people due to their status and class or because of the circumstances of the urban environment in which they lived in. Both of these urban environments had to also undergo rebranding and re-shifting from a heavily industrialised economic context of production (which nonetheless was based on the workforce that already existed there) to a futuristic and post-industrial mentality that allowed for cultural production to become more prominent. Music in itself became the means and medium for this expression to be owned by the people. In Detroit, for example, there is a strong correlation between techno music and the rhythmic African American dances of the black population that lived there but also with the city’s industrial past and the machine-like sounds that were produced. In Berlin, it’s almost the same since heavy industry used to support the city as a whole in the past and an openness already existed there. So artists that came from Detroit, having a socially disintegrated background because they were either discriminated or pushed aside by the rise of different economies, were more easily accepted by the community in Berlin. And thus, a cultural alliance between the cities started to form itself, whether it was because of the common experiences or a shared perception of a troubled urban past.

Detroit’s socioeconomic situation in the 1980s was a mistake, albeit one brought about by political and business decisions with racialised consequences. The link of the city to Germany makes sense from the perspective of these conditions, since for the future of African Americans in the city it made complete sense at the time to use European electronic “machine music” to prompt an uncharted, synthesised territory that otherwise seemed patterned and preprogrammed for perpetual hostility towards 92 Gook, Ben, Berlin and Detroit: An Alien Techno Alliance: Cultural Politics and Social Transformation after the Fall of the Wall, Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies 8, Rombach Verlag, University of Melbourne, 2016, p.173

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their social reproduction. The shift to global manufacturing, transnational corprorations pulling out of production within the city limits as well as the imposed social costs of all this to young people devastated cities like Detroit in America in the 1980s. Youth cultures were disenfranchised economically and culturally, growing disaffected through their systematic development.

As Gordin et al. describe it: early techno started from recognising the here-and-now wreck of the city for many (particularly its African American population) and the idea that the progressive future would allow this to be overcome in some post-racial, post-identity society93. By 1985, Detroit was buzzing with this new sort of music which was aimed at exploring the future through machine-made instruments, synthesisers samplers and so on.

Thus, cultural production was focused on turning to machines as a source of aesthetic inspiration and as a sign of human progress. Noise, electricity, movement, speed and acceleration were all synonyms of the ambivalent relationship early Detroit techno artists had with technology: union-busting, profit-maximising automation caused their parents to lose work from the mid-1970s onward while technology became the means to survive and steer themselves into the future94.

In addition, the birth of the electronic dance music scene was closely connected to the abandoned space that existed and was used in different ways to reclaim parts of both cities through a cultural rupture. As Barrett Watten introduces ‘the constructivist moment, [which is] an elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social negativity - the experience of rupture, an act of refusal - invokes a fantasmatic future - a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation’95 was later on realised in these abandoned industrial spaces, which offered a ‘blank canvas’ for different futuristic approaches to be played out. The rupture that Watten talks about obviously is the link that granted societal, economical and political crises to allow creative forces to productively imagine change through a particular kind of community making. Escaping from a tormented political past is one thing, but trying to reshape a post-industrial, forward-thinking place of cultural significance is what brought these two cities together. For Detroit, this means that the difference that was visible to the eye between the urban architecture of downtown and the suburbs could be used to describe and underline the process of releasing creativity in the urban realm post 1950s.

93 Gordin, Michael D., Tilley, Hellen, Prakash, Gyan, Utopia and Dystopia Beyond Space and Time: Utopia / Dystopia - Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton University Press, 2010, p.2 94 Pope, Richard, Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture, Dancecult - Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol.2 No.1, 2011, p.30 95 Watten, Barett, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, Wesleyan University Press, Middleton CT, 2003, p.183

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For Berlin respectively, it means that the minimal, de-humanised and delocalised nature of techno is connected to the previously industrial character of the city.

The popular explosion and artistic innovations of electronic dance music culture post-1989 were exceptionally rapid and extensive. In Berlin, for example, the sudden availability of new club spaces in the East was combined with the extensive reception of Detroit techno, collaborations between organisers and DJs from both the East and West parts of the city and the growing access of producers to new instruments, DJ equipment and computers. By the early 1990s, austere and industrial-inflected Detroit techno was received with such a positive attitude that the aforementioned alliance between the two cities was born and proliferated itself in perhaps the most influential techno label and club at the time, Tresor. Berlin’s postindustrial and dystopian character was very often compared to the original “techno city” Detroit while this relationship was further reinforced by the label and club’s connections to Detroit producers, such as Jeff Mills and Juan Atkins.

It is important to mention here that this history resulted in the constant internationalisation of Berlin techno during the 2000s, both through the rapid growing of tourist industries in the city and through the appearance of a complex network of local and international music producers and promoters, many of whom relocated to Berlin during the last decade96. This means that a relative centralisation of German and international EDM industries took place around this time, something that has taken on such dimensions that Berlin has often been viewed as the techno capital of the world. A capital that of course doesn’t turn its back on its predecessors and allows for a beneficial relationship to occur between the people that are involved in this particular cultural rupture and social revolution at the same time, such as all the artists and art itself that derived from Detroit.

96 Nye, Sean, Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum and the Debates of the Legacy of German Techno, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol 25 Issue 2, Association for the Study of Popular Music , University of California, 2013, p.156 63

09_tourism practices & techno-tourism Tourism practices and image marketing have recently become common strategies to motivate population increase and economic investment in a city. In Berlin, during the period of 1993 to 2004, a decrease in population has been noted due to economic and structural difficulties in the social sphere of the city. However, in the past few years the successful tourism promotion has caused an overpopulation boost in Berlin with a large influx of newcomers settling in the city -most of which had visited the city as tourists for the first time and later on decided to move in. With cities remaining centres of politics, economy, society and culture, it can be observed in Berlin how tourism has become counterproductive and somewhat destructive for the city. In fact, tourism and tourists have become the target group of protest and aggression by the city’s residents. At the same time, there is a group of tourists with an increasingly growing social value, that could be defined as ‘techno-tourists’, with specific patterns and interests of activity throughout the city of Berlin, who mainly just visit the city for its club culture. These people disassociate themselves with mass urban tourism practices as they search for authentic experiences through the city’s subcultural scenes, marking their displacement in the city’s more ‘alternative’ neighbourhoods and contributing in large to Berlin’s tourism income. For example, in 2004, a strategic paper published by the Berlin Senate and the city’s tourism board set 15 million overnight stays by 2010 as a goal for the city’s tourism industry. The city surpassed this goal by 2006, however, and by 2010 overnight stays exceeded 20 million. In this chapter, I will try to create an ethnographic sketch of the specific characteristics this group of tourists possess, what are their interests in the city of Berlin, their reasoning behind their enthusiasm for accumulating scene-specific cultural and social capital (to the point where they adopt the role of a ‘local’ participant and thus almost party ‘like a Berliner’) as well as analyse their relationship with the city’s local residents and how tourism authorities treat such a group of people in order to benefit the economic development of the city.

Every weekend in Berlin it seems like the same pattern is being repeated: thousands of tourists arrive to the city, immerse themselves in a sort of ‘hip’, alternative, post-industrial aesthetic and atmosphere of touristic consumption that this place has to offer through countless visits to all the nightclubs that exist. They leave behind hundreds of thousand of Euros worth of profit to the city’s nightlife and seemingly most of them tend to revisit the places they have been to quite often in the next months or years.

The markings they make as they move through the city, trying to blend 64

Conflicts between tourism and club culture institutions in Berlin (source: anonymous)

Caricature drawing of ‘Summer Crashers’, from ‘Tribes of Berlin’ series published by Sugarhigh (2010) 65

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in with local people and so on, as well as the ways in which their actions affect the city’s nightlife economy and wellbeing are quite important since they allow for strong relations to be made within the scene’s infrastructure and a more globalised network of actors.the city’s nightlife economy and wellbeing are quite important since they allow for strong relations to be made within the scene’s infrastructure and a more globalised network of actors.

Of course, these tourists fall under the category of ‘post-tourism’ which itself intersects with all sorts of different tourism labels: these tourists distinguish themselves from mass tourists and the identities they associate with as they seek out authentic urban experiences in post-industrial landscapes. The ‘breaking away from the pack’ could also be described as neo-romantic because it involves a renewed search for authenticity after accepting the idea that conventional tourism practices cannot help but generate artificial and distorted experiences in the city. While immersing themselves in unrehearsed urban life situations, techno-tourists claim to be able to achieve a kind of post-industrial urban pastoralism that remaps the non-urban and pre-globalisation imaginaries of alternative tourism onto cities such as Berlin97. Their motivations and attitudes are in contrast with those of a stereotypical image of mass tourism and the cultural exchange in which they engage through actively participating once in a while in the city’s nightlife provide a definitive complexity between localism and globalism.

This is also how the scene partly reflects and is reflected by, its global impact every weekend in Berlin.

The term ‘techno-tourism’ first appeared and was coined by local journalist Tobias Rapp’s book Lost in Sound: Berlin, Techno and the Easyjetset (2010, Innervisions), which is a collection of essays, narratives and interviews covering the city’s vibrant nightlife. Rapp introduced the term in order to describe the ‘weekend-warrior’ party tourists that characterise Berlin’s electronic dance music scenes, while denoting the importance of budget air-travel for making this phenomenon possible. This is true since affordable air travel tickets and alternative ways of accommodation are prominent between the younger, financially precarious nightlife tourists of twenty-first century Europe. In addition, this particular influx of tourists cannot be measured with complete accuracy.

According to statistics released by local authorities and semi-public agencies (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2009–2014, 2010;

VisitBerlin.de/Berlin Tourismus Marketing GmbH, 2011), touristic activity in Berlin has almost quadrupled in the two decades after German reunification, with overnight stays rising from 7.3 million in 1993 to 27 million in 2013.

However, these figures do not include the sort of ‘grey areas’ that techno tourists prefer to situate themselves in, such as smaller bed-and-breakfast establishments, privately run vacation rentals (i.e.: Airbnb apartments) or unlicensed hotels and youth hostels. A new study by the Berlin Club Commission finds that club-tourism brings an estimated of 1.5 million euros each year to the city. The figure comes from a study called “Club Culture Berlin 2019,” which pulls data from the previous year using surveys from venues and partygoers. In 2018, three million tourists visited Berlin for its world-renowned nightlife, staying on average of 2.4 days and spending €205 per day. This coverage of Berlin tourism in numbers has also taken the form of debate over tourism’s impact on the city, on the way it is involved in local creativity as well as on processes of urban renewal and gentrification processes.

City tourism is not something that is foreign as a concept to almost any large European metropolis during the 20th century and it has become a mass phenomenon. However, one of the reasons why it has become so famous in Berlin is also the city’s economic downturn as a sad result of an overly optimistic budget forecast made in the early nineties. At the time, the predictions made and the plans put on blast by the city’s authorities in order to create a flourishing global city within a few years were not fulfilled and in reality: a city that was designed for around five million didn’t grow - it shrank98. This meant that the vacant industrial landscapes within the city limits were occupied by significant actors in club culture and so the party scene emerged in the nineties, gradually becoming bigger as time went by up until the point were ravers from all over Europe and the world started fleeting to the city to experience it. This was something that was even more easy to do so once the liberalisation of European air travel and the appearance of low-cost airlines allowed for the jetting off to a European city destination for a weekend to become a budget treat for the masses, instead of an expensive luxury (like it was the years before).

As mentioned above, techno-tourists differentiate their patterns of mobility from the norm when visiting Berlin and this is possible due to the temporalities of the city’s nightlife. The lack of regulated closing hours and the absence of a set curfew often means that they can party well into the

97 Garcia, Luis-Manuel, Techno Tourism and Postindustrial Neo-Romanticism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes, Tourist Studies, Sage Publishing, Vol.16 No.3, p.277

98 81

Rapp, Tobias, Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno and the Easyjetset, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009, p.

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afternoon of the next day and sleep during hours when conventional touristic activities seem to take place (such as museum visits, tours, sightseeing and shopping). Eager to get the most out of their clubbing experience, they organise a typical visit which involves landing on a Friday night. Afterwards, they proceed with checking into their chosen place of accommodation, having dinner and heading to the first nightclub by 2.00 am. Having spent a couple of hours there they can either continue to party by moving to a different club (such as Berghain or Panorama bar) which would remain open until at least noon on Saturday or go home, sleep through the day and repeat the process when night comes. At this point, they would have to make the decision of either going out and staying up almost all of Sunday or going home for another nap and wake up early Sunday morning and then spend the rest of their time in Berlin dancing until late Monday morning.

During the summertime, the existence of ‘open-air’ clubs also makes it possible to not stop dancing for the whole weekend, if one is willing to.

Consequently, this group of tourists engage in an all-weekend long expenditure of transgression which will not only make a significant mark on them as a special or ‘once in a lifetime’ sort of experience but is also conceivable only in a place like Berlin.

Moreover, one should not imagine that techno-tourists form a discrete or even a homogenous subculture. Their group is simply a subset of the different subcultures that are being formed all through central Europe due to people’s love for techno and house music. What is also very interesting here is the fact that these people are not easily recognisable within the nightlife context of Berlin. While queuing to get into a any club you will hear people talking all sorts of different languages (except maybe German) but this doesn’t mean that they also necessarily don’t live here since the city has such an international level of residents - something that is also rendered in its subcultural domain of entertainment and leisure. Therefore, techno tourists quite often reject the label of ‘visitor’ and instead insist that the city is just part of a personal topography of mobility, a notion that could also be described as ‘neo-Bohemian’.

The term ‘neo-Bohemian’ is perhaps more useful than ‘hipster’, in that it describes a set of values and principles shared by most of the technotourists. For Richard D. Lloyd, ‘bohemia’ as an urban space characterises a cluster of creative labour and precarious lifestyles that rely upon ‘a notion of diversity that often fetishises’ the gritty and the illicit as authentic’99. Neo99 Lloyd, Richard D., Neo-Bohemia: Art and Neighbourhood Redevelopment in Chicago, Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol.24, Urban Affairs Association, 2002, p. 518 68

Bohemia, in turn, describes how these once-devalued characteristics are converted into valuable, profit-making factors in a post-Fordist economy (e.g.: entertainment, tourism, gentrification). This is of course something that influences the way the city works as well as how post-tourism tourists situate themselves in the urban realm and economy. One could then say that the Berliner neighbourhoods in which techno-tourists frequent (Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Neukölln) are neo-Bohemias because consequently their consumption of the artistic products of these ‘creative clusters’ contribute to processes of secondary accumulation that both add ‘value’ to the neighbourhood as well as drive up the cost of creative production.

This romantic view of post-industrial urbanity resonates with identifications that connect this group of people with doing ‘harm’ and benefiting the city at the same time. More precisely, the post-industrial landscapes and urban decay of cities like Berlin are remapped as a ‘new urban pastoral’. Besides, the aim of club culture and its utopian vision, is to create moments in a constantly changing environment and to trigger the sensual and emotional potentials of the urban landscape, in order to overcome the ‘void’ that separated urbanities from each other in the past100.

Their improvised lifestyle is directed towards sociality and their sociality is what makes their lives improvised. With their top goal in life being not the artistic achievement but the social gathering, they create and maintain Berlin’s image as a party town and take it back to their hometown to further endorse it in the future by their narratives from the ‘best time of their life’.

Another reason why tourists are attracted to the city’s vigorous nightlife scene is also it’s strong underground character which of course is one of the prominent qualities that are being offered here and the way this is translated in a more political dimension. Tourists coming to the city for the first time encounter several instances of alternative and underground culture production defined by values such as self-organisation, free access and anti-authoritarianism employed through antagonistic language and themes.

In the city’s nightclubs, this is expressed through allowing many behaviours, which elsewhere are forced to the underground or are prohibited, not be considered deviant and on the contrary form the social norm in Berlin. Its status as an alternative scene then needs to be understood on a global scale, since ‘local music scenes need to be understood in relation to broader transnational processes’101. However, party promoters and actors that deal with the subcultural exploitation of the city’s nightlife usually commodify this 100 Lefèbvre, Henri, Kritik des Altagslebens, München, 1977, p. 210 101 Cohen, Sarah, “Scenes”: Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p.243-244

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mage for a public that is more interested in these liberties rather than the actual party’s political implications102.

Urban nightlife itself then is quite often dispatched with these tensions, segregated spatially and temporally by identity and group belonging, with varying degrees of awareness and explicitness at the same time. The commercialisation of public space and urban nightlife through the progress of tourism agencies can also intensify social divisions by excluding non-consumers, especially when these spaces are organised around the consumption of specific substances or services avoided by particular groups. Clubbing for example, is an immersive affective experience that includes not only consumption but music, dancing, erotic sociability, subcultural belonging and transgressive exuberance103. All of these factors cast the nocturnal urban landscape as a complex situation where rational elements such as planning, surveillance, policing and tourism practices intertwine with commodified and sanitised, saturated by emotional (enhanced through alcohol, drugs, dance, sex and encounter) elements. This procedure consequently creates a tension that has to do with conflicting views on urban space: whom is it for, what purposes it serves, what activities are appropriate and how sharing should be managed104. What is interesting in the case of Berlin is that a symptom of this underling struggle for urban space is also shared by tourists since they very often are also part of the aforementioned problem. As the availability of empty, low-density, unsupervised urban space decreases, formerly disused post-industrial zones and working-class districts become highly attractive destinations for work, living and leisure. Tourists participate -even without consciously knowing it sometimes- in slowing down this process of urban gentrification by supporting the nightlife economy and by creating strong correlations and profit nonetheless for it.

102 Nardi, Carlo, The Scene of Scenes: Berlin Underground Parties, in Stahl, Geoff, Poor but Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes, Peter Lang Publishing, 2014, p.93 103 Malbon, Ben, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, Routledge, New York, 1999, p.15 104 Garcia, Luis - Manuel, Agonistic festivities; Urban nightlife scenes and the sociability of ‘anti-social’ fun, Annals of Leisure Research, Vol.21 No.4, Routledge, 2018, p. 467 70

Sign outside of famous Berlin nightclub Salon zur Wilde Renate showing conflicts between the city’s club culture, tourism and future development stake holders. The text is proof that these conflicts exist in the city and affect the cultural wellbeing of the scene.

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10_Berghain Sitting on an old neo-classical East German heating power plant from the 1950s and located only a few blocks away from the former location of the Berlin wall, Berghain is considered by many of being one of the most important spaces of club culture throughout Europe - if not also, the world.

Its location, the border of the two adjacent neighbourhoods (Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain) gave inspiration for its name which derives from this specific geographical and spatial limit within the city. For Berliners, it is a sacred space of transgression and community, a place where a religious experience is achieved by connecting with the music, the people and the vibe of the weekend parties. For visitors of the city, it is often a lifelong dream to get in: pilgrimages - usually described as such by those who undertake them - are made from all around the world: some club - goers allegedly head straight from the airport to Berghain, spending multiple consecutive days raving until the late Monday morning hours. What these two groups of people often have in common is that they refer to the weekends they spend here as ‘going to church’ and Sunday morning parties as ‘Sunday mass’, implying that the perception of this particular experience in the club is regularly a spiritual one, determined by characteristics of a ritualistic process shared by a specific community. The repetitive four-to-the-floor beat with bass drums on every beat as well as the social interaction is generating this religious-like sense, not necessarily in the mind but rather directly through the feet, creating an embodied understanding and, in the words of The New Yorker, an ‘experience that matters’105.

The club has a very strong psycho-spatial effect, not only due to its massive size but also because it is a found space: after the collapse of its predecessor, the prominent techno club Ostgut in 2003, the owners poured money into extensive remodelling of the interior spaces of the former power plant (mainly through the German architecture firm Karhard). However, the space is not designed but rather repurposed: vestigial wires, electric boxes and iron rods protrude from its concrete pillars and walls, chipped white tiles are complemented by matching plaster burn marks. All in all, there is a feeling that these elements are intentionally and deliberately selected in order to further give more importance to the aesthetic and structural qualities of the space, a purposeful process which makes the architecture form part of the public discourse through its representative and impressive function. Berghain is perceived by its visitors as an impressive ‘machine’ whose gearbox achieves extraordinary performance by mixing form and 105 Biehl, Brigitte, Von Lehn, Dirk, Four-to-the-Floor: The Techno Discourse and Aesthetic work in Berlin, Symposium: The Freedom of Expression, Social Science and Modern Society, Vol. 53 No. 5, Springer, 2016, p.2

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Berghain: pre and post-unification conditions, from industrial infrastructure to cultural institution.

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function to create a synthesis that obtains industrial architectural characteristics of the past, but nonetheless deserves special attention.to create a synthesis that obtains industrial architectural characteristics of the past, but nonetheless deserves special attention.

The experience of entering Berghain is quite often influenced by the long-hour wait in the slow-moving queue outside of the club, which a lot of times may also take up to hours. Waiting in the queue is the first step in an initiation ritual, saturated with contradictory feelings which are to be released as soon as you step in. A lot of things have been written about the door policy of the club, how at times it can be totally random even if you are a regular every weekend or how there are specific qualifications you need to ensure you have incorporated in your outfit to get in such as black clothing, latex and leather gear etc. According to Tobias Rapp, this door is radically democratic because it exhibits a refreshing arbitrariness which makes you ask yourself the question each and every time, even after years of getting in without a problem: Will I get turned away tonight? Queuing is a lengthy procedure that becomes silent and tense the closer clubbers come to the door106. This is different from periods of long waiting elsewhere in clubs that are more commercial, when clubbers entertain themselves in the queue. and could also be interpreted as a show of respect towards the space as an institution.

However, what is particularly important to note for the cause of this thesis is that similar to entrances in many places of social relevance, Berghain is marked by a crossing of the ‘limen’ (boundary, borderline or edge) which separates the pre-liminal from the liminal betwixt-andbetween phase. Compared to its size in whole the entrance door is kept in its original small size, reflecting similar ways of control and mystification found in spiritual spaces of the past. So, what we see happening here is that it is not only the social processes happening even before getting in that act towards giving Berghain the sense that it is a ritualistic space, but the interplay between these processes and the architecture itself.

According to Victor Turner, the crossing of the limen allows for the play of imagination and for special aesthetic and transformative experiences to appear within these spaces and communities of people107, before ending in the post-liminal space when people step out and resume their normal 106 Goulding, C., Shankar, A., Elliott, R., Canniford, R., The Marketplace Management of Illicit Pleasure, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol.35 No.5, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 764 107 Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Performing Arts Journal, New York, 1982, p.36 74

daily lives. Berghain offers clubbers the opportunity to fill its empty space with their perceptions of the liminal phase they are experiencing every weekend and the architecture is the material backdrop of this process. Not only are new experiences created every week for thousands of people but new opportunities too, because of the constant ‘recycling’ of ravers, both local and international. Space here functions as a ‘generative building’ that has also been described as an ‘Ermöflichungsarchitectur’ (architecture of enabling)108.

After entering the 18-metre-high turbine hall with its raw industrial style, ravers ascend the stairs to the massive Berghain floor from which another staircase leads up to Panorama Bar, the club’s second and less dark dance floor. In general, the club does not have many dead ends, which is something that further intensifies the aforementioned sense of ‘enabling’, due to the constant facilitation of movement and circulation of guests. The need to pass from one space to the other encourages less predictable interaction and encounters109, determining a kind of site-specific choreographic performance which enables certain paths and influences the quality and speed of movement of human bodies through the club. Even the restrooms, which are not gender specific, are transitional spaces allowing for people to always be on the move and interact with each other.

This architecture may encourage playing out a variety of interpersonal, sexual and drug-related behaviours but it does not make it a necessary factor to actually enjoy yourself once you get in. In Berghain, no one is obliged to do anything particular except for being part of a larger ritualistic process that takes place every weekend for almost 36 consecutive hours.

This is also influenced by the artworks that exist in the club, such as Wolfgang Tillman’s sexualised body photography in the Panorama Bar, and Piotr Nathan’s 25-metre panorama ‘Rituals of Disappearance’ in the ground floor’s entrance - garderobe foyer that show the power of natural forces, a reminder of the ritual feast and maelstrom of music.

Although Piotr Nathan’s work has been nowadays dismantled and no longer exists inside the club, it is interesting how this work of art visually compared the cultic celebrations of the villagers and people of nature it depicted with what is defined in Berghain nonverbally by the combination of music and aura. The huge spatial drawing, as the first visual impression 108 Gerard, M., Selecting Ritual: DJs, Cancers and Liminality in Underground Dance Music, in Rave Culture and Religion edited by St. John, G., Routledge, London, p. 155 109 Dale, K., Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control, The Critical Journal of Organisation Theory and Society, Vol.12 No.5, Sage Publishing, 2005, p.

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club-goers had when entering the club, was considered by many as a gate in the entrance of the club. The composite individual panels illustrated a panorama picture of four natural phenomena: volcanic eruption, desert sandstorm with sand pants, sea storm with water pants and departure of the northern lights over a nocturnal resting place. The order of the motives followed in content the statement of the work and corresponded with its mystical ambiguity and aura to the ancient meaning of the word mystery and ritual, because of its secret core as a constant companion of any celebration110. Consequently, not only the building but also the materiality of smaller artefacts influenced and is still shaping people’s interaction in the club, thus creating a safe environment for experimentation, transgression and transcendence.

Furthermore, it becomes clear that the shell of the building was designed detached from its use and does not relate to its interior. In a similar way that a lot of other power plants in Berlin barely reveal their use and present sovereignty and durability only vaguely on a symbolic level, Berghain shows a strong contradiction between the strict exterior and the fluid and more free spatial experience that the interior spaces offer111.

For example, in contrast to the industrial disingenuity and rawness of the interior, the exterior facade of the building is left untouched and prevails as a socialistic neoclassical front that echoes the style of the Karl Marx Allee (which the original power plant was actually built to sustain) and has typical decorative elements of that time such as the regular breakdown of the fortunes and the typical jewellery rosettes. These details can also be seen up close inside Berghain today since because the power plant was directly docked to the external facade of the heating plant, it became part of the interior and is used as a well-lit backdrop for the bar next to the main dance floor112. his space is particularly interesting since it can also be imagined as the side aisle of a gothic cathedral - a large, industrial Gothic cathedral. Just as architects of gothic churches created a clever interplay of windows and narrow columns to emphasise the direct link of the space with the divine heavens, here the spotlights are positioned in such a way as to make the ceiling appear even higher than what it actually is113. Sitting right next to the Berghain dance floor, the narrow bar allows for socialisation 110 Piotr Nathan on the action of dissolving his space drawing Rituals of Disappearance. This artistic event took take place from 17 March to 17 April 2017 via the website http://rdv.berghain.berlin.

111 Kahlfeldt, Paul, Hans Heinrich Müller: 1879 - 1951 - Berliner Industriebauten, Birkhäuser, 1992, p.97 112 Rüb, Christine, Ngo, Anh-Linh, Das Berghain – eine Ermöglichungsarchitektur, ARCH+ 201/202, Berlin, 2011, p. 146 113 Rapp, Tobias, Lost and Sound, Suhrkamp, p. 147 76

opportunities to appear between the club goers and gives the feeling that you are standing in a very lightweight room which is situated right next to an almost endless black plain.

Another point of reference when analysing Berghain could also be Gernot Böhme who uses the notion of atmosphere to describe how the material elements have a sensual impact on people and generate that ‘something more’ in architecture ensembles114. Böhme’s theory on aesthetics implies that spaces are often saturated by the actions and feelings of the people who use them and these perceptions are projected onto the materiality of objects around them. When applying this concept to Berghain, it is apparent that the sequence of all these different spaces which magnetically ‘attach’ or ‘detach’ themselves to the main dance floors, become more and more intense by the people’s movement in them. This means that the space is being performed every time it is visited by ravers and it is not the material, stable space alone but the humans interacting in this space that define the quality of the former. In this context, Panorama Bar can be understood as the meeting of a lot of smaller tribes of people who network with each other through dancing, extending the notion of the room beyond the deliberately planned architectural elements.

According to dance theory, a raver’s erect upper body and open arm movements can be interpreted, more semiotically, as dialogical and as a communicative openness contributing to a broader communal experience. In Berghain, this kinaesthetic participation can also be seen as an occasion in which knowledge of the past (and in particular, Berlin’s past as the European mecca of club culture) is re-embodied and actualised through dance. There is a specific de-emphasis on feet in the way sound is organised in the Berghain floor, where speakers are hung as architectural elements from the ceiling with music being the factor that keeps on performing, informing and constructing anew a specific Berlin narration through the medium of the body and its movement115. Though not so much through their cognitive but more through their sensual capabilities, ravers take home a particular atmospheric, affective power of feeling that is then reproduced in conversations, on blogs and in newspapers and magazines.

This does not only contribute to the aforementioned ‘build-up’ of energy inside the club but also helps to keep the relevance of forms of collective 114 Böhme, Gernot, Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics, Thesis Eleven, Vol 36 no.1, 1993, p.113 115 Biehl, Brigitte, Von Lehn, Dirk, Four-to-the-Floor: The Techno Discourse and Aesthetic work in Berlin, Symposium: The Freedom of Expression, Social Science and Modern Society, Vol. 53 No. 5, Springer, 2016, p.7 77

memory within club culture, in a translocal and transnational level too. A narrative of shared experiences is created from scratch every weekend by making the thoughts of ravers explicit in a linear series of signs, contributing to evolving the atmosphere that is borne when people come together.

The narrative mentioned above is also further reinforced by the fact that taking photographs in Berghain is not allowed, because of the management’s effort to protect the privacy of its guests. It is not only prohibited, but strongly frowned upon - to the point where if you are caught taking pictures inside, you are immediately kicked out. This does not only contribute to keeping the stories that come out of the club alive in the outside world, but above all burning the bridge to the outside world. Sealing yourself in the charm of this parallel society that exists in the club makes the actual reality that exists outside of it an additional stimulant, a divide for adding intensity to the clubbing experience, which in itself gains new emphasis everytime you recount your weekend stories. Moreover, the no-photography policy also helps to make the feeling of the club as an institution be even more excessive in the way that the architecture is never portrayed through the visitors in a visual manner and only experienced, felt, touched and lived out in the weekend.

Finally, it can be understood that Berghain acts as a liminal heterotopic space due to the effect it has on the club-goer’s identity and sense of self. Taking part in the weekend-long ritual of partying further helps to interpret the club as a sacred space because of the constant collective oneness and transcendence that is experienced inside by many, a sense that is transposed or projected onto associated objects and people. The heterotopic quality is easily expressed, as society outside the club (and even time, itself) is dissolute once social identities and feelings of community start to become more important inside. Paradoxically though, clubgoers in Berghain, despite acknowledging the club’s spirituality and psychologically transformative powers, perceive the ‘liminal’ and ‘heterotopic’ aspect of the space not as a means but as ends in themselves. These ends are of course, the effects of identity dissolution, inverted social structure that appears inside and making of temporary community. However, this circular process between identity, liminality and community could only appear in a heterotopic space and Berghain is culturally and physically peripheral to the main urban order, creating a hidden dialectic with the larger social structure within which it is situated.

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Berghain’s no-media policy sign inside the club.

Berghain exterior view on a Saturday night, photography by Romeo Allaeff

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11_outro Through my analysis in Rave & Ritual, I tried to make four main connections between the meanings of ritual, club-goer (raver), institution (or built space) and the city. The aforementioned connections include even more intermediate ‘stops’ when it comes down to comparing the elements that these include, such as the concept of creative city, tourism, city branding etc. However, the starting point always is how can club culture be perceived as a ritualistic social behaviour in a post-ritual architectural space and what are the ways in which liminality appears when a person goes clubbing in Berlin.

In the beginning I try to understand how the act of raving is a political one: political action, in a way, is making yourself seem different only if others notice that you are different. Also, regarding the inner-social structure that occurs within the spaces of club culture, a sense of political action is born since the outside world is completely shut down for the purposes of transgression. In this respect, we can talk of clubbing as a form of ritualistic behaviour which permits its subjects to a form of ‘play’ with modes of social relationships and structural identities. The psycho-social effect of clubbing in redefining people’s sense of self has features that accord with Victor Turner’s notion of ritual transitions and Emile Durkheim’s concept of communitas. These two sociological references are then used to further prove that even though we live in a post-ritual architectural space, when humans interact on the ‘verge’ of society while clubbing they also seem to be experimenting with their own identity and the liminal aspects that can be found in ritualistic societies such as the Ndembu tribes that Turner studied, are also found nowadays.

After the fall of the wall in November 1989, the people of Berlin felt unified and in my analysis I claim that techno culture was a very strong cultural condition that allowed for the newly-unified East and West parts of the city to come together and form a community of ravers. Love Parade was the first time in German history that club culture moved from the underground and started making a public appearance in the urban environment. The humanising quality and societal counterpoise that techno music brought to the people of Berlin could also be further argued by the scene’s cultural attributes too. The scene has created a store of symbols and forms of knowledge that exists more or less independent of local limitations, the borders of nation-states and traditional fields of cultural activity and habits.

As the city of Berlin started growing, the city branding agencies started incorporating spaces of club culture or previously neglected repurposed parts of the city in its public narrative. A prominent example is the promotion of culture for itself, as an expression of a local identity and as a form of 80

personal and social development, compared to the recent ‘marketing for creativity’, fostered by conceptions made by Richard Florida. Consequently, the concept of the ‘creative city’ started being a very prominent one in advertisements that encouraged creatives or people who involved themselves in the cultural production of the city to move there. One of the main characteristics in this place-branding change mentioned above is the continuous appearance of new types of previously non-represented ‘creative spaces’ into the imagery of city-marketing campaigns, from the tourism promotion publications to the discourse of national and international media on Berlin as a ‘destination’. Of course, it is undeniable that the city’s club culture is fed by these ‘creative types’ with no specific timeframes within their working week programs, but the acceptance of this scene by the official city planners is a very valuable one for the causes of this thesis. In the German post-reunification modern history one can also find a common ground between the city and Detroit. The German word Zwischennutzung (‘interim’ or ‘temporary’ use) was coined to refer to activities that can be defined as uses in the urban fabric which are planned from the outset to be impermanent’ and ‘seek to derive unique qualities from the idea of temporality. These spaces not only existed in an abundance after the fall of the wall but also singled the shift from industrial to post-industrial, which is something that also Detroit had to undergo. In addition, when one takes into account the cultural alliance that was created between the two due to the famous Tresor club and record label, it is easy to understand that it was not only the urban similarities that allowed for this to happen but also the social changes that people faced.

Finally, the last two chapters refer to how this brilliant history of club culture has turned into a tourism industry nowadays and to Berghain, respectively. It is also interesting here that Berghain acts as a cultural institution for techno culture today and how it is visited by so many people over the weekends -and not necessarily ravers that live in Berlin. So the meanings of ritual and liminality are re-introduced in the last two chapters by analysing what are the effects of tourism on the city as a whole and how the spatial qualities of Berghain facilitate perceptions of liminality within the 36 hours of a weekend Klubnacht.

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