-
10 spots in Berlin that every music lover should visit
Despite its turmoils and seismic history, Berlin has always been a musical city that knows how to innovate and have a seriously good time.
Even a century ago, the old Prussian capital was the trailblazing zenith of interwar Europe. A hotbed of the avant-garde, cabaret, and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s socialist librettos, such subversion on the street was countered by the academic innovations in modern classical music, with Arnold Schoenberg rejecting centuries of Western compositional convention with his atonal and 12-tone row pieces. It was an exciting time for any artist and bohemian, before a seething conservative movement growing in Munich set such ‘degenerate music’ in its fascist sights.
The Third Reich could never kill Berlin’s creative spirit. In the ensuing decades, a reputation for fierce experimentalism would score the Western half of the city during its Cold War era. The heady explorations of Krautrock while the old FRG was swept by political protest, David Bowie’s famed Berlin Trilogy pulling international attention to the speck of capitalism deep in the Eastern Bloc, and the explosive Neue Deutsche Welle spinning their own wry and Teutonic take on the new wave at the 1970s’ end.
Such belligerent radicalism marries with the old Weimar Berlin’s sense of fun, too. Berlin to this day is a fervently party city, standing as a Mecca of the techno nightlife and the absolute authority on the world’s rave community. There’s a little golden age cabaret in the mammoth dance clubs, the echoes of Berlin’s unabashed dive into hedonism and Dionysian abandon of the 1920s fuelling all the megaclubs and 24-hour parties from the same gloriously libertine spirit that’s been floating in the centuries-old River Spree.
It’s still a city that commands countercultural attention. From punk underground to dance pilgrimage, we take a stroll through Berlin’s storied city and select the spots that tell an essential slice of the German capital’s music lore.
