Berlin Bars

When the first artists and dreamers picked up their tents and headed east to Berlin they were met with a jumble of boarded up shop fronts and peeling facades that looked more like the place old car parks go to die than the building blocks of a pre-eminent European capital.

Like a driver arriving on race day to find out he's going to have to assemble the car before he can charge it on the piste, the artists found a half-city in need of completion. They moved in and turned their hands to carpentry, painting, plumbing and wiring, and when the sawdust settled and the last blast of the masonry drills dipped to a purr what emerged was a place full of hobby bars that reflected the personalities of their owners. The bars expressed what the newcomers hadn't found upon arrival, and overnight, they transformed hundreds of erstwhile designers, writers, artists, actors and musicians into publicans.

One in four Berlin citizens are professional artists, one in four exist off social benefits, and the average German drinks half a litre of beer a day. If you ever find yourself in a city where everyone else is either an artist or two days away from the breadline, then the best bet is not to try and sell more art, but instead to sell beer.

Germany has the highest number of licensed premises in all of Europe and Berlin may well have the highest concentration of any urban area in Germany. Like rats in New York and switchblades in London, in Berlin you're never further than a couple of metres from a beer, but it's the prevalence of small, thematic establishments that function as bars while holding their own amongst art installations that makes the city so interesting.

There are venues that you enter through the low doors of a wooden wardrobe, bars where the furnishings are made from plastic buckets and stripped shells, more garage than bar, where you're compelled to play table tennis while you drink, and end up spilling beer down the jeans you got in that shop that was selling second-hand tack by the kilo.

They stay open as late as they want, they flirt with anti-smoking regulations and in a few cases they just take an abandoned building and run it as a bar when the coast is clear. It's the five-second schoolyard smoke, while the year head is at the beginning of a lap, come to life as a going concern.

Take Sophie's place for example. "I can only talk to you if you're not going to print anything in a German paper," she says, standing in the doorway.

"You've nothing to worry about," I say, "My German gets me coffee, cigarettes and mutters from my old neighbours. I'm a long way off writing anything. I just want to ask you about your bar."

"But it's not a bar," Sophie admonishes.

Of course it's not, how dumb of me. There are about a hundred people inside, and maybe another thirty out on the street, all drinking €1.80 beer and dancing to a DJ playing disco in the corner. Sophie's joint is a bar - not even the brain damaged could get away with saying it's not. But as far as the people who say what you can and cannot do in Berlin are concerned it's a derelict building that not even the squatters are interested in.

"It's like this," Sophie explains, "If a place is important to an area, they turn a blind eye."

The "they" she's talking about are Berlin's enforcers of control. They catch you cheating on the trains and they'll march you red-faced to a bank to extract your dues; they track your movements like paparazzi once you've registered your address and if you break a glass doing the dishes in the evening, they'll have a noise complaint on your doormat the next morning. Order trumps chaos in Berlin but when it comes to quasi-legal bars order turns a blind eye. The city's full of places like Sophie's that sell cheap beer, don't open that often and keep conscientious fire marshals awake in the middle of the night.

Cookies, Berghain and Tresor, three of the better-known club names in Europe, all began in Berlin as illegal venues. Nowadays they're right up there with the TV Tower and Checkpoint Charlie for sucking the foreign tourists in.

In Berlin they have an aesthetic called minimal that's applicable to many mediums: music, fashion, and even relationships - if you berate the stranger who passed 72 lost hours with you in June for only getting back in touch with you in January, six months later, they'll probably respond with "Sorry, babe, I'm just a bit minimal."

Kim is so minimal that they don't even have a sign outside. It's a bar run by four friends who divide responsibilities four ways, and don't fall out over dirty dishes in the sink. The building was originally a bicycle repair shop, then a coffee shop that sold drugs and now a bar, wholly free from non-essential additives save a 1970s Bang & Olufsen tape deck on the wall.

One of the four, Oliver, runs a ping-pong bar in the Prenzlaurberg part of town. Ping-pong works better than peanuts. A few runs of the table and you'll drink and dribble your way through more bottles than if your sweetheart got eyes for your brother and stole your car in the middle of the night to abscond with him.

Kuschlowski is a new bar opened by a designer who made all the furniture from pieces he'd come across at flea markets, including lots of buckets. It sits shoulder to shoulder with a Thai-themed bar whose main attraction is not the fake palm trees or the Asian pop music but the German prostitutes who charge €25 for twenty minutes in an upstairs room.

The Weinerei bar in Prenzlaurberg operates on an honesty system that is more open to abuse than a blind shopkeeper. But it must work the majority of the time or else someone's got a rich daddy, not in Berlin, who's footing the bills. You hire a glass for two euro and then refill it yourself for the rest of the night. When it comes around to leaving you pay what you feel the night's distraction was worth.

Berlin is the only affordable city in Europe where you don't feel like you've dropped off the face of the planet as a compromise to frugality. Rent can be cheap so it's easier to do things, like operating a bar based on your customer's good or bad nature, here than in most other European capitals.

It's naïve to say that it's not about money but most people realise they won't make any when they get into this game. Suffice to say if Sophie were to legalise her place, the taxes would put her out business, and Robert, who runs an underground poker bar in Mitte wouldn't make rent the last Wednesday of every month if he didn't keep winning hands. On average, no one's doing well in Berlin. The bar is set low and if you aim too high it just comes off ugly and pretentious. Berlin's mayor recently described the city as "poor but sexy" - black stockings with a ladder the size of a biro.

The best parts of Berlin city were claimed by opportunists who were mindful of the consequences of financial excess. Huge buildings in the centre have been held hostage by squatters for two decades. Some of the squats offer bike repairs, others run thrift stores, none of them make more than enough money to keep them living basically, but that you assume, is all they want.

A story goes that back in '89, a group of Germans from a Kreuzberg squat had begun dissembling the Berlin Wall and selling vials of GDR concrete when they realised that within a few hours they had already made more money than they had ever dreamed of. They dropped their picks and hammers, held an emergency meeting amongst the dust and clamour and made the unanimous decision to ditch the potential bounty still clinging to the wall. They deemed integrity more valuable than prosperity.

A lot of these smaller hobby bars close on Mondays and Tuesdays, not out of disdain for the ugliest days of the week but because the owners can't afford to take on staff and need a rest. Save a few, the majority of them have opened within the last few years in the up-and-coming rather than established neighbourhoods, which gives the city a long-legged spider rather than a squashed-up bug aspect. And when Frühling kicks in, the bar owners throw a host of higgledy-piggledy chairs out front for thirsty Germans to lounge, often nude, talking about recycling and David Hasselhoff with a cool beer between their legs keeping their sausages fresh.

Words by Conor Creighton