In Berlin, there is an abandoned Nazi airfield several miles south of the city center that has since been converted to the country’s largest public park. Here amidst the calls of endangered birds you can find teenagers playing soccer, cyclists and joggers going down the runway, a rainbow-colored kite idling in the late afternoon wind. I walk around unprohibited as if mid-dream. Looking out at the horizon, I am overcome with an acute sense of deja vu: though in my lifetime I have been to a number of airports, rarely ever am I outside, on the ground like I am now; usually funneled through an elaborate labyrinth of walkways and bridges designed for congestion control and maximum efficiency, or waiting inside of an aircraft, patiently watching from portholes as neon vests below wave sticks around to okay departure instead. It is strange to be here for the explicit purpose of being here and not because I, or someone I care about, am en route elsewhere. The park’s edges stretch into oblivion and evidence of the surrounding city—in some pockets, life entirely—disappears, rendering it into a state of temporal and spatial ambiguity: pre or post-civilization, anywhere but here and now.

When Nabokov visited Berlin for the first time in 1922, he wrote of its intestines being on display in The Gift. I will visit for the first time nearly a century later. Shortly after, someone will steal my phone, and I’ll lose all the images I captured of the city while there. This, though, is some of what I remember—

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Everywhere the Roman god Janus presides over the city’s ruins and construction sites. (Sometimes, often, a place is being simultaneously torn down and remade). The community garden—their version of a municipal park, dirt lots fit with a beekeeping operation adjacent to a multistory treehouse—constitute a remarkable achievement in the potential for recycling urban detritus. One afternoon, we have a grocery store picnic on makeshift tables of milk crates and plywood planks; nearby, small children squirm about in netted hammocks. Surprisingly the city is very green in an organic, unkempt way, unlike the verdant, carefully manicured lawns of England or America’s pristine Main Street, USA artifices. Graffiti is so integral to the cityscape, even on official buildings, that seeing the rare undefaced wall is jarring.

I immediately love this city for its self-awareness, a quality I have learned I value deeply in people as well: it acknowledges the past without necessarily feeling beholden to it. In so much of Western Europe, the veneration of history lingers like smoke in the walls: obvious, even suffocating, to a first-time visitor; eventually fading into the patchwork of everyday smells. Planning in such places often prioritizes preservation, sacrificing the very real present for a distant, abstracted past. Longtime residents are forced out to pander to tourists, who arrive in throngs to project their idealized notions of history and embalm these structures in the memory cards of oversized DSLR cameras and the Cloud. I tell myself that I am different from them.

Centuries ago, when people were first able to put words to the feeling we now know as nostalgia, they thought it was a disease. Collective memory can be an effective antidote. Germany appears to have made concentrated efforts to reckon with its recent atrocities, and it now boasts a diverse and substantial international community—if that counts for any true measure of success. In 2015, as part of Chancellor Merkel’s open-door policy (now frequently cited in discussions of what to do about American borders), thousands of refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East were temporarily housed in sterile cubicles in the hangar of the old airfield, amidst leftover Nazi insignia. Obviously there remains room for improvement.

After World War II, the city was divvied up into four sectors: the western portion, an “island of freedom” occupied by Allied superpowers, enveloped by Soviet-controlled East Berlin and Germany. Evidence of the literal intersection of East and West remains permanently etched into the city’s architectural facade. I am staying in the southwestern part, in what used to be the American section.

The city’s ethos is commonly referred to as “poor but sexy,” the eternal embodiment of the “euphoria and anxiety of transition” as cultural theorist Svetlana Boym notes. Naturally, many artistically inclined young people have found themselves drawn to it—myself included. After the wall came down in 1989 and the city devolved into chaos, few corporations wanted to set up headquarters here. As a result, the post–Cold War economic revitalization owes much to the investments of the creative class—artists, writers, musicians, early technologists—who saw the city as cheap, fertile ground for their aspirations. For much of the ’90s, the city adopted the slogan “Berlin is becoming,” a sentence intentionally left unfinished. We love to romanticize what could be most of all.

One evening in the hostel lobby, a German guy with face tats tries to sell me speed from somewhere deep inside his pants. I decline and escape to the river next to the East Side Gallery, where remnants of the once 12-foot wall, which snaked nearly 100 miles around the city, would be indistinguishable from ordinary defaced scaffolding were it not swarmed by smiling tourists posing for photos. Waves lap at the banks; the faint, steady rhythms of techno filter out of an open-air club across the way. A young couple smokes under the big willow nearby, and together all of us watch the sun slowly descend into the horizon. In my brief time in the city, I have seen every sunset and sunrise.

Here the club is church, a comparison one frequently encounters in any writing on raving. Weeks revolve around their ends and talk of nightlife leaks into day. Estimates suggest roughly 10,000 people were employed by the clubbing industry pre-pandemic. A friend who once spent a summer here shares some notes on the city passed down to him from another friend. The document’s anonymous author has written: “A lot of the people in the city are lost in a cycle of clubbing during the weekend and working odd jobs during the week to pay for clubbing again on the weekend.”

During the Cold War, East German churches were afforded greater protections and freedoms than most institutions in exchange for political neutrality. The first Blues-mass—an event that combined religious services with popular music, political talks, and theatrical performances—was held at a Protestant church in East Berlin in 1979 (Furlong). Blues-masses functioned as quasi-public spaces for people to congregate and express themselves freely and thus attracted many nonbelievers and members of different subcultures. Services began with a greeting welcoming participants who had traveled from far away and calling upon those “to show respect for one another’s differences and come together in celebration.” At a time when the music industry was state-controlled, these events also allowed unsanctioned musicians to publicly perform politically subversive music like punk or the blues, a genre borne out of the plight of enslaved Black Americans (Hayton). However, the actual lineup wasn’t as important as the act of sharing a sonic experience in a rare unregulated environment with hundreds—sometimes thousands—of others who saw this place as an oasis from the problems of everyday life.

When you get into clubbing, eventually you develop fluency in its language, allegiances to certain parishes—here the music is good but the crowd is so-so; here the crowd is god awful and should be avoided at all costs—and, if you go enough, community. A connection can materialize over the course of a 10-minute exchange in the dark and end by dawn, or not. In the harsh morning light, you squint and witness a body transmute into a supporting cast member in an anecdote about a party you once went to; or into a friend, even a lover.

Every weekend, thousands of members of “the easyJet set” hop on cheap flights for the express purpose of going to the club (Rapp). After night descends, because I do not know what to do with myself and because a cover charge is cheaper than a bed, I make my way to Berghain, sober and alone. In the line—an attraction in and of itself—I read Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and teeter with slight nervousness: this is perhaps the one city where being a young woman counts against you when you’re going out. The doors finally open at midnight and the line begins to creep forward; conversations drop off and half-empty bottles pile up at the entrance of the metal gates. They’re the same ones they use at Disneyland or to corral cattle. The bouncers are pretty nice—merely skeptical of my age.

Following a series of internal fissures, the final Blues-mass was held in 1986. Some of its organizers and participants went on to form grassroots social reform groups and underground presses or host purely secular non-blues concerts with people they had met there.

Entering Berghain reminds me of wandering midday into open cathedrals in Manhattan. It’s a massive retrofitted power plant with a concrete interior that’s austere save for a couple large abstract sculptures and a few blown-up Wolfgang Tillmans prints. Tillmans began his career shooting gay raves in clubs across Europe and in New York; his photos are visually striking, with an intimate candor resulting from a combination of their off-kilter framing, their subjects, Tillmans’s eschewing of post-processing. Parts of his exhibitions might be mistaken for an arty friend’s apartment wall: meticulously arranged unframed prints of varying sizes held up by Scotch tape and binder clips.

At a bookstore near Alexanderplatz, I contemplate buying a catalog as a souvenir for the lover who introduced me to his work. What is love if not wanting to share such glimpses of beauty? Of these particular nightlife images, a subject that he no longer photographs very much, Tillmans has said: “I would like to document for the future that it existed, that it cannot be taken for granted, and that there are only a few places in the world where such an intense way of being together so fluidly and freely is possible.” The print I see immediately upon stepping foot into Berghain is a shot of someone’s balls from below.

In the 1980s, after the international success of pioneering German electronic group Kraftwerk, a more minimal, hard-hitting strain of techno left the former American automotive manufacturing capital of Detroit and traveled back to Berlin. These mechanical rhythms offered a way of futuring from the ruins of rapid deindustrialization, which had impoverished swathes of the city’s predominantly Black population (Barnes). Though it failed to gain traction beyond a few localized scenes in the U.S., techno quickly took up in Berlin, played in abandoned warehouses and buildings left behind after the fall of the Wall. Berlin and Detroit continue to share a close relationship today; a working partnership is in place, aimed at revitalizing the latter in the manner of the former.

Techno in particular has a meditative quality, as if you could listen to blood pulsating from within your veins. I will admit there was a time when the appeal was lost on me, but I’ve since come around to it. Here, it’s hard not to. From above, the DJ commands a readily acquiescent congregation to submission. Everyone displays an impressive level of spatial awareness and of personal boundaries: no bumping or shoving, no unnecessary chatter, no spilt drinks, no sticky floor. There are no reflective surfaces, not even mirrors in the bathroom, and no cameras allowed, so that in a dark haze of sweat and fog, the delineation between self and surrounding blurs. I find myself suspended at a site of unexpected paradoxes: the perverse and the sublime, the hedonic and the ascetic conjoined in one throbbing mass.

Raving has always been political and tends to experience a wider cultural resurgence following major societal upheavals. New York’s music scene exploded after 9/11, giving way to many of the popular “indietronica” acts we now associate with the aughts (Goodman). Now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s enjoying a similar renaissance, one that I can tell I get to witness in real time. When things were bad we partied and when things were good we partied. But inevitably, the party’s forced elsewhere. To this end, Berlin has designated several of its most important clubs as historical landmarks.

When I speak to my old boss, she reminisces about nights spent out in New York’s Meatpacking District with such affection, a neighborhood where a dying trade was disinterred and replaced by underground parties with an egalitarian ethos in old slaughterhouses and packing plants, one industry of flesh making way for another (Lustbader). It is presently described on Google Maps as a “hip commercial area.” I wonder if that’s what I’ll sound like in 30 years, a distance I can barely fathom now. I wonder when the stories we tell will become elegies. Is it the very moment we write them down?

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My friend Meg, who I have come to visit in Berlin, reads aloud a disjointed history of Tempelhofer Feld from her phone as we trudge through knee-high stalks of grass, bleak gray sky collecting above: We are currently standing on the site of the 1948-49 Berlin airlift, during which Allied forces delivered food and supplies to millions in West Germany living under Soviet blockade and a transport landed every 90 seconds (Brady). “Did you know they also filmed part of The Hunger Games here?” she asks; I try to imagine Jennifer Lawrence crouching behind some semi-barren trees ahead. As the Cold War progressed, Tempelhof became an American Air Force base, one of the most desirable placements. And after the last flight took off from the runway in 2008, the locals held a candlelight vigil. I suspect they were not just mourning the impending inconvenience of having to now travel outside the city to fly.

When developers need land, public spaces and parks especially tend to be the first to go. I am reminded of the ongoing battle for People’s Park in Berkeley, California; I used to live right on its edge. Several years following Tempelhof’s official park conversion in 2010, the city proposed plans for new residential and commercial development along its perimeter, including a new public library and affordable housing units. It was a time when the city, like so many others, was grappling with skyrocketing rents, growing inequality, an influx of new residents, concerns about urban sprawl and the consequent traffic and pollution. In response, locals led the “100% Tempelhofer Feld” initiative to preserve the park’s existing state, skeptical that the city would actually keep such well-intentioned promises (Fahey). Ultimately the referendum to build on the former airfield failed to pass by an overwhelming majority. The much loved open space has become one of Berlin’s crown jewels and a living testament to its capacity for metamorphosis.

In 1978, Brian Eno released the genre-defining, four-track ambient album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which was inspired by his own experience stuck waiting in the German airport of Cologne Bonn and sought to explore the comparatively unplumbed dimension of music—space; I find myself often listening to it in airports. As with a number of other electronic offshoots such as techno, much of the groundwork for ambient was laid by the innovations of Berlin artists in the ’70s. Eno wrote in the album’s liner notes: “Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities … [it] must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

It’s still dark outside when I exit the club, but only for a brief while longer. I love dawn because it is one of the few times a city is still. As the sun begins its ascent, I board the bus to the airport, though this time I am actually en route elsewhere: in Paris, there is another airport on the outskirts of the city from before the war, which has since been partially converted to a museum commemorating feats in modern aviation and a gallery temporarily housing a massive metal labyrinth by American sculptor Richard Serra. The bus drops us off outside the gates and it’s eerily quiet inside, save for the occasional maintenance worker pushing a cart along the tarmac. Looking out at the horizon, I feel as if I have been here many times before.

Barnes, Marcus. “From Germany to Detroit and Back: How Kraftwerk Forged an Industrial Exchange.” The Guardian, May 25, 2020. www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/25/from-germany-to-detroit-and-back-how-kraftwerk-forged-an-industrial-exchange

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.

Brady, Charles. “Above & Beyond: The Village of Tempelhof.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008. www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/above-amp-beyond-the-village-of-tempelhof-9924004/.

Fahey, Ciarán. “How Berliners Refused to Give Tempelhof Airport over to Developers.” The Guardian, March 5, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/05/how-berliners-refused-to-give-tempelhof-airport-over-to-developers.

Furlong, Alison. “Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues.” Colloquia Germanica 46, no. 4 (2013): 433–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44110836.

Goodman, Lizzy. Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011. Dey Street Books, 2017.

Hayton, Jeff. “Crosstown Traffic: Punk Rock, Space and the Porosity of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.” Contemporary European History 26, no. 2 (2017): 353–77. doi:10.1017/S0960777317000054.

Lustbader, Ken. “Bar Room 432 / Mother,” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, April 2022. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/jackie-60-clit-club-martha-mother/.

Witt, Emily. “Wolfgang Tillmans’s Beautiful Awareness.” The New Yorker, September 18, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/wolfgang-tillmanss-beautiful-awareness