From a bunker to a cathedral: the never (fully) told story of Berghain

There is no reliable image online of the two men who founded the most famous techno club on the planet. No filmed interview, no Instagram profile, no awards ceremony where they've picked anything up. Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann have spent more than thirty years building the most influential nightlife empire in electronic music and have managed something no other club owner in the world has pulled off: being absolutely nobody outside the walls of their own business. This is their story, and also that of Berghain, of Snax, of the man with the tattooed face who decides every night who gets to cross the door, and of a concrete building that a German court ended up placing, by law, on the same footing as a classical music concert hall.

The bunker where it all began

Berlin, early 1990s. The Wall has just come down and the city is living through years with barely any clear rules or anyone to enforce them. Abandoned factories, empty anti-aircraft bunkers, buildings with no clear owner: the perfect stage for an entire generation to invent the night from scratch. Into that vacuum arrives a sound from Detroit that fits the city's grey, broken landscape like a glove: techno.

It's in that context that Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann, two figures who from day one chose to operate in the strictest anonymity, start throwing hardcore techno parties in the Reichsbahnbunker on Friedrichstraße, a former railway bunker of raw concrete that sums up the era's aesthetic rather well. The year is 1992. Two years later, in 1994, those nights turn into something far more concrete: Snax is born.

Snax never aimed to be just another party. Its slogan said it all: "for pervy men only". It was a touring, fetish party, exclusively for gay men, moving through different marginal corners of the city — it was even held in Amsterdam at one point — mixing the earliest electronic music with a sexual freedom that, in a freshly reunified Germany, had few precedents. Leather, rubber, latex, explicit sexual play and a musical rigour that had nothing to envy the city’s "serious" techno nights: that combination turned out to be a formula nobody else was exploiting. The graphic style of those first hand-drawn flyers is still, today, a cult object among collectors of the Berlin scene.

Ostgut: the dress rehearsal for a giant

Snax was such a success that its creators started needing something they hadn't had until then: a stable home. They found it in 1998, when they were offered a building that could hardly sound less glamorous: a huge, run-down freight-train repair depot, the Ostgüterbahnhof, in the district of Friedrichshain, in what had been East Berlin. No flashy facade, no promise of luxury. Just concrete-and-sheet-metal industrial halls, far from the city's traditional gay areas like Nollendorfplatz or Prenzlauer Berg, and far too from the clubbing heart of Mitte. The perfect spot to make noise without anyone complaining.

There they set up two spaces under one roof: Ostgut, a techno club open to a wider public, and Lab.Oratory, a fetish sex club exclusively for men that still exists, unchanged, today. And there something happened that no promoter had managed until then: Teufele and Thormann got two audiences that barely crossed paths — fetish gay men, until then not particularly interested in techno, and purists of the darker sound, who didn't usually frequent gay venues — to end up dancing under the same roof, united by a brooding techno that DJs like Boris and Tama Sumo were starting to define.

Ostgut ran for five years as the dress rehearsal for everything that followed. And it ended abruptly: in 2003 the government expropriated the land to build a stadium, the O2 World Arena (today the Mercedes-Benz Arena, after Telefónica bought the naming rights in 2006), and the building was demolished. Ostgut's closing party is, to this day, a legend told among Berlin clubbers who hadn't even been born when it happened.

A Soviet-era power plant becomes a cathedral

It took Teufele and Thormann almost two years to find a worthy replacement. They found it in an unlikely place: a former thermal power station built in 1953, in the neoclassical-socialist style of the GDR, also located in the former East Berlin. They leased it from the Swedish energy company Vattenfall and, in late 2004, opened its doors under a new name: Berghain, an acronym fusing the two districts the building sits between, Kreuzberg (former West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (former East Berlin).

To adapt that concrete building, with its eighteen-metre-high ceilings, they hired Studio Karhard with a guiding principle that would become their trademark: let the concrete speak. No velvet, no shiny plastics, no VIP areas. Stainless steel, dark glass, galvanised iron and bar counters cast in blocks of concrete, as if they'd been born with the building itself.

The technical challenge was huge: a giant concrete box is, acoustically, a reverberation nightmare. To tame it without giving up the industrial aesthetic, hidden acoustic panels were designed to mimic the texture of the original concrete and steel, and a wooden floor suspended over shock absorbers was installed to soak up the low frequencies, so people could feel the bass in their feet for hours without wrecking their joints. On top of that base, the company Schalldruck stacked a Funktion-One sound system directly on the floor, in four towers around the dancefloor, creating a spot where the sound hits hard but you can still talk to the person next to you without shouting.

And then there's the strangest decision of all: there are no mirrors. Nowhere, except minimally in the bathrooms. The idea was to strip away vanity and self-consciousness, so that everyone would forget their own image and focus on the music and the collective experience. Combined with the absolute ban on cameras and phones, Berghain's entire design is built so that ego stays at the door.

The building was split into two clearly distinct environments: the Berghain room, dark, with its concrete columns and hard techno; and the Panorama Bar, more intimate and bright, decorated with giant photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans, where house, disco and a warmer electronic sound play.

When Snax took over the whole building

With Berghain already up and running, the party that started it all didn’t disappear: it moved to being held twice a year, traditionally at Easter and in autumn (the latter edition under the name "FC Snax United"), and takes over practically the entire building. Researcher Luis-Manuel Garcia, who studied the event on the ground through interviews and direct observation, describes it as a genuine Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. The advertising for the Easter 2015 edition summed it up like this: "a bacchanalian feast with all the finesse, excess and good music you couldn’t otherwise conceive of".

During Snax, internal passageways open up linking Lab.Oratory, on the ground floor, with Berghain’s main room and with Kubus, the concert space, forming one giant maze. Lab.Oratory turns into a genuine warren: dimly lit corridors, chambers with leather slings, rows of glory holes, cages with bunk beds, a room under a metal grate acting as a "steam bath", and a leather sex swing hanging right above the main bar.

What’s striking is the level of production put into each edition. In 2014, for instance, a full military camp was built inside Kubus, with real tents by function — infirmary, canteen, bunks — and camouflage netting throughout the maze. Another edition recreated a building site, with scaffolding turned into a play area and trailers converted into intimate spaces. At the sports-themed "FC Snax", a full-size boxing ring is set up in the middle of the dancefloor every autumn, and the cloakroom becomes a locker room. One of the most memorable sets was a full doctor’s office, complete with an exam table, stirrups, (non-functional) instruments and even a waiting room with 1980s magazines. The organisers themselves call this humour "reflexive irony": a wink that strips solemnity from the fetish and turns it into theatrical play.

Musically, the party has never separated sex from music. While the main room plays the house’s usual pounding, dark techno, Lab.Oratory offers a highly charged erotic counterpoint: sleaze, Hi-NRG, eurodisco — what DJs like The Black Madonna call "slutty disco". The Lab.Oratory DJ booth is, in fact, a rarity in itself: a kind of cage raised above the floor where the DJ is physically separated from the crowd, who often only see their feet.

The inclusion of Marea Stamper, better known as The Black Madonna, on the Snax lineup was a milestone talked about for years: one of the very few women ever invited to play at a strictly "men only" event. She herself described her set as channelling "the Patrick Cowley of my imagination", a line that sums up well the level of musical seriousness the party demands, a world away from the clichés of conventional gay-circuit music.

The voice of someone who was there

One of the most interesting testimonies about what really goes on inside Snax doesn’t come from a journalist, but from a regular attendee named Sergio, interviewed by Garcia for his academic research. A Parisian hairdresser from the fetish community, Sergio arrived at Berghain in 2006 without even knowing he was walking into a gay club: what had brought him there was simply the club’s reputation as a techno vanguard. "We came back two months later, because we’d loved it. Then we came back five weeks after that, and then four weeks after that", he recalls of his first visit, before becoming one more of those "techno tourists" who today make a weekly pilgrimage to Berlin.

It was through Lab.Oratory that Sergio discovered Snax, and his definition of the party is as blunt as it is telling: "a great techno orgy in a fantastic club, with fantastic music and sexy men. For me, it’s the best one-hundred-percent gay party in Europe". What he values most is that Snax has kept its Berlin spirit — that "hard techno" that doesn’t bend to the taste of the Belgians, Spaniards or Italians who arrive en masse — despite becoming an international phenomenon. One curious detail this kind of first-hand account offers: for practical reasons, the crowd at Snax overwhelmingly prefers sugar-free soft drinks or non-alcoholic beer over real alcohol, which sets a rhythm quite different from a normal night at the club.

This journey that thousands of people now make to Berlin to experience Snax has an almost literary name: some researchers call it the new "Grand Tour", a reference to the trip young European aristocrats made across the continent in the 17th and 18th centuries to cultivate their cultural identity. Except now the destination isn’t Rome or Florence, but a former bunker turned power plant turned club.

The man who decides who gets in

If Berghain has a public face, that face doesn’t belong to its owners. It belongs to Sven Marquardt, the legendary head doorman whose tattooed profile, piercings and shaman-like air have become the club’s international image, to the point where many people wrongly assume he’s the owner.

Marquardt was born in 1962 in East Berlin, and his story begins long before techno existed. In the 80s he joined East Germany’s punk and new wave scene, a scene where dressing differently could bring serious trouble with the Stasi. Despite the risk, he started working as a fashion photographer and documentarian, capturing in black and white the underground scene, gay culture, and the discontented youth of communist Berlin. Those photographs, taken out of pure need for expression, are today considered historical documents.

When the Wall fell in 1989, Marquardt set the camera aside and threw himself headlong into the emerging club scene starting to take over abandoned factories and bunkers. He started working the door at Teufele and Thormann’s earliest parties, including Snax itself, and later at Ostgut. When Berghain opened in 2004, the founders entrusted him with the most delicate task of all: designing and running the new club’s door policy.

Marquardt has never considered himself just a doorman. He describes himself as a curator, whose goal is to find the "perfect mix" on the floor every night. For him, the dancefloor is a fragile ecosystem: if too many people of the same profile get in — too many tourists, too many office workers, too many techno purists — the energy breaks. His famous "Heute leider nicht" (unfortunately not today) isn’t, as he’s explained in the few interviews he’s given, a judgement on anyone’s looks, but a decision about whether that person fits the mix for that particular night.

That no-favourites policy has spawned some of club culture’s most repeated anecdotes. In 2022, Elon Musk publicly complained on social media about not being able to get in (he himself claimed he refused to go in over a "peace" banner on the facade; the version circulating around Berlin is quite a bit simpler). Talk show host Conan O’Brien filmed a comedy segment outside the club’s doors and was booed by the techno community. And rumour has it that celebrities like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton also faced the same rejection as any nobody. There are no VIP lists, no reserved tables, no way at all to buy preferential access.

Over the years, Marquardt has returned to photography after more than a decade without touching a camera, and today he’s an internationally recognised artist, with black-and-white portraits exhibited in galleries around the world and collaborations with brands like Hugo Boss. His trajectory sums up, in a single life, the same journey Berghain itself has made: from the margins of a divided city to recognition in the art world.

The owners who never showed their face

And while Marquardt became the club’s unintentional face, its actual owners kept applying to their own lives the same "no photos" policy that governs the door. Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann control every last detail of their business — the acoustics, the lighting, the decor, the DJ bookings — from a state of almost total anonymity. The few accounts circulating about them in the industry describe them as opposites: Teufele, heavily tattooed and pierced, is said to be the duo’s enthusiast and optimist; Thormann, the voice of reason, calmer, though rumour has it that the most extreme concepts behind the nights they’ve organised together came out of his head.

Their business skill, however, is undeniable. In 2011 they bought the power-plant building outright, shielding themselves forever against the gentrification that was starting to swallow Berlin. And around 2017, already past fifty, they began delegating the day-to-day running of the parent company, Berghain OstGut GmbH, to a trusted team, though they remain the owners.

The day a German court ruled that techno is culture

If there’s one episode in Berghain’s history that sums up its ability to bend the rules of the game, it’s the legal battle it fought against the German Ministry of Finance. The conflict was, on the surface, purely administrative: in Germany, VAT on tickets is charged at 19% if the venue is considered a general entertainment space — nightclubs, fairs, brothels — and at 7% if it’s recognised as a cultural institution, the same rate paid by museums, theatres and classical music concert halls. The Finanzamt argued that Berghain was, quite simply, a place where people went to get drunk, socialise and look for sex, with the music reduced to mere background noise.

Teufele and Thormann, for whom that 19% meant a multi-million financial hit, took the case to the Berlin-Brandenburg Fiscal Court with an argument as bold as it was, in hindsight, fairly logical: Berghain is, to all effects, a venue for contemporary music. Their lawyers built the defence on three pillars. First, the total absence of commercial-nightclub trappings: no VIP areas, no reserved tables, no expensive bottles to show off; the design of the space forces the crowd to focus on the music and the dancing. Second, the artistic curation: people don’t go "out partying" without more thought, they go to hear specific artists, with programming as carefully put together as a theatre’s or an opera house’s. And third, the DJ’s role as creator: they don’t just string records together, they use mixers, drum machines and synthesizers to build a new, continuous piece of music, live.

In September 2016, the court ruled in Berghain’s favour. The judges acknowledged that, even though the crowd dances, drinks or socialises, the "main focus" of those attending the club is the music created by the artists — the same standard applied to a chamber concert. The ruling had two important consequences. On one hand, an enormous tax saving that allowed Teufele and Thormann to consolidate their financial independence and sustain their own record label for years without depending on any outside label. On the other, it set a precedent that, in 2021, led the German parliament to officially reclassify all of Berlin’s techno clubs as cultural institutions, protecting them against neighbour complaints and property-development pressure.

The sound that came out of the concrete

If the building gave Berghain its body, its residents gave it its soul. In 2005, Ostgut Ton was born, the club’s label, which until it closed in 2022 exported to the world what came to be known as "the Berghain sound": the rough, industrial techno of Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock. Around them grew names like Len Faki, Norman Nodge, and Panorama Bar residents like Steffi, nd_baumecker and Ryan Elliott, who cemented the club’s global reputation through the 2010s. More recently, a new generation — Paramida, Sedef Adasi, Fadi Mohem, JakoJako — has been folding faster rhythms and echoes of 90s trance into the club’s long-standing sound.

The myths that silence grew

Berghain’s secrecy — no mirrors, no visible clocks, no cameras or phones — is fertile ground for urban legend. For two decades, what happens inside has only spread by word of mouth, and that has bred myths mixing reality, exaggeration and fiction. It’s said there’s a secret formula for getting through the door — dress in black, don’t laugh in the queue, speak German — to the point that AI-powered simulators have appeared online that analyse your face over webcam to predict whether you’d get in. The reality, according to the doormen themselves, is far less systematic: they turn away large groups, tourists who just want to "look", and anyone who seems to be there to judge everyone else, but black guarantees nothing, and sometimes someone dressed as a banana gets in while ten people in outrageously expensive designer techno-wear get turned away.

There’s also a legend that secret labyrinths and underground swimming pools lie beneath the building. It’s half myth, half true: there’s no functioning pool, but the building is so vast that it does hide areas that almost never open to the public, like the Halle am Berghain. And then there’s the myth that turns out to be completely true: that the club’s real essence isn’t lived on Saturday night, but on Sunday morning, in what regulars call the "Sunday church". Longtime Berliners don’t even try on Saturday; they set their alarm for eight on Sunday morning, have breakfast, and arrive at the club for the day session, when the Panorama Bar’s mechanical shutters open for a moment to let the sunlight in over a dust-covered dancefloor.

Two books for those who want to dig deeper

If this account has left you wanting more, there are two books worth keeping on your radar, representing two sides of the same coin: the view from inside and the view from outside.

The first is Die Nacht ist Leben ("The Night Is Life"), the autobiography Sven Marquardt published in 2014 together with journalist Judka Strittmatter. It isn’t really a book about Berghain: it’s a book about how you become the person who decides who gets into Berghain. Marquardt looks back on his childhood in communist East Berlin, his punk adolescence under Stasi surveillance, his first life as a photographer, and his almost accidental move into nightlife after the Wall fell. It is, above all, the portrait of someone who hates impositions — the GDR’s, fame’s, even the label of "the world’s toughest doorman" — and who has built his identity by refusing to fit the mould others wanted to give him.

The second is Berghain Nights, published in 2025 by Irish writer Liam Cagney with Reaktion Books. Unlike Marquardt’s book, this isn’t a testimony from inside the organisation, but the personal chronicle of a writer who finds on Berlin’s dancefloors meaning, exile, and a kind of joy he wasn’t expecting. Cagney uses Berghain as a gateway into a broader reflection on the Berlin techno scene and what it means to search for something like transcendence in an electronic music club.

Read together, the two books offer something no single article ever fully can: the voice of the person who built the myth from the door, and the voice of the person who lived it from the floor.

A temple that still needs no advertising

More than thirty years after those first parties in a bunker on Friedrichstraße, Teufele and Thormann’s original vision remains practically intact. Berghain has never needed a marketing campaign or a social media strategy: its secrecy, far from being an obstacle, has become its greatest asset. It’s probably the only nightlife business in the world to have turned "no" into its most desired product.

For HOFT, which grows precisely out of techno’s underground and queer scene, the story of Snax and Berghain isn’t just a curiosity. It’s proof that radical consistency, sustained for decades without giving in to easy commercialisation, can end up being recognised — even by a tax court — for exactly what it is: culture.