On a recent Sunday afternoon, the line outside Berghain, the Berlin techno club, stretched for hours. Hundreds of visitors, sweating in black outfits, lined the dusty path to the door, hoping to be allowed into the former power station, which is known worldwide for its tough door policy, starry D.J. lineups and hedonistic parties lasting nearly 36 hours.
The club is also notorious because, despite its reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent techno venues, its parties aren’t documented online. Clubgoers are warned at the door that photos and videos are banned: Any violation will result in expulsion. To ensure compliance, door staff place stickers on the front and back of patrons’ smartphones, covering their cameras.
Although this may seem excessive to visitors, such camera policies have become standard practice in Berlin clubs as a crucial tool for maintaining an anything-goes atmosphere, and clubs elsewhere are increasingly following Berlin’s lead.
Respected venues, including Fabric in London and Radion in Amsterdam have all brought in similar sticker rules in recent years. Pikes Ibiza, on the Spanish island famous for its nightlife, announced last month that all visitors must now cover their cameras, so that “what happens at Pikes stays at Pikes.”
Téa Abashidze, a founder of Basement, a Brooklyn techno club that has been stickering visitors’ phones since 2019, said in an email that it was part of a “cultural shift” toward “genuine, distraction-free experiences.” The club rigorously enforced the rule, she said, sometimes throwing several rule-breakers out per night.
Daniel Plasch, a co-director of the Berlin venue R.S.O., said that the growing international popularity of such policies reflected an appreciation for the city’s clubbing ethos.
“Other cities have clubs, but Berlin has a clubbing culture,” he said. “There is something unifying, ritualistic about the dance floor,” he added, but the atmosphere was ruined when people use their phones to take images that “they will never look at again, anyways.”
“By taking a photo,” Plasch said, “you are destroying the moment even as you are documenting it.”
In recent decades, Berlin’s clubbing scene has become more professionalized and venues like Berghain and Tresor have become some of the city’s biggest tourist draws. According to a 2019 study from the city’s Club Commission, visitors who come to Berlin for the clubbing contributed around $1.7 billion to the city’s economy.
Paradoxically, the city’s economic success has threatened the existence of many clubs, with some struggling to adapt to gentrification and conflicts with new, affluent neighbors. This month, Watergate, an influential club located on the Spree River, announced that it would be closing at the end of the year because of rising rent and energy prices.
Aside the city’s exacting door policies, the no-photo rule remains one of the few ways for the venues to retain a countercultural atmosphere despite the influx of tourists. Stathis Tsitinis, a Berlin D.J. who co-founded a gay party called Power Dance Club, said that he had noticed an explosion of interest in techno among young people weaned on the internet during the pandemic.
Many of these newcomers, he added, had little sense of the unspoken laws of Berlin clubs, including the ban on photography, making it crucial to cover their cameras. “It used to be that you were part of the community, and you knew the rules, but now you can’t control the quality of the clubbers,” Tsitinis said. “Do you really want to be in someone’s picture in your jockstrap? That’s not exactly everyone’s cup of tea.”
Matthias Pasdzierny, a professor of musicology partly focusing on techno at Berlin’s University of the Arts, said that photo bans have also allowed clubs to assert “power and control” over their image. “The less photos there are of something, the more exciting it becomes,” he said. “It’s very smart marketing.”
People’s obsession with finding out what happens inside the clubs “can be absurd,” he said, noting a 2009 illustrated feature in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper, that showed the interior of Berghain, drawn entirely from memory. “It almost makes it seem like a fairy tale,” he said.
But on a recent Sunday night, people lining up to enter R.S.O., where the party had already been going for 20 hours, were uniformly in support of the club’s stickering policy.
Zandra Hedlund, 41, a programmer who had moved to Berlin from Sweden, said that she valued the ways it allowed people to enjoy sex-positive spaces without worrying about their behavior being posted online. “When people are taking photos near me, I think about how I look, or have to try to avoid being in the photos,” she said, adding that the photo ban made her feel “more relaxed.”
Another clubgoer, Maud Ferrier, 25, who works as a bartender at the Kitkat Club, a fetish nightclub in the city, said that “many of the tourists really fight against the rule, because they feel like it is removing their freedom.” But in the end, she said, by giving up something up, they always end up feeling more free.
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