It isn’t even snorting Ecstasy at some techno club or drunkenly pissing on the Berlin Wall.
Meaning, the most “Berlin” experience you can have isn’t checking out Brandenburg Gate or Checkpoint Charlie. He begrudgingly let me enter the House of the Red Doors, a “sex/artistic/immersive theater/mayhem” event ($15 entrance fee) held every other month in a shabby apartment complex, “Salon zur wilden Renate”-just steps from the Spree in Berlin’s Friedrichshain.įrom the homosexual emancipation in the Weimar Republic to 1970s West Berlin hedonism, scatological pornography, and the fetish-charged, Molly-warped parties at Berghain, Berlin has a reputation steeped in the weird, the transgressive, the bizarre, the anti-authoritarian perversions and freak shows-just Google “German Porn” or reminisce that scene from Super Troopers.
Clearly, “flannel shirt” and “Michael Cera demeanor” didn’t meet the party’s dress code. “You know what’s going on here?” the bouncer asked as he looked me up and down.
