HUSH Captures Berlin’s Empty Clubs During the Lockdown

Pictures: Marie Staggat.

It wasn’t until a few months after moving to the city that I couldn’t wait to experience Berlin’s infamous clubs as a new Berliner. I was neither a techno listener nor a raver at the time, but I heard a lot of folk tales about Berlin clubs that excited me from the start. It had only been a few months and somehow I managed to get into Berghain. I was delighted as an amateur. Not knowing what would happen to me, I felt confused but eager to participate at the same time. I had no idea that in the following months, Berlin nightclubs would become an inseparable part of my life. Between dancing, sweating, intimacy and surrender at the moment, they became my mecca for a sex-positive environment where I didn’t have to pretend other than my very weird self.

However, last year, at the height of the pandemic in our city, silence hit the walls of our clubs and they were left in absolute solitude. Photographer Marie Staggat and journalist Timo Stein capture these unrecognizable club spaces and tumultuous silence in their new photo book HUSH: Club Culture In Times Of Silence. From April 2020 to December 2020, they collected their impressions of abandoned clubs in 360 pages of interviews, observations and photos, and they reflect the inevitable desperation highlighted by strong optimism.

Staggat and Stein say, “At first glance HUSH is a book about clubs during the coronavirus crisis, at second glance it’s also a book about what the house can be like.” They have visited more than 40 Berlin clubs where they have interviewed and photographed DJs, bartenders, janitors, operators, talent recruiters, bouncers and caretakers, who fear losing the spaces where they not only make a living. , but also a place they call home. They provide insight into their histories and spaces during the most difficult time of Berlin club culture. We learn about the life of the protagonists of Berlin nightclubs who crawled around the corners of old breweries, power stations, S-Bahn arches, roofs of parking lots, single-family houses, signage boxes, backyards , vaulted cellars, boats and roadhouses. HUSH takes us on a unique experience of the Berlin subculture with uninterrupted creativity and a freedom doomed to abandonment and alienation. It leaves us wondering what remains of our nighttime culture after the Corona crisis.

HUSH was released on March 1, 2021 by Parthas Verlag and can be ordered here. Proceeds from sales will be used to support the clubs that participated in the book.