Courts may have ruled that Berghain must receive the same generous tax breaks as other German cultural institutions such as museums and theatres, but smaller venues face problems unique to Berlin, as Baldwin explains. “When you see the crowd inside, and what you curated rises up into ecstasy, and you know you played a part in that, that’s special,” Künster says.Īs Berlin goes through another period of regeneration, with people from wealthier German states, western Europe and north America pouring in to get their taste of the wild weekends and cheap rent, many wonder if its nightlife will survive another increase in gentrification. Marquardt insists my use of the word “curation” makes them sound pompous, but all agree that the most satisfying part of the job is when they know the people they’ve selected fit perfectly together, and the night has been euphoric as a result. “Sometimes people approach me or yell from the queue: ‘Hey, Sven we took a picture together once, remember?’ and I have no recollection of that person whatsoever.” “You have to separate between private and professional life, fake and real friends,” Marquardt says in a soft Berlin accent. That’s why people give me positive attention.” While he seems to enjoy this significantly more than the other two, not shy to share pictures of young girls flashing him at the door, all three are keenly aware of how temporary the admiration is. “It’s an absurd profession,” Künster explains in the film. Künster is filmed putting logs of wood on his fire, Baldwin going home to visit family, Marquardt shopping for black designer T-shirts: these mundane moments are reminders of the regular people that stand between clubbers and a weekend of debauchery. The narrative is told in three phases, their growth, consolidation, transition and decline.Berlin Bouncer pulls back the curtain to reveal the personal histories and artistic ambitions of these figures, and the realities of living and ageing in a city once again undergoing rapid change. Informed by the experience of members themselves, this account provides an opportunity to study the conditions under which organised crime groups take root during periods of political, economic and social transition, including how such groups recruit, consolidate, compete and how they may decline and be replaced. The increasing recruitment of African bouncers by clubs themselves – primarily from Congo and Nigeria, they were cheaper than their white counterparts, more easily available when the former white bouncer recruitment networks dried up, and less prone to violence – facilitated a shift in control of the city’s drug trade to Nigerian criminal networks, thereby laying the foundation for a critical component of modern organised crime in Johannesburg.Ī study of the bouncer mafia may yield important conclusions for the rise and fall of criminal groups. While the bouncer mafia was one of several emerging criminal networks at the time, although the most prominent in respect of Johannesburg’ s changing illicit drug economy, they provide a useful example of how organised crime originated during South Africa’s transition: a fact often commented on, but little understood.Ī series of prevalent factors and changes in the industry precipitated the dramatic decline of the bouncer mafia: socio-economic transition altered not only the racial profile of key areas, but also the face of policing, resulting in a weakening of the networks between bouncers and the police. Changes in the prevailing political and socio-economic environment of the country during the transition to democracy were reflected in structural changes in the city’s night-time economy this led to the consolidation of the bouncer mafia, which, by early 2000, had concentrated into one company, Elite, assuming almost complete control of protection of the drug trade in clubs. Sharing a background of apartheid-era military service, the bouncers evolved from independent ‘heavies’ into a set of registered private security companies competing for turf and control of the illicit drug trade. The Johannesburg bouncer mafia was born out of a set of tough, white, working-class boxing and sports clubs in Hillbrow and south and east Johannesburg. Mark Shaw’s latest article with Simone Haysom for the Journal for Modern African Studies recounts the rise and fall of the Johannesburg bouncer mafia, a series of violent and competing groups that dominated the city’s underworld from the late 1980s until the early 2000s.
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