Too cool for their own good? Union Berlin’s fight to retain their identity

It takes about half an hour on the train to get from the centre of Berlin to Köpenick, and the journey is a game of two halves. The second half is a gentle rumble through the industrial, residential and woodland heartlands of Bundesliga club Union Berlin. The first half is a sight-seeing tour of Berlin’s world-famous nightlife.

After Alexanderplatz, the train pulls into Jannowitzbrücke, where a huge power station towers over the bank of the river. Behind it lie Tresor, an elder statesman of the city’s techno scene, and the KitKatClub, famed for its fetish parties and strictly kinky dress code. As the train approaches Warschauer Strasse station, the tracks and river part ways and an imposing grey building looms in the open sky over a low-build retail park. This is Berghain, the most famous of all Berlin clubs and a byword the world over for the city’s taboo-free, 24-hour party culture. Its notoriously scrupulous door policy is an attraction in itself.

All these venues are close to where the Wall once stood and all of them were founded in the decade or so after reunification. They are places which grew out of that unique period in Berlin’s history, when historical trauma and a sluggish economy meant the city was still full of unfilled spaces.

Nowadays, the spaces are disappearing and the clubs are surrounded by building sites, shiny new office blocks and shopping malls. Berlin has changed radically in the last 30 years, but few areas have been transformed quite as much as the central districts of the former East. More than any other, they have been subject to that familiar cycle of gentrification: a depressed area becomes a cultural hotspot, the culture brings cash and development, and slowly but surely people begin to be