The First Days of Berlin. Ulrich Gutmair

and the new one wasn’t yet fully in place. A year had passed between the Wall falling and reunification. East Berlin was caught up in a turbulent transitional phase marked by constant demonstrations, art happenings and parties. A situation similar to what nineteenth-century utopians christened ‘anarchy’ had taken hold during the interregnum between systems; an order that appeared to function virtually without leaders. Berlin was no longer the capital of the German Empire, even though every other street corner in Mitte suggested it might have been until very recently. Berlin was no longer the capital of the GDR, and not yet the new capital of a reunified Germany. A deal for Berlin to become the capital was far from done. Quite a few people in West Germany would have much preferred the seat of government to be Bonn rather than decrepit, dirty, poor Berlin in the eastern zone, which to their minds was halfway to Siberia.

Anyone arriving for the first time in reunified Berlin from the old West Germany encountered young East Germans in the process of learning about life in a world that had changed out of all recognition. There were East Berliners coming home from Schöneberg and Kreuzberg after a brief exile. There were people who went off travelling for a long time or moved to West Germany. And then there were those who joined forces with West Berliners and new arrivals from elsewhere after the fall of the Wall to create fashion, music and art, become DJs, design flyers and set up publishing houses and galleries, organize raves, open bars and clubs, sometimes for a matter of weeks and generally with no licence to serve alcohol. The clubs were the nerve centres of the new culture of ‘Metropolis Mitte’, as a flyer for the Eimer, a squat in Rosenthaler Strasse, called it.

      Nick Kapica and Tim Richter were keen to identify what made a good club night.

      ‘What makes people tick? How do you get people to dance, really dance, all night long? Unlike the clubs we’d been to before, people came to us to enjoy the night. They respected the DJs as performers’, Nick says. This Londoner with reddish-blond hair has Polish roots. He packed his bags when the Wall fell. The sight of all those people dancing on the Wall and the general euphoria on TV convinced him to take a look around Berlin for a year. Like so many of those who moved to Berlin-Mitte in 1990, Nick ended up in Tacheles. That was where he met the Australian Tim Richter while Café Zapata was being set up on the ground floor. One night, the two of them were hanging out, sipping their beers and wondering where they could go for a dance. They’d been to a few clubs in West Berlin, to Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, but there was something missing. A club with an idea behind it, a club that appealed to a specific audience. To their minds a club night was an event that needed curating.

Nick wanted to put into practice in Berlin what he had learned at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. There, they’d taught him about the Ulm School of Design’s concept, based on the principles of the Bauhaus movement and the rigorous lines of Swiss modernism.

      ‘We knew exactly what kind of public we wanted. We knew how it should feel. We knew what kind of music we’d play and we could already visualize the atmosphere inside our club’, he says. ‘The only thing we hadn’t figured out was where to do all of this.’

      Some time later, the two men knew they’d discovered the perfect place for their club when they spotted a trapdoor in the floor of Café Zapata. They shovelled out huge quantities of soot and dirt from the hole beneath it and eventually came across a flight of stairs and a walled-up door.

      ‘It was a total mess. We structured the interior to reflect what it was like when we found it – two rooms separated by a smaller middle room. We knocked down some walls and built a bar to create a dynamic space. We didn’t do any advertising in the normal sense, but every freak in Berlin came to our opening night. They became our regulars, and the line outside the door was enough to tell any future guest whether they were “in” or not’, Nick Kapica says.

      Initially, Ständige Vertretung only opened on Thursdays and Sundays. Those who chose to go out partying on Thursday and Sunday night, knowing full well they would have to go to work the next morning, paid for the pleasure with headaches, tiredness and below-par performance. Partying is about letting yourself go, feeling free and being unrestrained with your time. It’s a good bet that most of those sipping beers and cocktails, smoking joints or snorting speed at Ständige Vertretung on a Thursday night had no regular occupation.

Nick and Tim’s club was intended to be exclusive and unusual and yet open to everyone, so they chose not to apply a door policy defining who was allowed in and who wasn’t. They pretended there was one, though, to create a bit of suspense.

      ‘We were both graphic designers and that’s how we approached the project’, Nick says. He dreamed up slogans and themes that became the monikers of individual club nights – for example, Delirium, Swamp, Post House, Corruption and many more. You got your wrist stamped at the turnstile that marked the transition from outside rules to house rules. The day after, sometimes for a little longer, that stamp would be your only reminder of ever having been there, of having taken part in the night-time ritual. Because Ständige Vertretung operated a strict photography ban.

      ‘Banning photos but filming people having their hair cut at night and screening it live in the club was a way of teasing out questions of secrecy and privacy. The toilets were unisex at first. No cubicles. After a while, the only feature that remained was the one-way mirror you could look out through onto the dance floor. It was all about accentuating the moment and the situation we all found ourselves in together.’

      The photography ban was emphatically enforced. Breach it and your camera could end up in pieces on the floor, or at least the film torn out and exposed.

‘Loads of crazy things happened in that club. The only ones who can talk about them were people who were there, and every one of them will have their own version. There are hardly any photos to back up their stories. Those people possess something special in a day and age when every event is immediately posted online. We didn’t really care about being photographed, but we did want to create a special atmosphere, a sense of mystery’, Nick Kapica says. ‘There had to be something only people who were there could remember.’

      Of the photos taken in Berlin-Mitte after the fall of the Wall most are of the streets, very few of the clubs and bars. Even when it wasn’t expressly forbidden, as at Ständige Vertretung and many other clubs, it was decidedly uncool to take photos. It wasn’t permitted because it is impossible to observe and take part at the same time. Walk around a club with a camera and you’re like a tourist filming your own encounters. Anyone who slides a lens between themselves and the world doesn’t trust their own experience. They forego the here and now in the attempt to capture a transient sensation and are immediately a nuisance to everyone else. People who abandon themselves to the DJ, the music, the beat, are revelling in the loss of control and don’t appreciate being photographed in that state.

      ‘If someone came in to take some exotic photos, we’d tell them to stop’, Christoph Keller recalls. He worked the bar at the Friseur and has documented urban space in film and photographs. ‘We were conscious of it being something special. We wanted to avoid any commodification of the situation. It was something we created lovingly and quite deliberately to counter that type of exploitation. It was a space for tasting freedom where there was this form of temporary protection. That was also why people put so much energy into it, without really being paid for their efforts. Friends were allowed to take photos, but we didn’t like anyone doing it too openly. It would’ve destroyed the foundations of everything we’d built up. Some people tried to bring in video cameras, preferably with a lamp on top, but we kicked them out. It breeds alienation and ruins the atmosphere. Everyone was clear that we couldn’t let it happen.’

Due to many people’s aversion or simple indifference to documenting what was happening, the Berlin of those years immediately after the fall of the Wall has vanished almost without a trace. Most of the places where the old Berlin was still palpable and the new Berlin in its infancy are no longer there. There comes a point when so many tiny changes to the fabric of the city have accumulated that the essential details of the past are lost and can’t be stitched back together again. The real-estate market and urban planning decisions altered the buildings, the streets and the empty plots of Mitte beyond