Nightclubbing: Berlin’s Metropol

Berlin has long been a nightlife playground, even before the Wall came down in 1989 and techno spread across the city. Indeed, the seeds of that revolution were already being sown in the West for many years. Metropol was one of the first clubs in this lineage, a decadent space opened in 1978 that was reportedly modeled after Studio 54. In this oral history, Der Klang Der Familie author Sven von Thülen quizzes some of the club’s denizens to tell its story.

Henry De Winter

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Metropol was the theatre at Nollendorfplatz. The original theatre hall was destroyed in World War II. What later became the Metropol was actually just a little adjacent hall of the theatre, which was so big that it extended across two stories. With a ceiling that seemed like it was 20 metres high.

Der Würfler

In the 1950s they performed Brecht’s Threepenny Opera there. It then closed down for a while, until it was converted into a porn cinema.

Boris

When you drove past Nollendorfplatz in the ’70s, you could see the enormous posters. All porn films.

Henry De Winter

Paul Grasse, one of the people who ran the place, looked just like Hitchcock. Honestly. His physiognomy, everything. He was one of the post-war cinema kings in Berlin, and he was the leaseholder of the whole thing.

Mike Klosa

I was a real discotheque fanatic back then. I went to The Saint, Paradise Garage, Palladium and Studio 54. I had a look at all of them. When word got around about the Metropol, they said the architects had got tips from the people of Studio 54 and that now a similar plush nightclub was going to open in Berlin. Of course I was all ears. In March 1978 the press started writing about it. Initially they said the opening was meant to be in September. But it only opened at the end of October – with private parties.

Henry De Winter

The porn cinema wasn’t doing that well anymore. The idea of turning it into a discotheque was absolutely brilliant. There was a gallery, various bars on different levels, a wonderful wooden dance floor.

Mike Klosa

The music in Berlin’s discotheques was usually pretty commercial up until then. In the run-up to the Metropol opening, they said the music they would play was going to be different, namely disco, space rock and a bit of reggae, all imported from New York. Of course I could hardly wait.

Der Würfler

Through disco, gay nightlife finally shifted into the mainstream focus a bit. It was totally unusual for homos and heteros to party together up until then. I was a dancer in the late ‘70s, the heyday of disco. I even performed with Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor at Studio 54. It was around that time I started DJing at clubs like Dschungel, Metropol and Cha Cha. Metropol was supposed to be Berlin’s answer to Studio 54.

Boris

That part of Schöneberg where the Metropol was located was traditionally a gay area, with lots of bars, speakeasies and nightclubs. Even in the 1920s. So in that respect it fitted in really well.

Mark Reeder

It was Esther Friedmann, Iggy Pop’s girlfriend back then, who told me about the club. She worked there and told me to drop round some time. The first time I went there, I arrived rather late and there wasn’t that much going on anymore. But the sound and the location left a lasting impression on me. From then on I ended up at Metropol almost every weekend.

Douglas Simpson

I was with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Army back then, living in Charlottenburg, sharing a flat with Boris. For some reason I was allowed to live off of camp. One day Boris said to me, “Come on, I will show you this place I like to go to.”

Der Würfler

At first everyone was really sceptical. It made no sense to open such a big club there. It won’t work. Three months later, all the other bars and discotheques in the area were empty. Soon the cosy gay bars where you could sip your liqueur by candlelight were gone, and the transvestite bars also emptied out. One by one, they all moved elsewhere.

Douglas Simpson

Being in the military back then, I hadn’t come across many gay people before. Boris was probably the first gay person I’d actually gotten to know well. So being at Metropol was quite the experience. It was before AIDS, too, so you had a lot of heavy-duty stuff going on in the corners.

Henry De Winter

The place took off from day one. Size-wise, there’d not been anything like it in Berlin till then.

Der Würfler

I visited the Metropol for the first time thanks to an invitation. They had a red carpet outside and there was a true frenzy of flashing cameras everywhere. I was pretty impressed.

Mike Klosa

Initially it all revolved around glamour. The clientele differed greatly to that of other places, for example to that of Dschungel.

Boris

Dschungel was where the arty and bohemian crowd went. Although Berlin was already a 24/7 city in those days, the proprietor insisted on closing at 4 AM. I think he always saw it more as a modern cocktail bar rather than a nightclub. The dancefloor was tiny and when the club was full, there were about 200 people there — which was quite a lot by West Berlin standards.

Mark Reeder

If you didn’t get into the whole avant-garde and punk thing, but didn’t like pop either, you were kinda lost. Metropol offered a platform for people who wanted to dance. The sound system was amazing.

Der Würfler

The first time I walked into the main hall, I was awestruck. It totally blew my mind: laser beams flashing everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it. They came straight at me, as big as fluorescent tubes. And enormous mirrored disco balls everywhere, I think 16 in total, each multiplying the laser beam effects. At the end of the hall, there was a stage that looked like a runway into the sky. They’d suspended a UFO-like construction from the ceiling in front of the stage, which had even more bits and bobs and light show paraphernalia hanging from it, and they could move the whole thing up and down.

Douglas Simpson

I remember one night they drove it down so low that one guy jumped up and held onto it. And then they went up and down with him hanging on it. Eventually he smashed a few of the lights.

Mark Reeder

The laser show was quite impressive. But I didn’t really care, to be honest. We were there for the music. It was like disco television. When you’re off your head, it was very entertaining though.

Boris

They really put a lot of effort into the decor. And the sound was great. The dance floor was made of very heavy wooden floorboards and they’d built various wooden fixtures and platforms on which you could sit. These sort of enclosed the dance floor a bit. At the top there was a gallery, where all they had done was take the seats out. You could lie on the floor there and basically do whatever tickled your fancy. Since it was always particularly dark up there, of course there was always a lot going on.

Henry De Winter

I’d only gone there as a guest for about a year when I became the bouncer. They probably asked me because of the way I looked.

Boris

Henry saw himself as an English gentleman. He always stood by the stairs that took you up to the club, and next to him the cash desk. And he filtered out who was allowed in and who was not. Even back then.

Douglas Simpson

He was a show in itself, with his bowler hats and his monocle.

Mark Reeder

If I wasn’t wearing an old uniform, I dressed like Henry. He was fascinated with Britain and the ‘20s and ‘30s. He liked this whole 1930s stiff upper lip thing of the British establishment. He always wore tailor-made suits and he was really funny, unique and well respected.

Boris

Of course, we from Berlin never had any money. All of us were unemployed or students. But he’d let some of us in for free now and again. We were all very nice to him.

Henry De Winter

I was spellbound, as I always say, in other words: gay. And everyone always knew that. And so all sorts of boys would come up and try to make eyes at me to get in for free. They knew I was into sporty guys and champagne, and so they invited me. Of course, I let them in then. But, let’s face it, that bottle of sparkling wine or champagne was always more expensive than if they’d paid to get in.

Boris

He and his style also fitted to the building somehow. And you could see that he enjoyed his job.

Mike Klosa

At some point he started singing arias in the foyer when the first rush was over.

Henry De Winter

I’ve been singing all my life. That big staircase with its gigantic marble steps meant that the acoustics were fantastic. So I’d sing arias there, but also German classics such as Richard Tauber’s “Ich küsse Ihre Hand Madame” or “Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein.” However, I didn’t have any proper training back then and was totally out of breath after one-and-a-half songs.

Mark Reeder

What Max Raabe later did and got famous with in Germany, Henry had done that a very long time before him. The only problem was that he didn’t have a proper band behind him. He wasn’t too ambitious to get a career going.

Henry De Winter

Back then it was more of a hobby. And it was a nice contrast to the music that was playing upstairs on the dance floor which, to tell you the truth, never really interested me much.

Mike Klosa

Chris, the resident DJ, knew how to get the crowd totally ecstatic. He came from West Germany. In my opinion, at that time there wasn’t a single DJ in all of Berlin who could’ve done the job he did.

Mark Reeder

Technically, Chris was really good.

Boris

The DJ equipment was up on the gallery opposite the stage. It was inside a very spacious booth with glass walls so he had his own sound. The whole thing looked very much like a spaceship.

Mike Klosa

The crowd would watch Chris with awe as he DJed. He often had two copies of the same record spinning on the decks at the same time to create a kind of flange effect. He called it “space effect.” No other DJ in Berlin did that back then. At least I never saw it anywhere else.

Henry De Winter

Chris always wore his hair backcombed. His girlfriend, who worked downstairs at the bar, did too. They must’ve had the same hairdresser.

Der Würfler

Chris was my favourite DJ. I always wished my DJ skills could be as good as his. But in the places where I DJed, you weren’t allowed to do any mixing back then. And often it was technically not possible with the equipment at hand.

Mark Reeder

Around 1980 the crowd became more gay at Metropol.

Mike Klosa

In the beginning it was more posh and elegant. You know, the champagne-drinking society.

Douglas Simpson

You kinda had the feeling that Metropol was a membership club. Even though it was open to the public. You would know most of the guests every week. Maybe not by name, but you’d recognize their faces.

Der Würfler

The longer the night went on, the gayer the crowd became. And they’d even kiss. That impressed me. It was like in New York and San Fransisco. Some were lying around on the cushions in the next room, necking – in public. Scenes like that were unheard of in Berlin before. For me, as a young gay man, it was a really eye-opening experience.

Douglas Simpson

Berlin was quite mixed, which I liked, and nobody cared what anybody else did. You were left alone to do your own thing. The same goes for Metropol. Nobody cared what your sexual orientation was or how you danced. I was always impressed by that.

Mark Reeder

François Kevorkian is one of my all-time heroes, and Chris used to play everything he could get his hands on from him. All his remixes and all the Prelude stuff and a lot of Ramshorn Records. Chris also played a lot of West End and Larry Levan productions, which was pretty hard to get in Berlin back then. Even “Let No Man Put Asunder” by First Choice was obscure. Or The Strikers. You could only buy them at Chris’s record shop.

Mike Klosa

Chris was a quick thinker and spoke to the owners of the record shop City Music Bar in Lietzenburger Straße, who were often at Metropol as guests. He managed to convince them to import the records he played. He was sure that all the regulars would dash out on Monday morning to buy the latest records. He was right. Chris then started working there and turned the shop into a really big place.

Boris

I started buying records in 1980. When I started to frequent Metropol, I bought almost everything Chris played.

Mark Reeder

I would constantly run up to Chris to ask him what the record was he was just playing. On Monday mornings I would go to his shop and try to buy the newest stuff he had played the weekend before. Very often I couldn’t because he had only gotten two copies and kept them for himself.

Mike Klosa

He preferred a harder disco sound, which he called “heavy disco.” For him it was more about action than violin anthems. He played those, too, but he wanted his sets to ooze with emotion and at the same time to be really explosive.

Mark Reeder

Chris would usually play the instrumentals and the dubs. It was very trippy. That’s what we were into. Me and Alistair, my partner in Die Unbekannten, my band back then, would be there tripping on LSD while Chris played the perfect music for that state of mind.

Mike Klosa

The most-played record was “The Break” by Kat Mandu. Then “Dance Disco Heat” by Sylvester. And “Hot Shot” by Karen Young.

Boris

Funnily enough, at Metropol the allocation of the people was exactly the same as at Berghain today. In the front left corner all the gays and leather guys, in the front right corner all the cool heteros, in the back left corner all the transvestites and in the back right corner all the tourists.

Mark Reeder

The place had all kinds of dark-roomy kinda areas — the blue room on the balcony for instance — that had no lights. There were big curtains you could hide behind. There were all these facilities catering to debauchery.

Westbam

Metropol was known as a gay spot, but there weren’t only gays there. You can compare it to Early Christianity. There was the Jewish temple in the centre, and the Greeks who wanted to be part of it were allowed to walk around outside. At Metropol, the gays were in the corners – really hardcore with leather and chains. The trippy kids from the Berlin suburbs were at the front. Maybe they weren’t sure yet if they were gay. Or maybe they just thought it was all wonderful, like I did the first time I got in aged 17, standing there in a Hawaiian shirt among all these men in their chains. It smelled of poppers. The energy, the subculture, the hardcore thing, the menace – it was wicked.

Der Würfler

At some point I danced in the front left corner for a change and suddenly I was standing in pretty intensive smelling cloud of something or other. I had no idea what it was, but found it quite unpleasant. So I went over to the bar and asked totally naively whether someone had thrown a stink bomb in front of the stage. And the reply was: “No, it’s poppers!”

Mark Reeder

The smell of Metropol was the smell of amyl nitrite. You walked in there and you knew what was about to happen.

Mike Klosa

Poppers was a really big thing. And fans.

Disko

Metropol was famous for its fan fags. They danced swan-like choreographies with day-glo fans and were armed to the eyebrows with poppers. It had a little something of vogueing and rave about it.

Stefan Schwanke

They wore light-blue jeans, tight cut-off tops with their navels sometimes exposed and short hairstyles – these gelled-forward fag horns. They stood in rows of four. The leather men were in the corner, and on the other side of the dance floor, the New Wave kids. That’s where I was standing.

Der Würfler

Later, in the acid house and early techno scene, glow sticks were all the rage; in the Hi-NRG scene it was fans. When you were dancing, you always had to watch out that you didn’t get a fan in your eye, because people were waving them around all over the place.

Mark Reeder

I took Bernard Sumner from New Order with me to Metropol. It must have been 1980. He visited from Manchester and I promised him that he hadn’t seen anything like it. And I was right. He was blown away. After Bernard was in Berlin he went to New York and got introduced to the amazing club scene there, too. I knew that he liked electronic music and that he was into Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk. Actually, I bought him copies of E=MC² and Computerwelt the day they came out.

Boris

The place soon became a magnet for all sorts of musicians and stars. For example, you’d always see Fassbinder walking around wearing his black leather waistcoat. Of course he stuck out because visually he was the most unpleasant guy to look at that you could possibly imagine.

Douglas Simpson

Nobody ever reacted, no matter how strange or unusual you behaved or looked like. For me, that was pretty special. And that was also one of the reasons why quite a few celebrities came to Metropol frequently. Nobody cared about them. You could be anything you wanted.

Mike Klosa

The Pet Shop Boys were also regular guests. Back then, no one had heard of them yet.

Boris

And then there were the groundbreaking concerts. Grace Jones, for example. That was in 1981. Grace Jones was a sensation in those days. With “Nightclubbing” she became an absolute icon. The whole thing was billed as “One Man Show.” They set up a long catwalk in the middle of the dance floor. Of course, she kept us waiting for over an hour until she finally came out on stage – in a gorilla outfit. The audience went berserk. Such a concert could only have taken place at Metropol, it was the ideal setting. A few years later, Divine performed there, too. Unfortunately I wasn’t there that night.

Mark Reeder

Kraftwerk played there and it was brilliant. I stood close to the stage and if I looked around I could see this sea of people. People literally hanging on top of each other. It was crammed. It was the tour for Computerwelt. It was fantastic. With the dummies and everything. Another personal highlight was a show by The Residents.

Mike Klosa

In 1981 Metropol started playing Hi-NRG. The place was really on fire by then.

Boris

Back then, there were also a lot of heteros who were really hooked on Hi-NRG. Simply because it exuded so much energy. Fast dance music. In parts a bit kitschy, sure, but Chris always broke it up with things like Man Parrish or Kraftwerk. He played less black disco stuff from then on.

Mark Reeder

Being a freak for all that electronic stuff, this musical shift intrigued me very much. The available technology drove the music in a more mechanical direction.

Mike Klosa

They played at least ten tracks by Lime each night. Other big favourites then were Divine, Bobby O and Patrick Cowley.

Der Würfler

The disco era was basically over. Instead, there was Hi-NRG. It was also the time of New Wave and New Romantic.

Stefan Schwanke

I started going to Metropol aged 14, 15 – it was my surrogate family. At home, there was a lot of fighting; I lived in a youth institution for a bit. Early on, I took care to spend as little time at home as possible. By day, I sat around the Gedächtniskirche. There were always young punks and New Wavers hanging around. At night, I snuck out the window. In West Berlin, nobody ever asked how old I was. At the underground spots, nobody cared.

Mark Reeder

Chris threw the towel in at some point because he had constant fights with the new owner. He left some of his records there. But Martin, who had to take over, didn’t have any records, so it became a bit samey very fast. We needed another DJ. Jacques Ihle, the new owner, was completely frustrated. He asked me if I knew someone who could do the job. So I told him about Maximilian Lenz, AKA WestBam.

Ihle was like, “No way, he’s 16 or something. I need an established DJ.” I insisted that Max was good. I sat down with Ihle at the bar drinking Whodinis, because I knew that he liked Whodinis. So basically I got him completely pissed and convinced him to give Max a chance. Max was shitting his pants, he was only 19, I think, but he knew his music and he was technically skilled, so he killed it and as a result became the new resident at Metropol.

Douglas Simpson

Westbam was more hardcore when it came to mixing. He was quite fast, cutting a lot, sometimes he would scratch too, and his sets would generally be very upbeat.

Westbam

It was already totally clear to me back then where it was all heading, musically speaking. I wrote it down in Der Neger, an avant-garde journal based in Frankfurt. The text was called “What is Record Art?” and it was intended as a manifesto. I wrote that the new electronic music would be created by the DJs. Back then, there weren’t any records with one perpetual beat, so you took the same record twice and extended the short part with the beat by cutting the spot back and forth. In hip hop, they did it so they could rap over it. But I did it to create a new minimalist dance style. It was the thing back then that came closest to the later techno culture. An endless repetition of a specific line with an up-tempo beat. Of course, it didn’t run the whole night. These were facets. “I Feel Love” would play, and then there’d be another one of these mix numbers with the same record twice. It wasn’t techno yet, of course, but the rudiments were there. There were moments where you could already hear this idea – all I really need is a beat, a strobe and screaming people.

Stefan Schwanke

After the Hi-NRG era, I liked EBM musically, but it was more like concert music. People just did this three-steps-to-the-front, three-steps-to-the-back dance. In the dance context, EBM was totally occupied by this scene. Unlike in Hi-NRG, there was no freaking out on the dance floor, no excess.

Mark Reeder

Unfortunately Jacques Ihle tended to annoy his DJs, requesting more pop records to be played. That was the main reason Chris quit. He didn’t understand his crowd at all. His idea was to have people sit upstairs on the balcony drinking bottles of champagne at 100 marks a bottle, while listening to cheesy chart music. He wanted to get rid of the gay crowd. They were all drug takers for him.

Henry De Winter

After he’d driven out the gay crowd, at some point the tourists stopped coming, too.

Mark Reeder

Jacques Ihle was kinda taking away their home. Around 1986 it lost its allure. Parallel to the post-punk and avant-garde music scene, too.

Mike Klosa

There were four phases in the Metropol: the very short posh days in the beginning with all the string disco stuff, then the early ’80s where they played a lot of New York disco and Hi-NRG, and then as of the mid-/late ’80s: house.

Der Würfler

Then WestBam started playing more electro and early house. And quite a lot of pop music. Chart hits. Even back then I never really warmed to him. It was all too shallow and too commercial for me. At some point he released his first 12-inch, “Disco Deutschland.”

Mike Klosa

When techno came, that was truly the end of the Metropol. Disco was the past and everyone was interested in the future.

Henry De Winter

Later, I sometimes went to Tresor and E-Werk in my tuxedo, too. I found that equally enjoyable in a way. All the techno kids and their beautiful bodies.

Mark Reeder

Acid house and then techno rescued all of us. It drove us literally underground to the first UFO club in the basement at Köpenickerstraße and saved our dancing evenings. A lot of the people who had been at Metropol were the core of the early house and techno scene.