Sven von Thülen
Appearances
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
During the war, the building was destroyed, but the vault was still there. And then on top of the wall was just a kind of small bungalow, shack, whatever you want to call it. And it was situated right at the former death strip. This whole area, there was nothing. It was only like debris, sand. It was empty.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
So when they found the place by chance, Johnny Stieler from the East and Achim Kohlberger and Dimitri Hegemann from West Berlin, they were driving around like, we want to open a club in East Berlin. And basically, by chance, saw this shack It's like, well, what's that? So they parked their car, went in, and the door was open. They kind of looked around and it didn't look so special.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
But then they found this door. It's like, where does this door lead? And then they opened the door, and then it was just like dark, wet stairs going down into the basement. And they were like, huh, okay. And... So they had their lighters, went down around the corner, and then they suddenly stood in front of these, like in a prison, like rusty steel bars and like a big vault steel door.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
And they were like, what is this? And they all knew it was empty for at least 30 years. There was nothing. They basically, the air they would breathe, like when they went down, it was like kind of old. They all said it was kind of like a spiritual experience. They said when they got out, they didn't talk.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
They didn't talk for like half an hour because they were like completely like in this mixture of in awe, in shock. They all knew this is it. This is the place.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember the first time I went to Tresor. I went right down the basement.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
It was full of, you know, fog and the strobe was going off.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
and I couldn't see anything and the next thing I know I just fell because there was like a speaker on the ground and I was like and then I went to the wall kind of like where's the wall where am I and it took me a little bit to adjust
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Forget that. Funnily enough, I kind of started my DJing at Tresor as well because a friend of mine, she was cleaning Tresor at the time and I didn't have turntables yet. So she was like, you know what, just come over while I clean. So I was there quite often on Saturday, Sunday afternoons, basically playing and cleaning.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Yeah, I mean, you cannot make it up, in a way. It just kind of coincided perfectly. There was this whole optimism, you know? Like, the end of the Cold War, the future is bright. Like, ah, we had impending nuclear war. Like, all of that was like, ah, no, it's gone. And then you have all these possibilities suddenly. You have the spaces, you have zero economic pressure. You didn't have...
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
You didn't pay taxes. You didn't do anything. You just did, right? It felt like an exorcism for a lot of Germans, like the exorcism of the Second World War, Nazi Germany, the separation, all of that.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
There were still, you know, conflicts and all that. But overall, whereas in the rest of German society, a lot of shit went down, a lot of infighting, you know, and a lot of like blame going back and forth between East and West and all of that. But it really wasn't an issue in the club scene at all. It didn't matter if you're from the East or West.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
It was like reunification first started on the dance floor.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Okay. That's always a problem when your idea of something is just that bullshit stuff that's mass marketed.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
I lived in a squat. And for me, it felt like techno is just like apolitical. It's just hedonism. It's very German. It's like all that I, you know, as like, you know, an angry 16, 17-year-old, I was like, I don't like any of that.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
I grew up in a small town close to Hammerkopf Bremen. They didn't have spaces, so they had to go in all the, like, discotheques. And they looked like discotheques, so I could never relate to that.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
In Berlin, obviously, you had all these spaces that were basically, like some of them were actually squatted, you know, like where you had like illegal clubs, illegal parties. And even if it wasn't maybe not illegal anymore, it was still like rough and ready kind of like real underground stuff. I would go to Tresor and it's like, oh yeah, I can totally relate to that. Now it makes sense to me.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Yeah, the DIY aspect of it. Because, you know, I was organizing concerts and we did all kinds of like labels and fanzines and like all this stuff. So everything was kind of DIY. And in Berlin, everything was DIY as well. And it was like, basically, we take over spaces and do something great. And it's, you know, for us and our friends.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Realizing, okay, here are all the misfits. All the misfits of society are here and feel, today we'd say, safe here, welcome and all that. That, I had to see and experience that to fully, I understand that. And now I understand the music better as well.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
So, techno music. So in 1988, There was a seminal compilation that was released by a British label, Ten Records. That was the first compilation to basically showcase to the world the new dance sound of Detroit, which was techno.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Well, there's this famous quote by Derek May who said, techno is like craftwork and parliament stuck in an elevator.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
And he mixed it all up. He would play whatever the B-52s, Prince. He would play electronic music that came over from Europe. So you had Kraftwerk, obviously you had like the Belgium stuff like Telex, Italo Disco, and he would kind of create these narratives and he was kind of a mystical figure as well.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
It's been said like many times that being in Detroit at the time, kind of in a post-industrial city, the idea of the conveyor belt and that industrialness, that it all kind of played its role into how you approach making music.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
Berlin in the late 80s was still divided. It was still the GDR and West Berlin had a really small scene. Like it was really just like, I don't know, a hundred people or something. Small, small. Yeah, small. Like really everybody knew each other by name, small. And there were music enthusiasts and dancers and like all of that.
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Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? (Part 2)
And the music would obviously, you know, being played in like the two and a half clubs that West Berlin had at the time. And then for Berlin, the catalyst for everything was that the wall just came down.