Inside Berlin Diary: Nightlife, Heartbreak and the City’s Unapologetic Truth

Come As You Are

He sits down across the kitchen dining table. He has just moved the dining plates from his kids—some broccoli still on the plates—into the dishwasher. Tobi draws closer a curious pile of woven plastic pearls held together by a nest of fishing thread.

“You’re making this?” I ask.

He miraculously pulls at it and puts it over his head—as if by magic. “It’s a mask I made to wear at a party last Saturday.” He fishes out his phone and shows me a picture of himself with the mask on. It looks like a freeze frame from a music video.

We are discussing heartbreak. It was not easy, he said; she walked out of the relationship to find herself. “She is in India now. Why do people think they will find themselves by going to India?” he asks.

We move on. He talks about an upcoming concert at the Chandelier House. The mention whiplashes me back in time and here again. In the summer, Tobi had hosted his birthday party here. He had told me, “Come as you are, I am putting you on the guest list.” Shortly after, I received an email from the venue about, amongst other things, a kinky dress code.

That night I saw people so communal in their collective embracing of hedonism, I felt compelled to stand in the shadows—watching, processing, stumped.

Marco has just joined the table, and now we are discussing sustainable architecture, solar panels, immigration, about participating and escaping politics, about corruption. About common friends, you know, life.

We catch up on who we’ve become after a decade apart. I find their city seems to have allowed them authenticity, without the vulnerability. They’ve become more themselves; they shine brighter. This isn’t success; it is far more honest.

Tobi and Marco are Berliners. This is Berlin—gritty, rough on the edges, beautiful in its honesty.

I’ve struggled to articulate Berlin. The drone of sirens, the homeless people, the drug peddlers at shady corners—none of it bothers me yet. Every time I step out onto the street, I find that I smile. Perhaps because the city doesn’t try to please.

This may be a contemporary German quality. Trevor Noah once noted that no other people have made such retributions for their mistakes. I feel it here; the “never again” is etched into the city’s DNA.

Peter, who carries this weight in his nearly seven-foot frame, tells me: “We may be the last generation to carry this feeling. Our children won’t need to overcome the awareness of history.” They are instead inheriting a sincere honesty that is, to me, priceless.

Once while we were on a video call, his son Kobi, 8, interrupted to discuss something urgent. He wanted two euros to buy sweets because when his friends were fighting outside, he had convinced them to stop by promising them a treat. Peter gave him the money without question and then, after narrating what had happened, said, “His mother will have to talk with him about how peace must not be bought with bribes; then it is not peace.”

Honesty and Hedonism

A night club at 3 am: there is darkness, heat, smoke, pulsating bodies, hundreds of them, the sound of people moving together, sweat, techno, cigarette butts on the floor, spilt beer and red shafts of moving light piercing through people as the beams glide across the volume of the dance floor. The DJ jumps up the beat faster and the speakers start to boom with a deep voice: “Sex sex sex…” in a sultry intonation for several minutes, offering a trance that Berlin thrives on. Hedonism. We step out into the outdoor lounge for fresh air. Even here, the grit doesn’t wash off the social conscience. Between drags of cigarettes, people discuss foundations and global causes with the same intensity they gave the dance floor. It’s a city where fundraising and strobe lights coexist without irony.

This honesty and hedonism are inseparable because both require the same precondition—permission. Permission to be exactly what you are, without performance or apology. When a society stops performing, what remains is both more honest and more free. Is hedonism the point, or simply what happens when shame leaves the room?

Whatever this is, I cannot yet put a name to it. So let’s just call it Berlin.

I am captivated, a romance still young.

Berliners have assured me: heartbreak will follow. Honestly.

Jiten Suchede is a creative entrepreneur. He is most inspired in transit, and is often found between places and states of mind