It is 1am on a Saturday and the crowd outside Berlin LGBTQ+ club night Cocktail d’Amore stretches from the door of its venue, Griessmuehle, along the side of the Neukölln Ship Canal and out on to the road. It takes the best part of five minutes to walk from one end of the queue to the other, and these are just the early birds: Cocktail d’Amore opened its doors an hour ago, and will go on continuously for the next 56 hours, ending at 8am on Monday.
You can see why Cocktail d’Amore is such a draw. From a distance, Griessmuehle looks more like a wonderland than you might expect a converted grain mill to look: a haze of multicoloured lights glowing on the canal. Inside, Cocktail d’Amore feels like a Platonic ideal of what a club night should be. The sound system is immaculate, the music fantastic. While I’m there, at least, it leans towards the kind of sinuous mid-tempo sound that Andy Weatherall jokingly described as “drug-chug”; the late DJ was so enamoured of playing the room at Cocktail d’Amore dubbed the Cosmic Hole that he wrote a track inspired by the experience, Into the Cosmic Hole.
The crowd is wildly diverse – dressed-down kids in hoodies alongside guys in drag; girls in standard-issue techno black dancing with men in their underpants. At one point, a gay couple in their 70s sweep past. They’re conservatively dressed for dinner at the Savoy in the 1920s – one of them is walking with a silver-topped cane. The atmosphere is simultaneously friendly, excited and licentious: a friend who goes there regularly calls it “benign freedom”. Bouncers on the door make everyone cover the camera lens on their phone with a sticker; you don’t realise how accustomed you’ve become to people constantly filming their night out or taking selfies and what a difference it makes to the overall mood, until you find yourself somewhere where absolutely no one’s got their phone out.
The venue, meanwhile, is appealingly rough around the edges – graffiti covers the walls and the DJ booth, there’s a burnt-out car in the garden outside – and its industrial past is obvious, which adds to the experience. As Liam Cagney, an academic and regular Cocktail patron who’s about to publish a book on Berlin’s clubs, puts it: “It gives you these sort of surreal moments. You lose your sense of the outside world in these industrial spaces, like the everyday fabric has been torn off.”
But you can’t miss the handmade signs on the walls with their slogans: SAVE OUR SPACES, DON’T BREAK OUR HEARTS. They look like something from a protest march, which they probably are. A few days before I arrive in Berlin there’s a big gathering in Neukölln, protesting against Griessmuehle’s imminent closure: the venue is the victim of redevelopment. Its owner, an Austrian real estate company, declined to renew the club’s lease because it wants to turn the site into offices and flats. The protest didn’t do any good: Griessmuehle is closing, and this is the last party Cocktail d’Amore will throw there.
Cocktail d’Amore’s promoters, Giacomo Garavelloni and Giovanni Turco – who DJ and produce under the name Discodromo and prefer to be interviewed via email, speaking as one voice – seem reasonably sanguine about this turn of events. They moved to Berlin from Italy in 2008. For the first five years of its life, “Cocktail d’Amore was a nomadic party, using more than a dozen locations, many of which were illegal. We found Griessmuehle after losing more than one location either due to being busted by the Ordnungsamt [city regulators] or torn down to make way for new condos.” There’s no question of Cocktail ending, although “it’s getting harder and harder to find the right spaces. It was already challenging in the first five years, but now it’s nearly impossible.”
It’s a situation that has been mirrored in capital cities throughout the world, not least in the UK (look online and you can find ghost maps of London’s lost nightlife, complete with photos of shiny office buildings and apartment blocks that used to house clubs). But it seems particularly strange to talk about Berlin’s nightclubs being in crisis: they’re one of the things the city has been famed for. Techno may have been born in Detroit, but no city fell harder for its charms than the German capital. Since the early 90s, it’s been techno’s second home, host to a succession of globally known clubs, from E-Werk and Tresor to Berghain. The city’s reputation has been bolstered by the city’s longstanding reputation for what Garavelloni and Turco call “freedom and permissiveness”: “From the laws in place – there’s no set closing time for clubs – to the ways that clubs decide to auto-regulate, which is way more relaxed and loose than anywhere else, and of course the incredible out-of-the-norm people who reside here.”
According to Lutz Leichsenring of Berlin’s Club Commission – an organisation and lobby group set up in the early 00s to promote the city’s nightlife – the problems began “after the financial crisis, around 2010 to 2012. We had a couple of years to breathe, but then the money was back and now we see low interest rates and insecure markets that mean a lot of companies invest in real estate. They pay speculation prices – more than the actual value of a site right now. So if you’re a club in that building they kick you out right away, because they need to earn money, they need high rents.”
Leichsenring estimates one-third of the city’s clubs have been lost in the last 10 years: Germans call the process Clubsterben, meaning “club death”. New clubs have opened in their place, but as he points out: “Sometimes a very iconic club closed down and a mainstream club opened that just wants to maximise its profits, play chart music, have bottle service, because they pay a higher rent. It’s a kind of quality reduction. We’re interested in places that have a social and cultural value.”
At least 40 more clubs are currently under threat, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that Berlin is a growing city in the grip of a housing crisis. Ironically, says Leichsenring, Berlin’s club scene has something to do with that. “Startups are the thing in Berlin, I think we have more of them than any city in Europe after London,” he tells me. “They’re scaling up, employing many thousands of people, and it’s very, very easy to attract talent to the city. You see the job adverts for engineers and IT specialists and they basically say, ‘Come to work in Berlin, because it’s the greatest cultural clubbing city in the world.’ That’s the main issue, not that we pay the highest wages, not that you’ll get the most amazing job.”
That’s a more compelling argument to put to politicians than Berlin’s reputation as a club tourist’s destination, he says. “Tourism is perceived as over-tourism, with noise and litter.” Nevertheless, politicians seem to be listening to what the Club Commission has to say. The city authority invested €1m in soundproofing clubs to avoid neighbour complaints about noise. The mayor of Neukölln spoke at the Griessmuehle protest, and there was a subsequent parliamentary resolution that the club needed to be supported. It’s not unusual for German political parties to have “something like a club spokesman”, while a recent Club Commission event attracted senators and members of the Bundestag. There are plans afoot to reclassify clubs, giving them “the same cultural status as a theatre or concert hall”. At the moment, they’re still classed as “amusement venues, which means in building law, they’re on the same level as brothels and casinos and porn cinemas”.
But the real issue isn’t convincing the politicians: it’s convincing the property developers. “You can have strong support from the politicians, but if someone owns the real estate and they legally have the right to build offices, then you don’t have a lot of power,” says Leichsenring. “It’s trying to make developers realise that they should do not what gets the maximum profit, they should maybe do something that is paying into the city. If they have a long term plan for the city, they should definitely think about including people who made Berlin as attractive as it is.”
That sounds like a remarkably tall order – property developers aren’t exactly renowned for zealously guarding cities’ cultural lives – but everyone I speak to in Berlin seems cautiously optimistic about the future. Leichsenring talks about introducing a code of conduct for developers, organising conferences “so that urban promoters and club owners can pitch ideas in front of great developers”. Cagney points out that Berlin clubs have a reputation for resilience and mutability. “A lot of the people who organise parties there are quite politically engaged, a lot of them are involved in the LGBTQ+ movement, there are nights like Room 4 Resistance, which is about music and gender identities, but it’s also about being active politically. All these things bode well for Berlin’s club culture not going under.”
Meanwhile, Griessmuehle has appended the words “im Exil” to its name and found a couple of temporary homes. Garavelloni and Turco are still looking for a new venue to host Cocktail d’Amore. Griessmuehle is a hard act to follow, they say. When the music finally went off at the club for the last time, the dancefloor was still packed. “People really loved Griessmuehle, they had some of the best experiences of their lives there. Knowing that this would have been the last Cocktail there created an incredible celebratory energy, ultimate joy mixed with ultimate sadness. The people on the dancefloor didn’t want to let go of the place. They didn’t want to let go of that beautiful, though sad, moment.”
