The First Days of Berlin. Ulrich Gutmair

that no longer exists. In the back wall of the house is an inconspicuous grey steel door, which opens around eleven or twelve at night. I’m not alone – nobody goes dancing on their own. Maybe there are two or three of us. We say hi to the bouncer and wink cagily at the woman on the till. She’s sitting off to the right, just inside the door, huddled in a thick jacket. In front of her is a small metal box. She looks like a secretary guarding a franking machine rather than the most exciting place in Berlin. We head downstairs and step into the passageway at the bottom. The ceilings are low, the walls unplastered and damp. It smells of cellar, of decades of silence, of cigarette smoke and the spilt beer of past parties. You’re confused the first time you reach this point. Which way? Straight down the tunnel into the pitch black? Or turn right, around the corner? This disorientation turns out to be a trick. There’s no dark tunnel ahead of us, just a mirror standing slanted in a lift shaft. It lures you into believing in a path that doesn’t exist. Then we hear the music. We turn right, around the corner, and we’re inside.

      An offbeat is pumping away. The bass drum pounds stoically, imperiously, at 120 beats per minute. The syncopated sound of a cymbal, running ahead, cutting in early, draws our bodies forward. Individual sounds, fat, rich and sexy, carve out spaces for themselves between the beats. Slowly our ears grow accustomed to the music. It’s house, on vinyl imported from Chicago or New York. It’s better, simpler and more seductive than anything we’ve ever heard before. People come in, stand around for a while and say hi to each other. They chat, laugh, drink beer, and then sooner or later they start dancing. They don’t come here to sit around; the only seats are at the cocktail bar. Both the bar and the bar stools are mounted on springs. It’s a challenge to climb up and sit down. Your legs dangle in the air as if you were swaying on the branch of a tree. It isn’t very comfortable and it doesn’t make sense to sit down for very long. The club consists of a damp cellar, dim light, people, music and, most importantly, motion.

You can make out two rooms, separated from one another by a smaller space in the middle. A laser beam cuts across the club from left to right, like a sign from the future encountering the remains of a story that seems to be stuck in 1945 when the Berliners hunkered down in air-raid shelters, waiting for the Red Army to arrive. A heap of rubble is a reminder of how it may once have looked down here. Further back in the dark there’s a small bridge over a water-filled hole in the floor. People are dancing to a new track played by a DJ whose name we don’t know. Initially, there’s no DJ cult, no names you need to remember beyond the names of the places themselves. There are smells and smiles, gestures and conversations in places the music has enticed us to. There are people who move, dress, drink and smoke in their own style. They meet down here for a night in one another’s company.

      The club is called Ständige Vertretung. It’s named after the Federal Republic of Germany’s permanent diplomatic representation in East Germany which was situated just around the corner from Tacheles, in Hannoversche Strasse, from 1974, but is no longer in use. On 2 October 1990 the plaque of the ‘Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany to the GDR’, to give it its full name, is unscrewed and removed. From that moment on, Ständige Vertretung ceases to be a place representing a state but a place where things happen that you can only experience live. Till Vanish has hauled a few old TVs down from the street into the cellar. He uses them to show the feedback you get when you film a screen with a video camera, then play the recording on a screen and record it all over again: a permanent short circuit that produces not pictures but lighting effects. Till Vanish has a cyberpunk peroxide-blond hairstyle you can spot from a mile away. Some Sundays he cuts people’s hair down here. He came from Weimar to Tacheles and lives next door.

People are dancing in the left-hand room. A French guy is at the decks, playing euphoric, minimalist music that’s hard to resist. From the edge of the dance floor it looks like a private party with rules unintelligible to anyone who’s only watching. Now it’s all about peeling yourself away from the wall, taking that one decisive step towards the dance floor that sets everything in motion. Until your movements have become automatic and you’re immersed in the music. Until you’ve overcome the embarrassment of letting yourself go, and the fear of looking weird. Until your mind is calm and focused, taking the occasional break, a few minutes’ time out at least.

      Detlef Kuhlbrodt, who used to go clubbing in Mitte, describes this moment. ‘The first time I ever danced I was twelve. I’d imagined that dancing would kind of make me vanish into the here and now, but sadly that didn’t really happen very often. Instead, you just felt insecure. The effort to get it right just meant the effort contaminated your movements.’

      But this music, more than any other, actually makes it easier for the dancer to slip softly into it, as into sleep. House is based on loops, simple repetitive bass lines over a straightforward beat. A few sounds, a few chords played on keyboards, often imitating the sound of a piano. If there’s any singing, it’s generally simple commands related to dancing or to the music itself. The loops spiral forwards in time, creating a feeling, as you dance, of being fully here, an overwhelming, powerful sense of presence and simultaneity. It’s the loop that moves the dancer. This produces the euphoric je ne sais quoi described in the ‘Can you feel it?’ of a famous house track, yet still unspoken, as if it were something you weren’t supposed to say aloud. And so at some stage we really do vanish into the now, transported by the beats, the elegance, the lush sounds of the music, beguiled by the motions of other people’s bodies, all this overspilling energy. Laughing faces, fleeting glances, attention, contact.

After we’ve been dancing for an hour, the sweat starts to drip on us and the others from the low ceiling where it has condensed and merged with the grimy deposits. Over the house beat, a woman’s voice shouts, ‘Come on!’ This isn’t just a memory; I can recreate it at any moment, because one of the few pieces of material evidence of my nights at Ständige Vertretung is a Scram record. It’s been standing on my shelf since I bought a copy after the DJ played the Empire Mix of ‘Come On’ one evening. I’d taken an unforgivable peek at the turntable: sometimes sheer exuberance makes you overstep the line. That can’t have been during Ständige Vertretung’s first winter, though, because ‘Come On’ was only released on the New York-based Strictly Rhythm house label in 1992.

      I have precisely three objects that are laden with memories of Ständige Vertretung. That Scram record and two slips with ‘Entrance Card’ printed in bold typewritten letters on thin cardboard – free entrance tickets (you saved five marks) I clearly never used. I think the cashier must have slipped them to me when I left the club in the morning, but it might have been someone else.

      I moved to West Berlin in October 1989 to study at the Freie Universität. Good timing, because the Wall came down only three weeks later. In the years that followed, I spent my days at university deep in the western half of the city, while at night I was out in the unlicensed, unregistered bars, the squats and clubs of Mitte.

      Memories don’t work like a camera. The pictures our memory produces are hazy. They fuse with smells, sounds and faces, and in turn these are associated with conversations that might well have taken place in a completely different context. Brief moments from scattered nights over a number of years coalesce into a single memory. A riot of rapid sequences, like strobe-shattered shards that belong together but are impossible to compile into a story, however hard you may try. But I can tell when and how at least one of my first nights at Ständige Vertretung ended.

One morning, before sunrise, we staggered up the steep stairs out of the damp cellar and into the wintry orange light of Berlin. It was a Friday, 18 January 1991. The reason I’m so sure of the date is because that morning something about the big wall on the far side of the large stretch of wasteland behind Tacheles was different.

      Right at the top of the wall below the roof, written in white lettering at least two metres high, was the word KRIEG. War. The previous evening when we went down into the Tacheles cellar – Thursday used to be house night – that graffiti hadn’t been there. In the early hours of the previous day, Operation Desert Storm had begun in Iraq. That same day Helmut Kohl was elected the first chancellor of a reunified Germany.

      It snowed heavily for a few days in the winter of 1990–1, making Alexanderplatz virtually