Going out in Berlin with borderline bronchitis while surprise bleeding a week off schedule, my dear friend and I stand in line to enter a club at 2 in the morning. I am generally not one for ignoring my body’s needs, but right about now I am pissed off at my perpetually failing immune system this winter, and my desire to go dancing in Berlin overrules this coughing, aching body. Just this once, just this twice, just this week, OK? I have never waited in line for a club before out of principle, but here we are. It is freezing outside, with that humidity that cuts through your bones. Berlin is gritty. We talk to two guys in front of us while figuring out what we are actually standing in line for. Who is playing and what are they playing? We SoundCloud through the list of DJs on a smartphone and decide it seems danceable enough for our taste and good enough to warrant our waiting in the freezing cold, for now. We will see how long this lasts.
We manage to reach the front of the line where a thin guy in a black hat starts speaking to us in German. I stare at him somewhat amused at how such a slightly built character can have such an intimidating presence. When it becomes clear he wants me to respond to something I say: “Sorry, my German is not good enough for this”. He goes: “Alright, in English then: We are a leftist club…” “Oh!” I interrupt “thát is why that guy is on the wall” pointing to a graffiti stencil of Karl Marx next to us. “Yes” he responds firmly, looking me directly in the eye: “du you like him?”
“I do, actually!” I say with an enthusiasm that is clearly out of place and does not fit the vibe of the location. More aloof, Yvet, this is fucking serious, alright? The guy continues to explain the politics of the club we are about to enter: “no homophobia, no sexism, no racism. Are you OK with these terms?”
“Absolutely.”
Something in me actually quite appreciates these politics as door-policy. All performance aside, these should be the conditions for entering all public spaces. Just stating these terms with clarity at the entrance grants a feeling of safety, like an insurance, and that, I notice, feels remarkably welcoming to me.
We are allowed to walk to the next station two people at a time. Even though the two guys we were talking to technically stood in line before us they let us enter first as my friend joyfully exclaims: “ladies first!” Which she immediately half-jokingly, half-seriously withdraws: “or, maybe not, I don’t know if they allow that here…?” We arrive at the next station, right hand on an imagined Communist Manifesto, where our bags are searched and our phones get stickers over the cameras and we are told we can’t take photos inside the club. Onward to station three, the cash register. This is where the Marxist Idealism ends and good old capitalism requests €15 a person to be able to enter the club. I am not smart-assed enough in this moment to ask whether there is a sliding fee for low-income guests or if we are going to keep our leftist radicalism just slightly hovering over class issues for the sake of making a profit?
Anyway, when we are finally inside the typically old and dark and grungy smoked out rooms of the Berlin club scene, we dance. I am wearing my usual all-black attire, which in the Netherlands sometimes feels a little grave in comparison, but here looks so similar to the German Antifa uniform, I fit right in. Germany is interesting like that, there are still Punkers, and Altos and general rawness. You hear that Nethies: Too many smooth hipsters, not enough grungy Antifascist grit. The techno beats sound through the old industrial building doused in black paint and thick smoke. I dance the wild radical dance of a totally sober, sick, and bleeding body refusing to miss out on some live Berliner EDM. Like a leftist badass.
I am contemplating the performance of radicalism, the limits of leftist politics, the lack of leftist voices in Netherlands, the synchronous bullshit AND importance of it all. And I am imagining Karl Marx in line of a self-proclaimed leftist nightclub in 21st century Berlin, standing in the dark smoky hallways observing groups of drug-addicted youngsters huddling together in genderless toilet stalls with overflowing toilet bowls and never any damned toilet paper. Escaping from something, somehow. Or reaching for something, somehow. Would he laugh a giant belly laugh or sternly shake his head at the silliness of this scene? When in fact, we know quite well, it’s dead-serious, everything is so very serious at the root of it all. It’s just not serious like staged performative aloofness. It’s serious like the deeply human struggle for meaning while we are here in these bodies, making sense of our existence, or eagerly running from it. We are alive, all together now comrades, and it is horrible, and silly, and so much fun, simultaneously.
Also Netherlands, a footnote of gratitude: Let’s be long-term real here – thank you for the smoking ban in your clubs and public spaces ❤ ❤ ❤ I, for one, deeply appreciate it. I will take the sweat and fart stink over the total annihilation of my lungs and tar lodging into every pore on my body any day. I have washed my hair three times since Berlin, and I have yet to arrive at something that doesn’t smell like death. I love going out dancing too much to be slowly killed by it.
Yvet Youssef 