E-Werk Berlin An Interactive Archive of a Berlin Club

Planet was one of the key early Berlin techno clubs, active roughly from March 1991 to 1993. Multiple scene histories describe it as an early center of post-Wall Berlin club culture. Compared with Tresor, it’s often remembered as warmer, more colorful, more melodic, and more queer in atmosphere. Residents associated with Planet included Dr. Motte, Jonzon, Terrible, and later Disko and Woody.

At Köpenicker Straße Planet quickly becomes one of the rooms where the still-young post-Wall club scene finds a weekly rhythm. It was not a fixed institution yet. The crew built the night into the space, ran it, and stripped it back down by morning. Planet is the prehistory of E-Werk: the same network learning how to test locations, move equipment, and turn temporary rooms into scenes.

In the summer of 1992, Planet lost its lease at Köpenicker Straße and moved east again to Alt-Stralau. The second Planet was larger and much farther from the center, and the crowd improvised its own routes there, including shuttle Trabbis running over from Tresor.

That same year, Andreas Rossmann and Ralf Regitz found another possibility in Mitte: the abandoned Abspannwerk Buchhändlerhof on Mauerstraße. The listed BEWAG substation had been shut down in the 1980s and was still being used as a depot for street lamps until 1991. E-Werk did not begin as a polished club concept. It began when the Planet crew recognized that this former piece of power infrastructure could be used again, this time for nightlife.

The first step into the former substation came in February 1993 with the Evidence Party in what is now Hall F. Low Spirit and WestBam were involved, and almost none of the later club infrastructure was in place yet.

What people encountered was closer to a trial run than a finished opening. Contemporary accounts remember hard, fast music, open fire installations, and a space that still carried an illegal warehouse feel. The success of that night made it clear that the building could work as more than a one-off.

After the February trial run, the plan moved quickly. In April 1993, Planet relocated into E-Werk and took its new name from the obsolete power station it had occupied.

The move did not erase what came before. It reorganized it. Dubmission moved into the Friday slot, while Twirl became the new Saturday party and quickly turned E-Werk into a weekend destination. What had started as Planet’s search for another room now had a fixed address, a recurring program, and a scale that set it apart from the smaller clubs around it.

E-Werk hosted major residents and guests including Westbam, Clé, Woody, Jonzon, Paul van Dyk, Sven Väth, DJ Hell, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and others.

In 1994 the place settles into itself. The operation gets smoother, the routes through the building get clearer, and the nights start to move with less strain. As an example they opened the tunnel between Twirl and Evidence Hall and also introduced a chip system to make the payment faster.

It is also the year the outside world really notices. Bigger crowds, branded events, the first Chromapark. Elsa for Toys and Ralf Regitz are just two among many people behind the Chromapark concept. Music, installation, and media are staged as one environment instead of separate parts of the night.

By late 1994 the separate hall is no longer just extra space. It is being used for outside productions, branded nights, and the kind of events that sit slightly apart from the club’s ordinary weekly pulse.

Versace had already passed through that register. Then came the MTV Awards after-show. Elsa remembers working more than partying, turning the hall into a jungle while guests and supermodels moved through a room that had barely existed as a regular floor before.

The first Chromapark had already happened in 1994. By spring 1995 it comes back in a form that is easier to read from the surviving material: exhibition language, daily print, named artists, club nights that look like parts of one larger program.

This is less the beginning than the point where the format sharpens. For a while the building itself becomes the event frame. People move through it, look at it, dance inside it, and take in music, installation, and media as one route.

By late 1995, the room is still inventive, but something has shifted. The programming looks more systematized. A regular “Fridays” series now anchors the week, consistent and branded. A website has appeared: Techno.Net, offering event info and merchandise, a digital address for something that once lived only in the moment. The branding is harder to miss. The city around the club is getting more expensive, more watched, more tense.

The easy momentum is gone. The pressure is no longer outside the frame. It is already in the room.

By late 1995 the commercial layer is no longer background noise. West Sound Circle is one visible trace of it, a quadrophonic audio spectacle in December sponsored by West cigarettes, but not the whole story. Bugatti, MTV Club Tour, sponsored formats, corporate hospitality. The room is still inventive, but it is being packaged more openly now. That is what gives the period its doubleness. E-Werk can still do things other clubs cannot do. But money, image, and access are now part of the room as well, and the club stands caught between pioneering something and being reshaped by the market forces closing in around Berlin’s center.

Chromapark ‘96 feels like excess in the best sense. Ten days. More than forty artists. Ninety-six hours open from Thursday onward. Launches, installations, parties, projections, people crossing paths at all hours. E-Werk reached one of its clearest high points as a space where club culture, visual art, and performance fully merged. Installations, projections, fashion, and live interventions, while the venue remained open for marathon stretches that blurred the line between exhibition and nightlife.

For a moment, E-Werk felt less like a club and more like a living cultural environment at the center of Berlin’s techno scene.

By the second half of 1996, the atmosphere at E-Werk had noticeably changed. The club had become more commercial, and there was a stronger presence of gangs and dealers around the venue. At the same time, stricter entry policies meant that people often gathered outside either because they couldn’t get in or simply because they liked it there.

Staff members described increasing pressure and tension within the team. The armed robbery of the club’s offices, mentioned briefly by Angelo and echoed in other accounts from the period, marked a moment when these developments became visible. In retrospect, it showed how E-Werk was turning into a space of conflicting interests toward the end of its run.

By 1997 the ending is already underway. E-Werk does not vanish in a single gesture. New interest and investment in the central areas of Berlin is making it harder for E-Werk to sustain itself. After the financial chaos of three Chromaparks, a fourth edition did not take place. Instead a party called “chocolate bunny days” happened on the Easter weekend.

In the September issue of Raveline, the closure of E-Werk was announced. The article also hints at plans from PLANETCOM to continue its activities after E-Werk’s closure. The last known event to take place at E-Werk was the Don Giovanni opera running from 09.08 to 13.09 ‘97, which already foreshadowed the buildings continued use as an event location.