Obituary: Tresor

A tragic event has passed in Berlin. On the 15th of April the Tresor closed. Tresor: the trusted carrier of the Berlin’s house music torch was a club whose main dance floor was an old, dark, moist, rusted-out vault that stank of sweat, cigarettes, weed, and artificial fog, whose sole strobe light and master DJ’s had the ability to turn anyone who entered it a dancing zombie. People would dance endlessly only freeing themselves from the grip by crashing up a narrow staircase that led to a quit garden where the madness below seemed to be only a gentle, relaxing hum.

Tresor was born in a city that was lost without direction; a newly united Berlin that was full of expectation with the fall of the wall and in need of ways to express altruistic jubilee. It was a place where young people came together in the bombed out shell of old Berlin to learn how it was on the other side and together participate in something new and out of this environment house music found its base. For much of the next fifteen years the club’s pulsating music pushed life blood through out Berlin and Germany on its course of unification. Despite political defences claiming the hardships of the integration between East and West, reunification is complete. The differences between what was the DDR and GDR are still bold but there is only Germany. Thus Tresor in the end pulsated only as historical monument to the day when German showed the world how reconciliations could be won.

Clouds again begin to form over Berlin. Eager to move forward, some of the past and with it direction is being forgotten. Tresor has been slated to go the same way as the former GDR parliament building, making room for new development. Development that has lost its direction and the support of the people while they begin to fret over an expanding Europe and fear a future that they can not choose: displayed by the building of one empty building after another. Today Euro fear has risen to see the re-emergence of the National Socialists Party with a rising National Democratic Party. The German people like much of Western Europe fear loosing there culture to immigration and the influence of ideals that are not their own. All this is further fuelled by an unemployment rate in Berlin reaching hire than 20%.

The cause for excitement of unification still exists and with it the jobs that build the future. Berlin: take pleasure, in your past, in your diversity and with it forge the future, but keep your monument to the past as a means to help map the way. Tresor was a living monument and marked a time in Berlin, Germany, Europe and the World that should not be forgotten.