Our Picks for TAG DER CLUBKULTUR 2026: A Love Letter to the People Making Berlin
Berlin's relationship with nightlife has always been slightly unreasonable.
After the Wall came down, there were empty buildings everywhere. Old factories, bunkers, basements, warehouses, power stations. The city was full of spaces nobody quite knew what to do with yet. So people moved in.
Punks. Artists. DJs. Squatters. Queers. Drug dealers. Musicians. People who had no particular interest in asking permission.
They made clubs. They made parties. They made art. They lived in places they weren't supposed to live in and created communities, clubs, collectives and raves in spaces that were never intended to be clubs.
It was messy, temporary and remarkably free.
In 2024, techno culture was added to Germany's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage, a fairly official acknowledgement of something that started out with very little interest in being official at all.
But Berlin isn't driven by the music in itself.
It is driven by people who realised they could make their own rules.
That idea has stayed.
Of course, Berlin is not what it was in 1990 anymore. There are no endless empty buildings waiting for somebody with a sound system to come and turn it into a vacuum in time. Property prices exist. Building regulations exist. Noise complaints exist. Instagram exists.
But somehow the basic instinct is still here.
Find a space.
Find your people.
Make something.
And make it possible for somebody else to come in and be strange for a while.
That last part is probably the real reason people keep coming to Berlin.
You can spend most of your life being told, in small and large ways, how you are supposed to behave. What a successful life looks like. What you should wear. Who you should date. How much you should work. When you should settle down. What is embarrassing. What is respectable.
Then you go out in Berlin on a Saturday night and there is a 67 year old man in six-inch heels arguing about the finer points of gabber with someone dressed as a Victorian widow.
There is no shock value. It is simply who we are without the conformity.
It may look careless to some, however Berlin nightlife cares very much.
And we must together make space for it.
You can be completely lost, completely sure of yourself, newly arrived, born here, or somewhere in between.
For a few hours, nobody needs to know what you do for a living.
This is what freedom looks like when you are actually using it.
And it is why Berlin's underground culture has always been bigger than the clubs themselves.
The locations change. The music changes. The people change. A party that started in somebody's living room becomes a collective. Someone stops drinking and starts a sober night. Someone wants more art, more noise, less noise, different music, more free sex, themed dress up, or... You get it.
Someone always has an idea.
From the outside, it can look like Berlin just magically produces interesting nightlife.
It doesn't.
People produce it.
And they have been doing so for decades.
That is what makes TAG DER CLUBKULTUR an important pillar for the city
From 3–11 October, more than 110 Berlin clubs, collectives and initiatives will take part in this year's festival, with around 130 events across the city. It is the biggest edition so far.
On 3 October, 32 clubs and collectives will also receive a total of €410,000 through the TAG DER CLUBKULTUR awards.
The point is not simply to hand out prizes to people who have already done the work.
It is to recognise the work they put in without financial gain.
Because Berlin's underground was never about preserving one particular sound, one particular club or one particular idea of what a Berlin night should look like.
It was about freedom.
And freedom is not very good at sitting still.
A few things we're looking forward to
Heels & Lashes
At Drink and Draw Berlin, Harpy Fatale and Alice La Douce bring performance, drawing and stories from their lives as sex workers into the same room. We are here for the sex workers and know just how good it gets when they're in charge.
Lilly Mortis' KABARET KLUB
Historical Berlin cabaret at Ballhaus Berlin. Live music, performance, high fashion, satire and glamour. Basically: an excuse to get dressed up and behave like your core is telling you.
The Bliss x ACUD Club
The Bliss is a Berlin project livestreaming electronic music sets at ACUD. For TAG DER CLUBKULTUR, they take over the courtyard, gallery and club at ACUD in one continuous night of performance, choral vocals, ambient music and, later, club music.
DRIFT KYIV
Born in Kyiv and now based in Berlin, DRIFT KYIV brings DJs, performance, visual art, a zine and a panel to GIRI. Different scenes and different histories meet in one room. This is also part of how Berlin keeps changing: people arrive, bring their worlds with them and make something new here.
tracey zero: A Dose Of Pleasure
A sober edition of tracey zero, with two dancefloors, performances and queer, sex-positive activations, including Gay Consent Lab's Love Room. Your proof to that you can go to a club, have a good AND filthy as f.... time while being sober.
STAY CORE
This year's theme is STAY CORE — a question about what club culture is actually made of, and what happens when the spaces around it become harder to keep. Rents go up, venues disappear, costs rise and the pressure to make everything more polished, profitable and presentable is always there. STAY CORE is about not losing the thing that made this culture worth having in the first place: staying, looking after each other and resisting when necessary.
Because club culture was never really about the room, the sound system or the name above the door. Those things come and go. The core is the people who keep making spaces where you can be yourself, do things differently and be the most playful version of yourself.
This year, more than 110 clubs, collectives and initiatives are asking what that core means to them — through parties, performances, workshops, exhibitions, conversations and everything in between.
Full festival schedule: Program
So together with TAG DER CLUBKULTUR, we are raising a glass to the people who keep making the rooms:
The ones who keep the doors open.
The ones who keep changing the music.
The ones who refuse to let the night become alienated.
The ones who understand that Berlin was never made by people following the brochure.
It was made by people who made sure to create a new world where they were just as accepted as anyone else, without following pity guidelines.
Written by: Amanda Sandström
