t’s 4pm on a
Saturday afternoon.
Clouds of weed
surround me, the
smoke catching
in my throat.
I’ve already been
standing for an
hour and I have
around three more
hours of waiting
ahead of me. It
could be longer
t. I don’t dare ask.By 7pm, as the sky turns
pink, descending into night,
everyone around me has
fallen silent. We are united
by one mission – the door
in front of us. The silence
is punctuated by a woman
with an afro bob and
purple lipstick ordering
those closest to her to
keep smiling or they’ll be
rejected. I am afraid that
when we eventually get
close to her, she will simply
look us up and down and
say “no”. That all this waiting
is, ultimately, pointless.
I’m in the queue for one of
the world’s hardest-to-get-
into clubs. This woman
is the bouncer who decides
which of us succeeds and
who goes home.
Party people
Two months later, it’s 1am,
and I’m standing in front
of an iconic club, only this
time I’m wearing a bullet-
proof vest. The only way
for me to find out the
answer to that much-
Googled question “how
exactly do you get into
Berlin’s superclubs?” was
to guard the doors myself.
When the Berlin Wall fell
in 1989 it marked a new
political beginning for
Germany. It also set off
a chain of events that led
to Berlin becoming the
clubbing capital of Europe:
the end of the divide
between the East and the
West created a new sound- and a new way to party
- that brought everyone
together. Week-long parties
began to burgeon at full
speed. Clubbing became a
lifestyle, music a religion –
and it garnered worldwide
attention. Once The Wall
fell, several East German
businesses closed down,
leading to soap factories
and power plants being
revamped into illegal
clubs. Over the years these
forbidden parties gave way
to venues with permits – but
many retained the grit that
made them so special in the
first place. Tourists flooded
to the city, and locals wanted
to keep the atmosphere
created sacred. Berlin’s
nightclub door policies got
so strict that they became
almost as famous as the
clubs themselves.Today, endless online
forums detail what to say,
what to wear and how to
act in order to get in. The
bouncers have become
celebrities, with head
doorman of the clubBerghain, Sven Marquardt,
the man to impress (it’s
rumoured Berghain once
turned away Britney Spears
for wearing the wrong
shoes). Yet Berghain is just
one of a network of clubs
with strict door policies,
and although Marquardt
and his male colleagues are
the ones who dominate
newspaper columns and
documentaries, there’s a
group of women who wield
just as much power. They’re
super-secretive and their
world is hard to penetrate- it took over a month of
club-hopping, day and
night, to get to know them.
Mostly I was shunned and
told that journalists are not
trusted until, with some
persistence, a few party
promoters took me aside
to whisper their names
“I began
to lose all
empathy. I
started work
pissed off”
Bouncer
Saskia has
“no” tattooed
on her palm