The world’s premier techno capital is back under the grip of the pandemic, but that hasn’t stopped its vanguard from seeking a special status for venues like the Berghain from an international cultural organization with a reputation for being as formidable as its famous bouncer.

The Guardian is reporting that a group of club owners, DJ’s, and festival organizers, collectively known as Rave the Planet, is pushing to get the club and several other dance spaces such as Tresor added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites owing to what it says are existential threats caused by gentrification and years of business failures.

The city’s club scene has been hard put by COVID-19 restrictions that have shuttered venues across Berlin and accelerated a trend which had been affecting businesses since well before the lockdown began.

“So many venues have closed in just the seven years I’ve lived here full time. In other cities, it would be the natural club cycle at work, but Berlin is a different kind of place, where the club and creative scenes are the currency of the city,” influential DJ Allen Oldham told the Observer. 

Techno Culture in Berlin // Film on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Application. Video via Rave The Planet on YouTube.

The group primarily wants to have the techno genre afforded Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) status, the same as reggae and other forms of musical culture have been granted by the UN body in the past. If permitted, the status would help the 30,000-square-meter former power plant receive some much-needed preservation funding in order to protect it from a possible future closure or worse — something that locals with decades-long stakes in the matter worry might effectively kill the scene. 

“Techno has become a refuge for people who are marginalized, and there’s a natural attraction to Berlin as a place which is more permissive, when you come from places that are less permissive,” Peter Kirn told the Guardian. “Berlin is on this fracture line between western Europe and eastern Europe. And even though a lot of the focus is on what that meant in the 90s, when the wall came down, there’s been less focus on what’s happening now — Georgia is in crisis, Poland is in crisis, Russia is in crisis. So people from all those places are looking to Berlin as a hub for some kind of radical social response.”