Club Profile

Berghain Details...

Location:  Berlin, Germany

Berghain is a nightclub in Berlin, Germany. It is named after its location near the border between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain in Berlin, and is a short walk from Berlin Ostbahnhof main line railway station. Founded in 2004 by friends Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele, it has since become one of the world's most famous clubs, and has been called the "world capital of techno."

History

Thormann and Teufele became party promoters in the 1990s, hosting a male-only fetish club night called Snax, which launched in 1992 at Bunker. In 1999 they founded their first club, Ostgut, in a former railway repair depot in Friedrichshain. Unlike Snax, the club was open to the general public. According to Deutsche Welle, Ostgut, "known for unique parties and boundless freedoms, sexual and otherwise, is considered to have paved the way for Berghain." Ostgut closed in January 2003, with the building slated for demolition and later replaced by a large indoor arena, the O2 World Berlin (since 2015: Mercedes-Benz Arena).

Berghain opened in 2004 as a reincarnation of Ostgut. The name "Berghain", a portmanteau of the two city quarters that flank the south and north sides of the building, Kreuzberg (formerly in West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (formerly in East Berlin), has been described as evocative of the club's "post-1989 identity." The literal meaning of the German word Berghain is "mountain grove."

The club is located in a former heating plant built in 1953 as part of the flagship post-war Stalinallee development[5] and abandoned in the 1980s.The space was originally rented from the energy company Vattenfall[9] but has been owned outright by the club since 2011. The building has a cavernous main room with 18-meter ceilings and is dominated by steel and concrete. The design of the club's interior, as well as later interior and exterior expansions of the venue, were carried out by the Berlin design firm Studio Karhard.

In 2016, a German court officially designated Berghain a cultural institution, which allows the club to pay a reduced tax rate.

Inside Club

The club's main room is focused on techno, with a smaller upstairs space, Panorama Bar, featuring house. The basement holds a male-only establishment called "Lab.Oratory", which Rolling Stone described in 2014 as being "known as Berlin’s most extreme sex club."

Berghain has a Funktion-One sound system on its main dance floor which, when it was installed in 2004, was one of the company's largest club installs.The Panorama Bar was upgraded in 2017 with a four-point line-array system with an additional six subwoofers from Studt Akustik.