There were times this summer where it felt like club culture was back in full swing: streets were lined with queues in front of clubs; inside, ravers from around the world mingled, moving in sync to the familiar rhythm of a seemingly endless night. Countless festivals and concert tours celebrating their long-awaited return painted a picture of a revitalised scene.

But a closer look revealed another difficult year for fans and industry at large, threatening the very future of club culture. In Germany, the number of clubs fell from 1,948 in 2009 to 1,432 in 2018. In Berlin, nightlife remains the main attraction for visitors, but the city suffers from an ever-diminishing number of affordable spaces. A few prominent examples include the iconic riverside venue Bar 25, which had to make way for construction in 2010; Stattbad Wedding closed in 2015; and Griessmühle, which ran for over ten years, shut in early 2020. If Berlin’s Federal Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing, had his way, Wilde Renate, Else and ://about blank would have to give way to a parking area for construction vehicles. And that was before the pandemic hit. After lockdown, most clubs with official licences and the correct paperwork could reopen after lockdown thanks to funding from the government.

On the surface, there seems to be an over-saturation of parties and festivals at the moment, but the scene is in a more precarious state than ever before. At a press conference last month, Pamela Schobeß and Lutz Leichsenring from the Club Commission stated bluntly: “Several crises are currently colliding.”

An estimated 1.5 million hospitality workers and 40 percent of those employed in nightlife left the industry during the pandemic and never returned. This dramatic number underscores some of the struggles the hospitality sector faces in the aftermath of the pandemic. “Clubs were desperately looking for staff,” Leichsenring said. “We’ve never seen anything like this before.” Promoters are faced with the difficult decision of raising entry or drink prices to keep up with high inflation and rising costs, which would create a bottleneck for those who can afford a night out. Making club culture inaccessible to low-income clubgoers, however, “endangers the fundamental values of independent, inclusive club culture,” the Club Commission stated.

According to Leichsenring, this could explain why ten to 20 percent of Berlin’s clubs are regularly full while the rest don’t come to capacity. Major clubs like Berghain and Tresor still attract large crowds of tourists and have 200-metre long queues, “while clubs nearby suffer from increasing losses over the weekend.”

For this reason, this summer, Jägermeister has decided to award a fund of €50,000 towards up to five community-driven and innovative ideas for improving nightlife. Recipients of the fund can be based anywhere in the world, but their independent jury, selected by the team at Berlin clubbing institution Tresor, are all core members of the German capital’s nightlife community: multidisciplinary artist and door girl Asia James; Bernard Koomson, DJ and founder of artist collective deadHYPE; Tresor founder Dimitri Hegemann, DJ, label owner, promoter, founder of Clean Scene Fallon MacWilliams AKA Darwin; Lewamm Ghebremariam, a Club Commission board member who also runs the queer club night BRENN; and DJ, producer, curator and promoter Sarah Farina.

The fund intends to invest in projects and ideas that improve nightlife long-term, for example, by making it more sustainable, or attracting new clubgoers through greater outreach efforts focussed on inclusivity and diversity. In Berlin, the Tag der Clubkultur is another initiative which awards collectives, clubs and organisations locally, by providing 40 recipients with a grant to fund their ideas.

A recent community survey conducted by the collective Keep Hush underscores the necessity of new proposals and ideas. In it, only 25 percent of Generation Z reported being interested in going out and partying, compared with a dwindling 13 percent of millennials, leading them to conclude that “the pandemic brought forward some people’s retirement from clubbing.”

Fears of contracting Covid-19—particularly as case numbers remain high and new variants emerge—are among some of the reasons cited. Many anticipate virus cases to rise in the autumn and winter months, as they did during the last. Representatives of the Club Commission are concerned that venues in Germany, a country that imposed some of the strictest anti-pandemic measures in Europe, could face another winter where restrictions dominate the dance floor. Unlike in 2020 and 2021, no aid packages have been proposed by the government so far.

For this reason, a general sense of lingering post-lockdown anxiety weighs on the clubbing community. In a panel co-hosted by Tresor and Jägermeister as part of their “Save the Night” campaign, Club Commission board member and nightlife activist Lewamm Ghebremariam reported suffering from social anxiety post-pandemic. “I’m definitely less social [since lockdown], and there’s only so much time I can tolerate around people,” she admitted. “I think a lot of us feel unsafe because we are not used to this kind of hyper-socialness, and there possibly needs to be a readjusting of being in a space with 2000 people again. I’m not 100 percent comfortable.”

Post-pandemic, ravers are not as trusting of the club experience as they once were—a situation worsened by reports of needle spiking in Berlin clubs that emerged in May, highlighting growing concerns around safety in nightlife for women. Even Berghain—one of the most secretive clubs in the city, which rarely speaks out on issues concerning the community—published harm-reduction and awareness protocols on their website.

The disciples of techno’s first wave in Berlin operated in a space far from the attention of any authorities. “Nobody cared about security [at that time],” Hegemann said. When it first became a concern, Tresor sourced its security from employees at Berlin’s airport. “These people had nothing to do with what happened at night, and that caused many problems,” he admitted.

The topic of awareness wasn’t a pressing concern among some of nightlife’s biggest institutions as recently as 2018 when Ghebremariam first joined the Club Commission as a board member. “I was very young, naive and motivated,” she said, and slowly, the message caught on. “Before Covid, the subject awareness was very new for us; we had to learn it,” Hegemann added. “It took years. And for me, it’s the first time we have had this new welcoming culture.”

According to the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan, public and institutional perceptions that cast clubs as uncontrollable, unsafe and non-essential can stigmatise venues, and result in strict licensing schemes, surveillance, rigid policing and ultimately closure. Co-authored by 130 practitioners, academics, public health experts, advocates and industry representatives from more than 70 cities all over the world, the plan suggests the use of checklists and feedback loops from all “event teams and staff to gain insight from front-line event staff and facilitate more inclusive practices, addressing space/inclusion, health and control and artistic expression.” After each weekend, Tresor’s door staff and awareness team reflect on how they can improve through regular feedback sessions, and Asia James draws on her community knowledge to inform her work on the door.

As for the wider clubbing community, Sarah Farina believes in transparency as the way forward to “create a more caring scene,” where everyone feels “more comfortable talking about money, contracts, what a fair collaboration looks like and to sit with those uncomfortable questions.”

In March, promoter Frank De Costa gave RA a breakdown of costs for running the Mother’s Finest parties in March; and for its first self-funded event in July, queer collective fluid.vision offered tickets on a sliding scale, with a “recommended” ticket price of €15 to cover their costs and allow them to pay their DJs and performers fairly. Training and hiring more women, nonbinary and trans people to guard the door at clubs could also alleviate some of nightlife’s understaffing issues while ensuring the crowd feels more comfortable in the space.

The Global Nighttime Recovery Plan also offers clues towards ways that clubbing diversity can be protected and barriers to inclusion can be addressed: by supporting independent, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) and vulnerable organisations.

Being intentional with every aspect of the space and having a specific ethos inform decision-making is imperative for a club to survive, Ghebremariam posited. Her advice: “If you don’t understand your privilege and positioning, you will be left behind. You have to move, and you have to understand these [power] structures. And I think we can see that in line-ups. We can see that in different things, including a fund that goes towards the people.”

The rise in collective action and community organising efforts among the scene makes Bernard Koomson hopeful for what’s to come. “Seeing the power go towards collectives and communities that can build their own infrastructures and do it themselves makes me excited about nightlife.”

For more information on how to apply to the Save the Night award, visit the application portal here.

H/T Resident Advisor.