The Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989. For techno, the consequence was material rather than symbolic. The eastern half of a major European city suddenly contained a large quantity of buildings whose ownership was unclear, whose electricity still worked, and which nobody was in a position to police.
Before the Wall
Berlin had a small acid house scene before reunification. UFO, opened in 1988 in a West Berlin basement, was its centre, run by Dimitri Hegemann among others, and closer to a squat than a club. The Love Parade began in July 1989, four months before the Wall opened: Dr. Motte registered it as a political demonstration, which under German law entitled it to street closure and municipal cleaning. Around 150 people attended the first one. By the mid-1990s it drew over a million, and it never stopped being, legally speaking, a protest march.
Tresor
In March 1991 Hegemann opened Tresor in the vault of the bombed-out Wertheim department store on Leipziger Straße, immediately south of Potsdamer Platz, which at that point was a field. The club occupied the strongroom. Bare concrete, steel deposit boxes still in the walls, no ventilation to speak of.
Tresor's founding decision was to look west across the Atlantic rather than east. The associated label released Detroit producers in Europe from the start: Jeff Mills, Blake Baxter, Eddie Fowlkes, Underground Resistance. The 1993 compilation Tresor II was subtitled Berlin & Detroit — A Techno Alliance, which was an accurate description of the business arrangement as well as the music.
This alliance is the single most important fact about Berlin techno, and it is frequently lost. The Berlin sound did not displace Detroit. It was built in explicit partnership with Detroit producers, several of whom relocated, and it sent money back.
Basic Channel
The other decisive Berlin project was quieter and much stranger. Basic Channel, formed in 1993 by Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, produced a small number of releases that took techno's repetition and submerged it in dub processing. Heavily filtered chords, long delay tails, deliberate surface noise, tracks that changed almost imperceptibly across ten minutes.
Ernestus ran Hard Wax, the Kreuzberg record shop that had opened in 1989 and functioned as the scene's distribution hub and gatekeeper. The pair's subsequent projects (Chain Reaction, Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound) extended the approach. What they invented, usually called dub techno, remains one of the few genuinely new things done to the form since 1988.
The city as instrument
Through the mid-1990s Berlin accumulated venues in spaces that existed only because of the peculiar conditions of reunification: E-Werk in a decommissioned power substation, the Bunker in a wartime air-raid shelter, Planet, and a rotating cast of temporary clubs occupying buildings whose legal status was being contested in courts that moved slowly.
Cheap rent is the underrated engine of all of this. Berlin's property market did not normalise until well into the 2000s, which gave the scene something no other European capital could offer. A decade in which failure was survivable and experiments did not need to pay rent immediately.
By the late 1990s the Love Parade had grown into a corporate-sponsored event that much of the underground actively disliked, Tresor was an institution, and the practical question had shifted from where to hold a party to what, at this point, the music was actually for.