Sisyphus time
For writer Isabelle Hore-Thorburn, Berlin’s nightclubs were an escape from the harsh realities of life. But after months of closures, she’s opening her eyes to the flaws in the fantasy
Photography Zach Helwa
Within the first weeks of lockdown, it became clear that I had no real hobbies. In the darkest weeks of winter, an underground club space, walking distance from my Berlin apartment, provided for most of my social, spiritual and romantic needs.
So in March, when the Berlin government ordered clubs to close their doors to stop the spread of coronavirus, I scrambled to cobble together a stopgap. I applied theatrical makeup for Zoom parties, synched headphones with friends on socially-distanced power-walks, and downloaded (then quickly deleted) dating apps. But I couldn’t simulate the high intensity and bodily physicality that I had come to depend on each weekend.
I began hearing this particular period of lockdown referred to as a kind of “Sisyphus time.” Like the mythical king of Ephyra, rolling the same rock up a hill, day after day for eternity, I was repeatedly forced to confront the hollowness of my new routines as days in the quar turned into weeks.
Well before lockdown, 2020 had felt sinister. I was preoccupied with the climate crisis and engrossed by predictions of the imminent apocalypse. Thawing permafrost was releasing ancient methane deposits across the Arctic; climate change was melting prehistoric poison into the present.
For me, the club night felt like a vital, albeit temporary, reprieve from thoughts like these: problems that were at times too big (the climate crisis) or too painful (the continued violence against black people and the extreme rightening of global politics) to confront each day.
I’ve lived here for just over two years. For friends who have been here longer, stepping into these spaces was an opportunity to forget the Clubsterben, or “club death,” that had haunted the scene for a decade. Neukölln’s techno institution Griessmuehle and the word-famous KitKat fetish club had recently been forced to relocate due to commercial development, so when lockdown went into effect, many felt it would fast track the much-speculated-upon demise of the club scene.
But as coronavirus spread throughout Europe, a hungry fungus of ideas crept across deserted dance floors and dark rooms. DJs turned to Twitch and OnlyFans, operators scrambled for workarounds to comply with increasingly austere lockdown rules, and developers, gallerists and entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to swoop down on these clandestine spaces.
Sisyphos, a river-side club that should have been running parties from Friday through till Monday this summer, made a measured pivot to Biergarten; and there are illegal raves in the Volkspark Hasenheide and more far-flung parks and underpasses across the city to join.
This summer, I felt less exposed at the nudist lake than at the corona-safe “open-air” parties or the less-legal daytime party. As one friend put it, “I want to be able to cry when I dance,” and I would have to agree. Darkness and amplified sound instil a feeling of anonymity, as does passing a threshold. In the sunlight, you can’t access the kind of dissociation that can bring you closer to yourself.
The club is a stage for your fantasised identity, and it’s transcendent to feel held by strangers as you move within those walls. These emancipated spaces have been offering this room to move since the beginning of the Berlin club scene itself, and it’s what has drawn people to the city for decades.
I, like many others, wonder if the temporary pivot to beer garden or gallery might rinse these spaces of their affective power. A colleague recently pondered if opening a daytime art exhibition in Berghain, for example, might run the risk of neutralising and sanitising a space that caters to fringe communities.
The “Studio Berlin” exhibition currently installed at Berghain does indeed feel like a kind of theme park version of the temporarily closed club. Works celebrating hedonism, club culture and the queer community coalesce to create a heavily mediated experience of a club night that seems to inadvertently caricaturise and objectify its long-term patrons.
What I learned from the first night that bars reopened in June is that I was unwilling and probably incapable of returning to something like what we had before. Sitting in Arkaoda for the first time in months, my friend beamed, “I never want to leave,” as I tried to calculate when I could politely return home. After looking at my wall for months, worrying about how bad things could get and the precariousness of my life here, the idea of returning to normal was anathema to me.
My growing discomfort with a return to normal went beyond clubbing. Reckoning with current events has required me to examine my own racism and environmental ambivalence — uncomfortable parts of myself that I had previously been able to tuck away — as well as how systems of oppression are baked into the organisations, publications, and communities that I hold dear. In pre-pandemic times, critics were already acknowledging how structural racism in music journalism, and an abundance of inaction at an executive level, protected a system where overwhelming white, male DJs play Black and working-class music to make money for wealthy white industry leaders.
This isn’t a model I hope will be revived when clubs reopen. As Diana Raiselis, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow whose work looks at nighttime governance in Berlin, told me: “There are bigger questions to ask as we think about a ‘new normal.’ This moment presents an opportunity to go back to something better than we had.”
A number of organisations are now proposing pathways to safer and more conscientious re-openings. Culture consultancy firm VibeLab’s Global Nighttime Recovery Plan, for example, outlines how institutions can protect creative industry workers who were working close to the margins before the pandemic, and implement harm reduction schemes to help people gather safely. Meanwhile, cooperative projects such as Clubtopia’s Green Club Guides and sustainability audits advise venues on how to reduce waste and energy consumption. Plans like these, Raiselis noted, are meaningfully engaging with the issues that “we knew needed addressing… work on climate consciousness and diversity and inclusivity.”
If the first wave and lockdown revealed just how important clubs are as progressive institutions, it also exposed their failings. In this seemingly wasted Sisyphus time, a shift in thinking has happened that would make it difficult, but not impossible, to ask that we return to the same clubbing landscape.
I’m hopeful that the new tools, insights and perspectives developed during progressive lockdowns will help confront systematic inequalities that had previously seemed immutable. While the political and environmental situation may be worse than ever, we are better and more organised.
Isabelle Hore-Thorburn is an Australian journalist in Berlin. She writes about art and culture for Highsnobiety and spent quarantine making radio plays about the end of the world.
