I have come across a DW video on this issue:
The video report is horrible. The only pertinent point is he rise of living costs in Berlin. Apart from that, they only let the organizers, DJs and club owners express their opinions. As expected they complain about how they are pushed out, how inflation affects the customer behavior and how they cannot afford to continue.
To start with, the report and the owners fail to mention the most obvious problem; even before inflation the entry fees for those clubs were astronomical in German standards. In many places it is over 20 even 30 Euros and beer prices change between 7 and 15 Euros. For Americans, they might seem suitable, but considering the fact that German middle class and young professionals are making a fraction of what their US counterparts are making and students are trying to survive with even less, the venues indeed dug their own grave slowly but steadily with those fees. The new rich residents of Berlin who can afford to spend a night at a piss-smelling shabby techno club have no interest in the old ways. Instead they look for sushi restaurants and expensive wines.
Add to that the bouncing-gatekeeping problem. So you saved money for entrance fee, beer, bad Bratwurst and are ready to possibly get an STD just by visiting the bathroom. You meet with your friends at the entrance, wait for hours in the line just to be told that you are nor good enough to enter the rundown places you see in the video. Worst, they might accept some people from your party and they just make a fake sad gesture before bidding their farewells and dancing like crazy inside. Sorry mate, getting into the exclusive techno club is more important than spending a night together. You end up eating German Döner or drinking beet on a beer crate in front of a Spaeti considering your friendship and clothing choices. Yes, the party scene which boasts for invading-squatting empty public and private buildings and not even putting a good work for decoration in fact doesn’t like people without money, right clothes, right ethnicity or skin color. Now go figure why any sane person prefers an affordable and clean party venue, a nice restaurant, a house party or even a small get together where playing scrabble is more fun than listening to continuous and monotonous bass and treble “played” by people who call themselves DJs.
Alongside with these factors I also saw another reason during my party-going phase. I have been to many clubs, discos, open air parties and whatever place that had the semblance of a venue. The ones in the West were well curated and boring. In the East, however, if you had the right contacts, you would enter the real underground scene. As the DW video mentions, that changed in the preceding decade. But for Berlin, party going was a compulsive behavior among young adults. The city has a population of almost 4 million, has many subcultures and is attractive to the international crowd. There are also numerous prestigious institutions of higher education and a steady flow of students. What happened was that one could end up at a party seven days of the week 365 days of the year with different people each day. Love was in the air and people were not only consuming beer and drugs but also each other. All the party loving folk I’ve me there were the most socially active yet the loneliest people I’ve ever met in my life. People, friends and lovers, were disposable and young people couldn’t see that with time the excitement diminished and their brains got overwhelmed with superficial short term relationships and friendships.
All in all, most of the avid party goers not only left with nothing of value from those times, like long term relationships, but the ones who decided to carry on despite their age either cannot afford it or are not even suitable for the clubs. Entertainment culture, like any culture, entails a healthy continuity. The first piece of the chain was broken when the clubs that were raising on the heritage of occupying factories and warehouses, on grassroots organizations and relatively broke but happy people decided to turn their back to this past and became all for profit with the added conceitedness of deciding who comes in and who doesn’t. Following that, as the city of Berlin embellished her image as the party destination of Europe without following much on what is to be done to maintain that image, millions of people flocked to the city with the sole aim of hedonistic party life. These people couldn’t carry the spirit of the party goers of 90s either. The disposable nature of venues and people took a U-turn into a dead end and here we are.
Here is a funny story from a small but beautiful East German city. I made some friends from that city and they told me about an e-mail list where people are informed about the parties at a certain place. That was the only selection criteria, bu it worked well. They didn’t want neo-Nazis or trouble makers there and if you know someone who trusted you, you would be invited too. The rumor was that while shooting Inglorious Basterds in Europe, Quentin Tarantino traveled from Paris to Berlin and wanted one of the German assistants on the team to show him the party scene. Instead of bringing him to Berlin, he brought him to his own city and Tarantino was one of the visitors of that place. I thought it was urban legend until I met a guy in the States who was also from that city and was a friend of the German assistant. Considering the fact that Inglorious Basterds were shot in 2008-09, one can simply say that the decline of the Berlin party scene already started for real underground lovers already in the first decade of 2000s and even the provincial alternatives were better options to bring a world famous Holllywood director. I had hell of a party indeed.