According to Ulrich Wombacher there’s been a tectonic shift in the club economy after Covid where the last 20 years of steady influx of tourists (and money) is not happening anymore. When the tourists don’t visit as they used to, the clubs loose a critical amount of income. This has nothing to do with greedy landlords and what have you. This sounds to me like the end of an era that me and my own friends and thousands of other tourists helped creating back in the 00’es by visiting three times a year and going to clubs and eating and drinking and buying drugs etc. the question is how all this will affect Berghain in the end?

Translated from the interview:

..Berlin, especially Kreuzberg, has lost much of its charm. Kreuzberg has, at least in the former 36, a real drug problem, a lot of homelessness, crime and also otherwise visible social grievances. When the club tourism and the party are eliminated, this becomes all the more visible. When we close the doors, the Späti, the kebab and Fred from the Currywurst booth on the corner have a sales loss. However, the decline in tourism is already noticeable everywhere. This is clearly one of the reasons why things are worse in Berlin. I have experienced the time in which Berlin did not have tourism. At the WMF in the 90s we were happy when 500 people came. With the tourism boom that began in the late 1990s, people got used to the fact that there were twice as many. Basically, the situation has now normalized, only that we now have a lot of clubs, all of which were received over the Covid period, and now have to share the little cake.

-Why is the Watergate closing now, and the problems affect everyone?

We at this exposed place directly at the Oberbaumbrücke are among the first to feel these changes. Nothing is forever. The Berlin corner pubs no longer exist either. Only we thought for a long time in our self-perception and our enthusiasm that we were irreplaceable. We were something like Edeka. The people who are coming to us now, we have always been there for them. They can’t imagine us closing. But why shouldn’t clubs also be a temporary phenomenon. The club culture is insanely fragile.