"Today, Berlin is one of the premier destinations for techno music fans. People come from all over the world to party all night to the rhythmic beat of Berlin’s club scene. And this music that the city is most famous for developed in large part because of the thing the city is most infamous for: the Berlin wall, which divided the city into east and west for almost thirty years" - 99% Invisible podcast introduces its new episode about the unusual destiny of the dance capital.

An amusing article in the Quietus about 'Nick Cave's Bar', a new book by Aug Stone about a bar in Berlin in the 1980s which was a "home from home" for many creative people - musicians, filmmakers, painters, poets, and punks. Risiko stood at 48 Yorckstraße in West Berlin, on the border between the Kreuzberg and Wilmersdorf-Schöneberg sections of the city. It wasn't really Nick Cave's bar (although some in Europe did call it that back then), but Blixa Bargeld bartended at Risiko during Einstürzende Neubauten’s early years, and Cave would come to visit it with the rest of The Birthday Party.

Alexis Petridis reports from Berlin where developers are kicking out nightclubs to make place for offices and flats. The last one to be kicked out is Griessmuehle, which closed down with a continuous 56 hours party. It was a worthy farewell - "dressed-down kids in hoodies alongside guys in drag; girls in standard-issue techno black dancing with men in their underpants. At one point, a gay couple in their 70s sweep past. They’re conservatively dressed for dinner at the Savoy in the 1920s – one of them is walking with a silver-topped cane. The atmosphere is simultaneously friendly, excited and licentious: a friend who goes there regularly calls it 'benign freedom'". An estimate says that one-third of Berlin clubs have been lost in the last 10 years, and at least 40 more clubs are currently under threat. Ironically, Berlin housing crisis has something to do with Berlin’s club scene - job adverts for engineers and IT specialists basically say "Come to work in Berlin, because it’s the greatest cultural clubbing city in the world".

German clubs are fighting to be classified as cultural institutions - last week a bipartisan group argued in front of a national parliament committee to reclassify clubs and live music venues. Nightclubs are currently classified as entertainment venues, equating them with brothels and casinos, the status change would make them legally equivalent to concert halls, operas and theaters. About 100 clubs have closed in the past 10 years, and a further 25 are under threat. So serious has the problem become that it has its own word: clubsterben, or club death. The Clubcommission collective told the Bundestag’s committee for building, living and urban development that music clubs were “the pulse of the city”, adding that an estimated 3 million tourists come to Berlin annually to visit its clubs, contributing €1.5bn to the local economy last year.