No One Knows What’s Going on in Berlin

★ The Prelude

Did you know that you can get yourself an office right inside the Berliner Dom? Not nearby. Inside-inside. As in, past the pews, behind the organ. With a tiny balcony staring directly onto the cathedral’s altar. Available for commercial use, no Protestant affiliation required (though if your startup fails here, I’d consider this divine intervention).

Ever been to the secret room at Kater Blau? Down the mirror corridor, behind a discreet door. I swear I stumbled in once, by accident. Could’ve been a K-hole mirage. It’s entirely possible I just sat in a janitor’s closet and hallucinated all the wrinkly leather sofas. Hard to say.

Maybe you’ve heard about the new rooftop wellness club opening near Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz? A terrace so perfect it shouldn’t exist. The kind of view you only get if you marry into one of those Linienstraße new-builds with a shared pool. That space, I can attest to. It’s a friend’s project. There will be ice baths, obviously. There are always ice baths…

Or the back chambers of Lokschuppen Berlin, fka Suicide Circus? Every Thursday, at Chantal’s House of Shame, that’s where the party happens. The main dancefloor is for spectators; trans icon Chantal is in the back. The lighting is aggressively unflattering. The laws of time, space, and self-respect don’t apply. It’s glorious.

How about Borchardt’s book club? Apparently, it’s hosted by Frankfurter Allgemeine and reserved strictly for the German literary circle (duh). A respectable pop culture reporter told me about it the other week. It’s hard to get on the list, she said, but not that hard. I take her word for it.

Or the bunker beneath Soho House? A heavy sound system, buried deep under Torstrasse—allegedly. A girl who works in nightlife showed me some blurry iPhone pics. When I asked a Mitte-based architectural historian about it, he shrugged. So did the people who work at Soho. No one could confirm or deny the bunker’s existence.

That, right there, seems to be the common thread: In Berlin, no one knows what the fuck is going on.

No reliable narrator. No fixed script. No “scene” per se—just a bunch of social micro-economies that shift, overlap, disappear, and reappear at will. There are no consolidated sources, no actual guides—unless you count The Berliner’s “4 Places to Get Incredible Hot Chocolate” as intel.

If a spot is too well-documented, you should be suspicious. If it has a website, it’s probably fully booked. If you saw it on Instagram, it’s already over. The best things aren’t launched with extensive PR campaigns; they’re passed along in manic voice notes that cut off before they tell you what time to arrive.

There’s no FOMO here—rather, a vague sensation of permanently missing something but not grasping quite what.

“Wait, you haven’t heard?” Certain people always have. They’re in on the opening before there’s even a door. They get the memo about which chef left which kitchen to start a vegan dining concept in an abandoned power plant. They don’t read event listings. They are the event listings.

And sure, there are plenty of Berliners who don’t care about this stuff. They don’t participate in the scavenger hunt for relevance. They have never uttered the words “Who’s playing?” and are probably very happy.

If you do care, however, you’re destined to reverse-engineer RA event pages and decipher WhatsApp group chats like there’s no tomorrow, trusting that someone, somewhere, will drop a pin when it matters.

The places change. The people running them change. The people who know the people running them change.

It might seem frustrating, but here’s the thing: Unlike so many Euro-strongholds with their stories set in stone, Berlin is still wet clay.

Case in point: Paris. By the late 17th century, the self-appointed capital of taste had surpassed half a million residents—ample reason to start inventing etiquette for the sake of making coexistence tolerable. Meanwhile, Berlin? Barely 20,000. Around the size of your average Berghain queue. A town so minor that if you sneezed, you risked becoming mayor.

Then there’s Rome… The eternal city. The blueprint that’s had millennia to workshop its mythology. The empire, the Vatican, Julius Caesar getting jumped in broad daylight—that legend is locked in. But Berlin?

Berlin is unfinished business.

It withholds. It deflects. It rewrites itself mid-sentence, almost as if to gaslight you. It erases its own beginnings before they can turn into endings. It keeps you guessing—because it hasn’t decided yet either.

This isn’t history, really. It’s happening. Like, right now. So if you’re here, if you’re invested, if you find yourself trying to keep up with the myth as it forms… stop.

You’re already part of it.

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If you’ve made it this far: thank you. My name is Dima, you might know me as the person behind Mitte Daily, a hyperlocal media project that documents the new Berlin myth in the making.

The rant you just read is a prelude to Mitte Daily’s newest sibling, Mitte Monthly. Soft-launching since, oh, 1964, it’s an undoubtedly biased (and less than fact-checked) chronicle of what mattered, what should have mattered, and what will soon be erased from collective memory. And it’s here at last.

If you—like me—are chronically online but somehow still out of the loop, this is for you. Tell a friend. Tell an enemy. Tell the person at the bar who looks like they might be important. Let’s do this together. It’s more fun this way.