Berlin club scene

Source: Berlin Club Scene, Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, 31:49, uploaded 2026-10-30.

Andrew Callaghan’s third episode in Channel 5’s German culture series follows an AfD rally and a visit to the last speakers of Texas German with a weekend in Berlin’s clubs. The film is mostly street interviews, with a narrated history running underneath. Its recurring question is how people manage to party for three days without stopping, and the answers move from drugs and techno to anonymity, the absence of cameras and the door at Berghain. Because filming inside the clubs is forbidden, the camera stays outside, and Callaghan’s own night in Berghain is told afterwards through animation.

A history in empty buildings

The narration places the modern scene in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Abandoned factories, warehouses, bunkers, department stores and power stations in former East Berlin became cheap spaces for artists, musicians and young people, and techno arriving from Detroit and Chicago became the soundtrack of reunification. In this account it stood for freedom, experimentation and the breaking down of earlier political and social boundaries. The clubs grew into cultural institutions that shaped music, fashion, art and the city’s international image, and in 2024 Berlin’s techno culture was recognised as intangible cultural heritage in Germany.

Several interviewees describe a city that has since changed. One recalls the old idea of Berlin as poor but sexy, where a lot was possible on little money, and says it has turned into something overpriced that now feels like an airport, crowded with people from everywhere and oddly impersonal. Callaghan also cites the roughly 100,000 expats who have moved to Berlin looking for an alternative way of living, one in which the paycheque is not the most important thing.

Two parades

The episode opens on a weekend with two large daytime events. The Fuckparade presents itself as the non-commodified, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist version, whilst Rave the Planet, the successor to the Love Parade, is described by Callaghan as the allegedly more corporate and gentrified event built for outsiders. Rave the Planet is presented as the largest rave in the world, with half a million people dancing in the street. Its founder, Dr. Motte, describes dancing together to music as a human right and a way of communicating that involves less thinking. He connects the steady beat to ancient forms of drumming and dance. Other interviewees describe something similar in plainer terms: a drum, a steady rhythm, night and many bodies feel archaic, and the dance floor lets people be alone together in the music.

Drugs and endurance

Asked how anyone keeps going for days, interviewees mostly answer with drugs, and the episode treats drug use as normal within the scene. Callaghan names mephedrone, or MCAT, as the most popular new drug in Berlin because of its euphoric stimulant effect. One interviewee warns that what is sold as mephedrone or ketamine is often something else and has made people psychotic. An American performer contrasts the casual attitude in Berlin with the United States, where fentanyl and the opioid crisis make drug testing a constant concern. Others describe how the endurance builds: a first night lasts four or five hours, then club-hopping across a weekend turns into forty-eight hours or more. A long-time resident calls it a lifestyle that most people do not survive intact and that drives some of them out of the city.

No phones, no photographs

The film explains its own restraint through the scene’s rules. Photography is prohibited inside the clubs, guests have their phone cameras covered with stickers at the door, and people are encouraged to leave their outside lives behind. The narration traces this rule to the collapse of the Stasi surveillance state in East Germany, after which a rejection of surveillance allowed clubs to become safe spaces for experimentation, queer expression and anonymity. Early clubs such as Tresor, E-Werk and Planet already discouraged photography, and the rule became more important with smartphones and social media. At Berghain it became part of the club’s identity. Interviewees describe the result as a space where they can be uninhibited, socialise more easily and stay present, with no risk of being photographed in a life that is otherwise watched from every direction. The dark rooms are the most private part of these clubs, and interviewees describe them as places where nobody is supposed to say what happens.

The door at Berghain

Berghain, housed in a former power plant, is presented as the most famous club in the world, known for its industrial atmosphere, techno, marathon weekends, its connection to queer and underground culture and its selective door. One writer calls the door a new Berlin Wall: people queue to pass it, some are let through, and nobody outside knows what happens on the other side. That mystery creates the desire. Interviewees offer reasons for rejection that are more about attitude than appearance. Bouncers are said to turn away people who seem judgemental, who would come to watch others like animals in a zoo, or who might not cope with an intense experience. Techno devotees and confident people are said to do better. Others think the difficulty is overblown and that being yourself is enough, since the outcome also depends on who is running the night. The same writer recalls a bouncer stopping a rejected guest from running in and telling her that she should not enter someone’s place uninvited, just as they would not walk into her house. He describes Berghain’s story as a tension between the underground and commercialisation, and notes that newcomers still have transformative experiences there.

Callaghan observes that the people who complained to him about being rejected tended to fit a certain profile. One of them objected to “men going into women’s changing rooms” and named migrants as a bigger problem. Content creators who wanted to film were also consistently turned away. His colleague Steph, unsure whether her usual clothes would work, buys an outfit at a kink-wear shop on the advice that bouncers can tell when someone is wearing a costume rather than something that suits them.

Inside

The pair get in at around ten in the morning. Callaghan describes naked bar staff, open drug use, a predominantly gay and queer crowd and a dark room where anything could happen. He expected people to be out of control, but found that most had their wits about them. After an hour he and Steph fall into what he calls a trance-like state of dancing. His conclusion about techno is quantitative: the longer he listens, the more it takes hold, from barely moving in the first half hour to dancing uncontrollably after an hour or two. Interviewees at the end agree that Berghain should never be filmed, because the darkness, the noise and the inability to see oneself or take a photo create an altered state they cannot find anywhere else. Callaghan closes by clarifying that, to his knowledge, the United States has no legal equivalent of a twenty-four-hour, clothing-optional, post-industrial rave venue open for a whole weekend.