Clubbing in ruins

Liam Cagney on Berlin label and nightclub, Tresor.

When you read about Tresor, the techno label and nightclub from Berlin, the word “legendary” crops up a lot. After Tresor’s legendary founding, its original Leipziger Straße location became legendary, as is the club’s legendary connection with those legendary Detroit techno artists it promoted with many legendary releases on its legendary Tresor record label, which isn’t even getting started on the legendary nights all those absolute legends spent partying in that dark legendary basement.

I was mulling over this on a grey afternoon in late summer 2022 as I strode into the exhibition ‘Techno, Berlin and the Great Freedom’, held in Kreuzberg’s enormous Kraftwerk building, the former hydro-electric plant in whose complex Tresor now resides. Curated by Adriano Rosselli, the multi-storey exhibition celebrated the history of Berlin’s first techno club. I was also soon planning to visit the club itself for the first time to see Oscar Mulero, a master of multilayered hypnotic techno sets, so I wanted to do my homework.

Every good scene has an origin myth, and on the exhibition’s ground floor, documentaries projected on screens told that of Berlin’s techno scene. One day in 1991, three young German men (Dimitri Hegemann, Achim Kohlenberger and Johnnie Stieler) were stuck in traffic a stone’s throw from the sandy wasteland of Potsdamer Platz. Aware of the derelict buildings dotted around the former East Berlin district of Mitte, and hunting one they could potentially use as a club venue, they spotted from their car a dark façade that piqued their curiosity.

The building, it turned out, had been part of the Wertheim department store, in the Weimar era one of Potsdamer Platz’s grandest attractions. Since the War it had lain ruined and untouched, cast outside history. Having gone away and procured the building’s key from a Stasi superintendent, the three men eventually returned and explored the musty ground floor. After some time in the gloom, as if in a pulp mystery novel, they discovered behind a bookcase a door; it had been painted over, and beyond it a staircase led underground into the midnight dark basement.

 “We went down into this slippery stalactite cave without lighters,” Stieler recalled in the 2012 book Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall, “and after fumbling around in the dark for a bit, we eventually found the door to the vault.” The vault was that of the department store’s bank, and inside it, the air they breathed was fifty years old. “That must be what it feels like to find an Aztec treasure,” Stieler said. “None of us said a word.” Hegemann said, “It was magic, like the walls were talking to me.” Enlisting friends, they began renovating the building, which had no electricity or water. They arranged a sham license for an art gallery with a bar. The club’s name came easily: Tresor, which in typically literal German fashion means Vault. The club’s logo—three concentric circles—was taken from a leftover door bolt. 

The club’s unusual discovery—ruin, anachronism, shattering linear time—elicited various artistic responses at the exhibition. On one of the gritty power plant walls were daubed silhouettes of children, recalling prehistoric cave paintings. Elsewhere, black and white photos of early Tresor clubbers included one of a woman with a mohawk looking like a warrior from a pre-industrial tribe. Most spectacularly, on the second floor, opening onto the huge ceiling, Anne de Vries had made a scale-model replica in sand of parts of the original club—sand being, in Brandenburg, everywhere; the main substance your dancing feet abuse.

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Reflecting on Tresor’s discovery, the detail that fires me isn’t the swashbuckling romanticism of these three young men discovering an ancient tomb. Nor is it the Situationist détournement, whereby a former commercial hub is repurposed into a countercultural space. No, it’s the detail about Stieler cadging the club’s logo from an old inscription on a piece of metal: 

In this elementary graphic form–a circle inside a circle inside a circle–found in a zone abandoned by history, I can’t help but see a primordial drawing on a cave wall. 

Artistic modernism has long been fascinated by how industrial-age art fractures linear chronology. Brassaï made this connection in his 1933 article Du mur des cavernes au mur d’usine (‘From Cavern Walls to Factory Walls’), wherein he described how, in modern day Paris, “two steps from the Opera, signs resembling those of the Dordogne caves, of the Nile Valley or the Euphrates, emerged on the walls.” 

At my usual club, Berghain, I’d often had anachronistic moments. One evening, breaking from Honey Dijon’s sweltering Panorama Bar set, I went to the first-floor toilets, beyond the Vulcan forge bar with its charred black walls and ripped brutish men, and at the stainless steel urinal trough, as harsh orange light shone through the stained glass window, I found myself standing over a supine man on the dirty floor. His brow was flushed; and in his hands, he was holding a funnel connected to a transparent tube inserted into his ass. 

As my brain tried to make sense of this man’s kink—he continued fidgeting on the floor with his urine enema device—a stately figure stood at my shoulder. It was a muscular man, chest breathing deeply, in a huge jackal helmet. The jackal likeness, over the man’s exposed chest and leather harness, masked his entire head. For the rest of the evening, that hulking speechless jackal man stayed in my mind’s eye.

What a disappointment, then, that after all that buildup, the club itself, the legendary Tresor, turned out to be such a damp squib. Or should I say a damp squib inside a damp squib—since at the legendary Tresor, different levels of annoyingness looped maddeningly around each other. 

First, Tresor basically has no door policy. Pretty much everyone gets in. So, when I finally reached the legendary Tresor basement—to access which you pass down a very long subterranean corridor—I was confronted by walls of young straight dudes, many topless, bumping into people. Shoulder-to-shoulder, drinking beers, they seemed oblivious to the techno. 

Inside, the basement dance floor architecturally felt like a cruel prison. It was pitch black with a low ceiling and you couldn’t walk two feet without banging your shin off a concrete block, or having some invisible teenager barge into you in the gloom. Take one step forward: bump. Take one step to the side: bump. Stay in one spot and try to dance: bump . . . bump . . . bump, the clone dancefloor entrants, all dressed in black t-shirts and black jeans, flailing in the black darkness straight into you, like the choreo for a late Samuel Beckett play. Oscar Mulero played a fine hypnotic techno set. But the Tresor basement PA isn’t far above a set of Logitech laptop speakers, and after three hours I fled the legendary club.

At home, I reflected on my experience. What had happened to the Tresor we hear so much about? Aesthetic mismanagement, perhaps; inability to evolve; resting on one’s laurels; indulgence in one’s legends. Nonetheless, as the fine exhibition had shown me, it took nothing away from the club’s historical impact. DJ Rush touched on this when he said of his first time visiting Tresor’s basement in the 1990s that he felt like he had stepped out of the present and into medieval times. And another person I knew had had a totally different experience to mine, finding in Tresor’s dark a gnostic space.

The modernist painter Giorgio De Chirico wrote in one of his notebooks: “Live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness.” At moments during the exhibition at Kraftwerk, I had found the experience similar to the visions of De Chirico: an abandoned piazza under green skies; a rubber glove beside the Apollo Belvedere. But unfortunately for Tresor, these days rubber and classical manliness are more on-brand for its great Berlin rival.