99% Invisible #442 (11 May 2021): Tanz Tanz Revolution
Berlin is known for its club scene, and this comes from the Berlin wall. No one really wanted to live in West Berlin, it was cut off from the rest of West Germany, so the government offered incentives: subsidized rent and food, exemption from mandatory military service.
(I’m surprised post-war Germany was allowed to have mandatory military service.)
This leads I guess to a bunch of musicians coming in, and they start defining a music scene. There’s I think mutual influence between them and Detroit? They broadcast on the radio, and they say where they’re DJing tonight, “come to the UFO club to hear this live” kind of thing.
Meanwhile in East Berlin, only state-sanctioned music is allowed, certainly nothing countercultural. If you want to hold a dance party, you need months worth of permits and bullshitting about how this will make the participants better soviet citizens through the ecstacy of dance. But the radio broadcasts from West Berlin are still there, so the East Berliners know what they’re missing out on.
Eventually the wall comes down, they’re allowed to mix freely, and East Berliners go to West Berlin clubs. Anyone who was there will tell you that the reunification of Germany happened on the dance floor.
West Berlin didn’t have that much space, but East Berlin did. And for a lot of it, the ownership was unclear—the nazis had expropriated it from a Jewish owner, then the soviets from the nazis, and now in theory it was supposed to go back to its original owner but that could take a while (if they were even still alive I guess). In the meantime you could kind of just rock up to an abandoned warehouse and hold a rave? You’d be there for a couple of nights and then move on.
At some point one started staying in a dedicated location, somewhere that had held a bunch of records? I kind of zoned out and missed a lot of this.
Discussion of the link between Berlin and Detroit, but I missed a lot of that too. One specific record shop owner in Berlin was important.
99% Invisible #442 (11 May 2021): Tanz Tanz Revolution
Berlin is known for its club scene, and this comes from the Berlin wall. No one really wanted to live in West Berlin, it was cut off from the rest of West Germany, so the government offered incentives: subsidized rent and food, exemption from mandatory military service.
(I’m surprised post-war Germany was allowed to have mandatory military service.)
This leads I guess to a bunch of musicians coming in, and they start defining a music scene. There’s I think mutual influence between them and Detroit? They broadcast on the radio, and they say where they’re DJing tonight, “come to the UFO club to hear this live” kind of thing.
Meanwhile in East Berlin, only state-sanctioned music is allowed, certainly nothing countercultural. If you want to hold a dance party, you need months worth of permits and bullshitting about how this will make the participants better soviet citizens through the ecstacy of dance. But the radio broadcasts from West Berlin are still there, so the East Berliners know what they’re missing out on.
Eventually the wall comes down, they’re allowed to mix freely, and East Berliners go to West Berlin clubs. Anyone who was there will tell you that the reunification of Germany happened on the dance floor.
West Berlin didn’t have that much space, but East Berlin did. And for a lot of it, the ownership was unclear—the nazis had expropriated it from a Jewish owner, then the soviets from the nazis, and now in theory it was supposed to go back to its original owner but that could take a while (if they were even still alive I guess). In the meantime you could kind of just rock up to an abandoned warehouse and hold a rave? You’d be there for a couple of nights and then move on.
At some point one started staying in a dedicated location, somewhere that had held a bunch of records? I kind of zoned out and missed a lot of this.
Discussion of the link between Berlin and Detroit, but I missed a lot of that too. One specific record shop owner in Berlin was important.