It takes about half an hour on the train to get from the centre of Berlin to Köpenick, and the journey is a game of two halves. The second half is a gentle rumble through the industrial, residential and woodland heartlands of Bundesliga club Union Berlin. The first half is a sight-seeing tour of Berlin’s world-famous nightlife.
After Alexanderplatz, the train pulls into Jannowitzbrücke, where a huge power station towers over the bank of the river. Behind it lie Tresor, an elder statesman of the city’s techno scene, and the KitKatClub, famed for its fetish parties and strictly kinky dress code. As the train approaches Warschauer Strasse station, the tracks and river part ways and an imposing grey building looms in the open sky over a low-build retail park. This is Berghain, the most famous of all Berlin clubs and a byword the world over for the city’s taboo-free, 24-hour party culture. Its notoriously scrupulous door policy is an attraction in itself.
All these venues are close to where the Wall once stood and all of them were founded in the decade or so after reunification. They are places which grew out of that unique period in Berlin’s history, when historical trauma and a sluggish economy meant the city was still full of unfilled spaces.
Nowadays, the spaces are disappearing and the clubs are surrounded by building sites, shiny new office blocks and shopping malls. Berlin has changed radically in the last 30 years, but few areas have been transformed quite as much as the central districts of the former East. More than any other, they have been subject to that familiar cycle of gentrification: a depressed area becomes a cultural hotspot, the culture brings cash and development, and slowly but surely people begin to be pushed out.
Union, whose home lies out in the leafy suburbs of the former East Berlin, are a world away from all of this. Yet as they have risen from lower-league obscurity to Europa League over the last decade, they too have come to face the same problems as the city’s other major subcultures.
“If you have too many people who are only here as spectators, then eventually it won’t be that great any more,” says Christian Arbeit, the club’s famous, long-haired stadium announcer and spokesman, when I meet him in September 2021. He is talking about Union, but he could just as well be talking about Berghain.
Arbeit has been the face of Union for more than a decade, and he has seen both his club and his city boom in popularity during that time. He meets me in one of the stadium’s beer gardens, and for the middle part of the interview, we have to shout at each other. It is the day before a match day, and behind us, someone is testing the loudspeakers in the stadium. At one point, they play a well-known advert for a brand of Berlin beer that also happens to sponsor Union. A quickfire series of clips showing ravers, mechanics, dominatrixes and DJs is overlaid with the 2003 song Berlin, Du Bist So Wunderbar. With its slickly synthesised organ notes, hip-hop beat and scratchy vocals, the song is an anthem for Berlin’s 21st-century self-image. It was released in 2003, the same year that then then mayor, Klaus Wowereit, famously described his city as “poor, but sexy”.
When Arbeit first took the microphone, Union were more poor than sexy. They were still in the fourth division and reeling from the financial and footballing woes of the early 2000s. After their fan-led stadium renovation and promotion to the second division in 2009, however, they established themselves as the undisputed second force in Berlin, behind their western rivals Hertha BSC. They, too, became more prosperous, and footballing success quickly began to dovetail with the city’s cultural cool. As the beloved German DJ WestBam put it in an interview with FAZ newspaper in 2016: “Union are more techno than Hertha.”
Read More: Too cool for their own good? Union Berlin’s fight to retain their identity |